Marlene Emilie Lyngstad's feature debut "Cute" provoked strong reactions at the San Sebastián festival, and the Norwegian director says that is precisely the point.

"I find it interesting and exciting that the film creates such strong reactions," Lyngstad tells Variety. "It's never explicit, so the discomfort must arise from the inner battles of the characters. Maybe people are confronted by their own monsters?"

The film centers on Richard, a man attracted to his girlfriend's seven-year-old daughter. He leaves and hides in his old childhood home, where he meets Stella, his mother's caregiver, who likes to behave like a little girl.

Lyngstad is direct about what the film is and is not. "I think there's an important distinction between the guilt of someone who has abused a child and the guilt of someone with an unwanted attraction who's determined not to act on it. My film deals with the latter," she emphasizes.

"Richard is fighting an inner battle that confronts us with difficult but important questions: How can this person forge a decent life while carrying shame that can never be eliminated? Is this person also worthy of love?"

"Cute," she says, is a love story. "It asks what love is. It's about two adults, each broken in their own way, who long to be loved unconditionally."

The director argues that audiences seek out cinema precisely because media narratives tend toward the black-and-white. "I'm not interested in discomfort for its own sake, but I do think that some degree of unsettlement is inevitable when asking questions that might not have answers," she says. "I find humans uncomfortably contradictory, and I love it when cinema exposes these contradictions."

The cast includes Jan Gunnar Røise, who worked on Lyngstad's graduation film "Norwegian Offspring," alongside Karin Bertling, Kitt Maiken Mortensen, Molly Kirk Rasmussen and newcomer Gina Jaqueline, who plays Stella.

Jaqueline's path into the role was unusual. "I first met Gina while doing research for this film. She was a collector of the 'cute' aesthetic, and I was interested in understanding its appeal on grown-ups," Lyngstad recalls. "When I told her about Stella, she opened up about her experience with OnlyFans and the online erotic market."

Lyngstad brought Jaqueline on as a consultant during script development, then invited her to audition despite the absence of any formal acting training. "She turned out to be a raw talent. She had the ability to lift the scenes from the page and deliver performances beyond my imagination," the director says.

"She was navigating the line between being exceptionally charming, vital, very vulnerable and haunted. I was very touched by her presence."

The director describes the contrast between her two leads as "especially exciting": "It was Jan Gunnar's precision and control against Gina's playfulness and intuition."

The strong first responses following the film's world premiere, Lyngstad suggests, reveal a contradiction in contemporary viewing habits: audiences have a complicated relationship with sexual imagery on screen even though anything is available online.

"It's hypocritical," says the director. "That's why I wanted to deal with the imagery provided by the internet. Images connecting childhood and sexuality are a part of pop culture and even mainstream pornography. A new territory of moral ambiguity has emerged. How should we navigate these blurred lines between fantasy, representation and exploitation?"

She adds: "I think we don't want to look at this. Maybe it's because we all carry some kind of guilty conscience?"

TrustNordisk handles international sales for "Cute." Nordisk Film Production A/S (Denmark) produced the film, with co-producers Nordisk Film Production AB, Film I Väst (Sweden) and Amarcord (Norway). With sales underway and the debate already running at San Sebastián, "Cute" now faces the wider market — and audiences who, on Lyngstad's reading, may find the film holds up a mirror they did not ask for.