EIFF 2015: Welcome to Me

Based on premise alone, Welcome to Me could have gone horribly wrong all too easily, but director Shira Piven’s barbed satire successfully walks a fine line between mockery and sincerity.

A magnificent Kristen Wiig is Alice, a woman with borderline personality disorder who’s self-medicating rather than listening to her therapist’s pleas. Her prescription includes obsessing over VHS recordings of Oprah, and, when she wins $86 million in a lottery, this fuels her ambition to buy time on a local TV network and start her own daytime chat show.

Alice’s investment is a large-scale vanity project, a shrine to her tortured past and bitter grudges complete with hired actors re-enacting her past embarrassments. The broadcasted narcissistic bubble eventually becomes a viral sensation. There’s shades of Network, The King of Comedy and the endurance art of Tom Green (in one episode Alice silently eats a cake for five minutes), and the film, though messy when it comes to a sentimental climax, is a strong send-up of self-actualisation and exhibitionism culture.

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