Dir: Marlene Emilie Lyngstad | Drama 2026
There’s nothing remotely cute about Cute, Marlene Emilie Lyngstad’s audacious but ultimately frustrating debut, which arrives in San Sebastián determined to venture into one of the most disturbing corners of human experience.
Jan Gunnar Røise is immediately appealing as Richard, a lonely man who flees to his childhood home to be with his ailing mother after becoming troubled by his feelings towards his girlfriend’s seven-year-old daughter. There he encounters Stella, his mother’s apparently vulnerable caregiver, who leads a secret life as a “Lolita” camgirl: At home in her bedroom she envelopes herself in a fuzzy candy floss bubble of pink and pastel-coloured porn wearing skimpy underwear to attract online customers. She also seems to have some kind of scam going where she appeals to men’s caring side to pay for her in shops, but this is just another unappealing side to her disingenuousness.
Richard falls for her ditzy coyness and the two embark on an increasingly bizarre relationship, playing at being father and daughter, while Richard’s past — and the stepdaughter he has left behind — threatens to intrude.
Lyngstad’s aim is clearly to explore tenderness, loneliness and intimacy around an almost impossible taboo, refusing the easy route of simply making its central character a monster. It’s a provocative proposition. The trouble is that Cute never quite earns the psychological credibility it needs.
Instead, the film is painfully slow, its languor too often passing for profundity, while its increasingly outlandish characters and situations feel less unsettling than simply ridiculous. The treatment of the sex workers in particular is so cartoonish and implausible that it punctures rather than intensifies the film’s attempt at moral discomfort.
Røise does what he can, bringing a disarming warmth to Richard and providing the film with its one consistently engaging human presence, and we feel for him. But the more Cute insists on its own transgressive delicacy, the more artificial it feels. What should be disturbing, ambiguous and emotionally dangerous too often becomes merely awkward and irritating — a provocative idea stretched far beyond its dramatic life.
SAN SEBASTIAN FILM FESTIVAL 2026