“The most difficult thing about Cute is also what provides its pulse: the film refuses to tell us exactly how to feel about these people.”

What does it mean to be innocent, and what happens when the idea of innocence becomes something an adult wants to return to? Cinema has often looked at childhood as a space of safety, but there is something much more complicated about trying to recover that space after growing up. Marlene Emilie Lyngstad’s Cute enters this uncomfortable territory through loneliness, performance, and desire, following people who seem to be searching for something they cannot quite name. The film never makes that search entirely comfortable, and perhaps that uncertainty is where much of its interest lies.

Richard (Jan Gunnar Røise) leaves his girlfriend after becoming troubled by forbidden feelings towards her seven-year-old daughter. He returns to his childhood home, intending to renovate it before selling it, and tries to disappear into a life of routine. He cooks, cleans, repairs and takes care of things, as if normality itself might keep his thoughts under control. Then he meets Stella (Gina Jaqueline), his mother’s caregiver. Stella has built a very particular identity around the aesthetics of cuteness and also works online as a Lolita cam performer. Their meeting develops into a strange surrogate father-daughter relationship, one in which both seem to find something they cannot find elsewhere. Richard sees in Stella someone who might accept him without judgment, while Stella finds in him a form of attention that she cannot quite trust. When the child Richard left behind reaches out to him, the artificial world they have created begins to crack.

What makes Cute interesting is that Lyngstad does not make Richard’s story into a conventional narrative of transgression. The film is less interested in what he does than in the burden of what he carries. He is constantly performing normality, almost desperately. Beneath his politeness, his well-kept appearance, and his endless need to be useful is a man who cannot find a place for himself. The contradiction is disturbing precisely because he does not behave like the image we might expect from someone carrying such thoughts. Lyngstad uses this gap between appearance and inner life to create much of the film’s tension. Richard is not simply hiding something from others; he seems to be hiding from himself.

Stella is another kind of performer. Her cuteness is partly an aesthetic, partly a business, and partly a survival mechanism. She understands what people want from her and has learned how to turn that desire into an identity. Yet the performance costs her something. She knows that looking younger can be profitable, while also understanding that the same performance threatens to consume the person underneath it. Her relationship with Richard therefore becomes strangely symmetrical. He longs for childhood innocence from the outside; she has built an adult identity around performing it. Both are looking backwards, but neither can really return.

This is where the film’s title becomes more complicated. Cute is not only about children or childishness. It is also about a contemporary culture that surrounds us with images, objects and identities designed to make us feel something we have lost. Online spaces, clothes, toys, and carefully constructed personas all become part of the film’s world. Lyngstad suggests that the desire for innocence can itself become a product, something we perform and eventually depend upon. Richard and Stella are shaped by this world even when they believe they are escaping it.

There are moments when the film’s difficult subject could easily become sensational, but the performances keep it grounded in something more human and uncertain. Jan Gunnar Røise gives Richard a restrained and deeply conflicted presence. His politeness, nervous energy, and constant need to remain useful reveal a man trying desperately to hold himself together. Gina Jaqueline brings something more unpredictable to Stella. She can be playful and performative one moment, then suddenly expose a darker vulnerability underneath. Their chemistry is strange and uncomfortable, but it gives the film much of its emotional life. Lyngstad handles these performances with remarkable confidence, allowing small gestures and changes in behaviour to carry what the characters cannot say. With Cute, she proves herself to be a very promising director, particularly in the way she approaches challenging material without reducing her characters to simple explanations. The most difficult thing about Cute is also what provides its pulse: the film refuses to tell us exactly how to feel about these people. Lyngstad leaves room for discomfort, uncertainty and questions about where empathy ends and responsibility begins. Her film does not offer innocence as something pure. Instead, it presents innocence as something people can long for, imitate, commodify and perhaps become trapped inside.

For a first feature, Cute is an unusually bold and uneasy work. It does not always find the same strength in the storytelling as it does in the ideas, but there is a genuine searching in the way Lyngstad approaches these lonely people. Her characters are trying to create a private world where they can finally be accepted. The tragedy is that the very performances which bring them together may also be the things keeping them from touching anything real.