FrightFest review – Above the Knee
Viljar Bøe’s first film was Good Boy – not the 2025 dog-sees-ghosts film but the 2023 FF selection about training people to act like animals. That theme is hashed over in at least three of this year’s films – The Instinct, Don’t Let the Cat Out and Sick Puppy – and one wonders whether there will be a similar glut of crasser, more genre-type movies about the unusual subject of Bøe’s follow-up Above the Knee. The theme is Body Integrity Identity Disorder, a real (rare) psychological condition whereby sufferers believe that they would be comfortable in their own bodies if they were to lose a sense or a body part. Obviously, this is a more extreme condition that body or gender dysmorphia – and the straight world’s treatment (psychiatry) isn’t what those with the condition want from medical intervention.
Above the Knee opens with a bloody rock and has constant listings of ‘days before the accident’ to add a ticking clock. Amir (Freddy Singh) is recovering from an attempt to saw off his own left leg which has been misunderstood by his partner Kim (Julie Abrahamsen) and everyone else in his life as a suicide attempt. That he lets this stand rather than reveal the truth suggests just how stigmatising his real condition is. He sees his leg as rotten and has adopted a few strategies – tucking it under him when he sits down, painting self-portraits with a stump – to stave off his urge. When Amir and Kim watch a TV documentary about BIID, Kim says she feels that wannabe blind interviewee Rikke (Louise Waage Anda) is offensive to actual disabled people – but Amir quietly sets out to contact the woman, posing at first as a researcher though she quickly realises that he’s a fellow BIID believer, paradoxically picking up on visual cues through her big dark glasses. She offers to help him realise his dream, but cautions that it’ll have to look like an accident – for the social shame of his actual motive will estrange him completely from the world.
Built around an intense, interior performance from Singh – who also co-wrote – Above the Knee is short enough not to get dull, though its countdown-to-the-inevitable premise is the antithesis of engaging or suspenseful. BIID may have a physical cause, to do with a brain injury or malformation, but Bøe isn’t interested in that – for the purposes of the film, it’s an almost mystic condition and can only be a source of shame. Just as Amir would rather be thought of as suicidal than BIID, he lets Kim believe that his involvement with the mercurial, manipulative Rikke is a regular affair. For AMir, losing his leg is not enough – it’s losing his leg and getting the sympathy due someone who didn’t cut it off himself, even after he’s gone through rehearsals with a chainsaw and a leg of beef. Bøe is as outside a director here as he was on Good Boy – he’s not interested in understanding, but in the process of a mind with a worldview others must interpret as delusional but which is a simple reality to Amir. It’s a cool, chilly, not exactly welcoming picture – but interesting.
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