Fantastic Fest Review: Sick

Agata Trzebuchowska is prepared to make you feel queasy. The opening moments of Sick, with images of pus and soiled condoms, are intended to elicit an intense visceral response. It’s a feeling of unease she maintains throughout, even if the source of disgust becomes less about physical decay and more cerebral, moral, and emotional.

Wading through this increasingly disturbing environment is Maks (Konrad Kakol), a 16-year-old kid dispatched to the family home over the summer to care for his invalid grandmother, played by Monika Niemczyk. Having made her screen debut in Andrzej Żuławski’s still-controversial 1972 period horror, The Devil, the veteran actress is no stranger to stories of corruption in the Polish countryside. Yet when she first appears, she is unrecognizable: catatonic, drooling, her back turned away from any visitors.

It’s questionable whether Grandma will make it through the whole summer. The better question is why the family thought that the ill-prepared Maks is a suitable hospice nurse, even with the assistance of an old family friend, Szymon (Julian Swiezewski). The arrival of Maks’ sister, Emma (Katarzyna Lubik), doesn’t help matters much. Three years older than Maks and crashing out of what was once a promising tennis career, she seems hellbent on torturing her little bro.  

But something is awry. Grandma’s behavior shifts in unsettling ways. Strange puddles of some kind of sticky fluid appear at random points in the house. As for Emma, her increasingly libidinous taunts, her ever-skimpier wardrobe choices, the way she touches Maks in inappropriate ways, starts to feel predatorial.

In Trzebuchowska’s feature directorial debut, the star of Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida actually treads with surprising delicacy through what, in a less subtle retelling, could simply be a grotesque display. Instead, the tone of Sick is like when you think you’re just going to burp and actually get that tiny flash of bile in the back of your throat.

Arguably her greatest achievement is that she adds symptoms to this creeping sickness so subtly, so that you barely realize how the infection has spread. Kakol’s Maks is a typical offish teen, desperate to hold on to some kind of vestige of his normal life, doomscrolling to kill the time between spicy pics from his kinda, sorta girlfriend. It’s his confusion and naivete that allow Emma’s escalating transgressions seem like something to be overlooked, even as the tension between them should be escalating. As for Lubik, she doesn’t simply flick Emma between tease and bully, but she pulls those elements together, making a part that could have been merely an enigmatic force within Maks’ life into a character who is, like Maks, at the whims of whatever forces are at play. And just as their relationship becomes increasingly troubling, Trzebuchowska keeps a relentless and putrescent stream of bodily fluids, vomit, and goo flowing before the camera, testing the audience’s gag reflex.

Yet Sick feels anemic because there’s no diagnosis, no real attempt to bind the narrative together for a purpose. As the family connections become more strained and more perturbingly intimate, it seems to be for little reason more than to distress the audience. There’s little real insight into sibling bonds, of what it means to be a caregiver for a dying relative, or into the terrors of aging within a decaying body. Trzebuchowska builds a truly immersive mood of oppressive isolation and increasing moral collapse, but there doesn’t seem to be much to Sick than that mood.

Trzebuchowska may be prepared to make you feel queasy, and she may be very good at it. But if she’s going to work so hard to turn your stomach, she should probably give you a little more to chew on first.

Fantastic Fest runs Sept. 17-24 at the Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar. Badges and info at fantasticfest.com. Follow our coverage at austinchronicle.com/fantastic-fest.

The post Fantastic Fest Review: Sick appeared first on The Austin Chronicle.