Danish filmmaker Lyngstad’s upcoming film Cute is set to premiere at the San Sebastian Film Festival, bringing a provocative story about sexual taboos, fetishisation and the complicated boundaries surrounding adult attraction to children to the international festival circuit.
Written by Lyngstad and Emilie Koefoed Larse, Cute centres on Richard, played by Jan Gunnar Røise, a man struggling with forbidden feelings toward his seven-year-old stepdaughter. Unable to reconcile himself with those feelings, Richard makes the decision to leave his girlfriend and withdraw from his family life.
He retreats to his childhood home, where he plans to renovate the property before putting it up for sale. However, his attempt to isolate himself is interrupted by Stella, the caregiver of his mother. Her presence gradually becomes an important part of Richard’s increasingly unstable world.
Richard discovers that Stella is living a secret double life as a Lolita camgirl. The discovery leads the two into a deeply transgressive surrogate father-daughter relationship, creating an unusual bond built around their shared desire for intimacy and connection. As their carefully constructed reality begins to fall apart, Richard is forced to confront the life he left behind when his stepdaughter reaches out to him.
The film explores the uncomfortable space between intimacy, desire and fetishisation while examining characters who struggle to establish genuine human connections. Its central relationship is deliberately unsettling, with the story using the characters’ emotional vulnerabilities to question where the boundaries between affection, romantic love and fetishisation can become blurred.
Lyngstad said the film reflects her broader approach to confronting subjects that she finds disturbing rather than avoiding them. “I have accepted that I am unable to ignore the things that scare and sadden me,” the Norwegian filmmaker said. “This is why, through my films, I attempt to reshape apathy and melancholia into curiosity.”
She added that one of the issues that particularly concerns her is the difficulty of separating romantic love from fetishisation. “Cute is an attempt to examine this line,” she said, describing the film as the story of two people who desperately want authentic intimacy but repeatedly end up humiliating one another in their attempts to find it.
Produced by Carl Osbæck Adelkild, the film is a Nordisk Film Production and is co-produced with Film i Väst and Amarcord. Thomas Robsahm, Thomas Heinesen, Kristina Börjeson, Evelina Jacobsson and Johanna Bergenstråhle serve as co-producers.
The cast also includes Gina Jaqueline, a social media influencer and OnlyFans creator who makes her feature-film debut with Cute. Karin Bertling, Molly Kirk Rasmussen and Kitt Maiken Mortensen are also part of the cast.
Cute will have its world premiere on September 20 at the San Sebastian Film Festival, where it will screen in the New Directors section. The Spanish festival is scheduled to run from September 18 to 26, placing Lyngstad’s film among the titles being introduced to international audiences during this year’s festival.
