Alice (Carla Sehn) and Shantana (Maria Nohra) in Swedish black comedy Sick.
The pair leave the hospital in slow-motion,a smile slowly spreading across Alice’s face. Outside,she’s preparing to call her mum in Sweden,as Matt fumbles with his own phone,hastily answering text messages – before telling Alice he’s dumping her.
Matt has been secretly seeing the nurse from Alice’s cancer ward;Alice grabs his phone and finds “dick pics” in his messages to the nurse,prompting the memorable line,“They’re not dick pics – they’re black and white!”
Furious,Alice returns to her hometown of Farsta,a suburban satellite town outside Stockholm. But after five years away,life has moved on without her. Fearing the worst about her illness,her parents,who had separated,have moved in together in a smaller apartment,and many of her old friends are not as excited at her return as she’d anticipated. In fact,at a housewarming party at her old apartment – her parents swapped flats with another family in the complex – barely any of her old classmates remember her,and if they do it’s for the time she “humped the cushions in the playroom”.
At least there’s her lifelong best friend Shantana (Maria Nohra) – but even she has changed,now in a relationship with an ever-present and largely silent girlfriend. Another old classmate,Mehmet (Dejmis Rustom Bustos),lets her down by refusing to sell her cigarettes from the corner shop his mum owns.
Alice tries to rebuild her life in suburban Sweden after recovering from cervical cancer.
As if that’s not enough,after her treatment Alice has a “shortened vagina”,(something she’s eager to test out),her unemployed mother (Anna Bloomberg) has started an advocacy group for “gynaecological cancer”,believing it suffers in the shadow of the more glamorous breast cancer,and she’s broke,unemployed and back where she started.
Forget your highly designed Scandi dramas,Sickis rooted in a down-at-heel suburbia,not a designer lamp in sight;this is a much more realistic – and multicultural – working-class Sweden.