Sister, What Grows Where Land Is Sick? A Case Study of the Eco-Critical and Environmental Grotesque in Cinema

Abstract In the feature film Sister, What Grows Where Land is Sick? ( Den siste våren , Franciska Eliassen 2022), the young woman Vera (Ruby Dagnell), who struggles with mental illness and anxiety about the future, exclaims: ‘There are no borders’. This extraordinary debut film explores various types of boundaries and their transgressions—both thematically and aesthetically—between the individual and the collective, the beautiful and the disgusting, the healthy and the unhealthy, and the realistic and the monstrous. Drawing on the concept of the ‘Environmental Grotesque’, this chapter examines the implications of Vera’s epiphany of borderlessness within an eco-critical and intermedial framework, and how a dark film centred on mental illness can illuminate the on the ecological crisis in unexpectedly positive ways.