It’s a shame Toxic wasn’t around for the recent excretions of body-horror discourse. Saulė Bliuvaitė’s debut feature, winner of the Golden Leopard at this year’s Locarno Film Festival, does at least as much to turn the stomach with its tablet of tapeworm eggs than either of The Substance or A Different Man‘s Faustian cures. The rub in Bliuvaitė’s film is that such a pill exists, if only for those willing to wade onto the dark web––even Googling its side effects, as the protagonist discovers, should be done with some degree of caution. The anatomical anxieties and queasy professional demands that create a market for such horrors are the subject of Bliuvaitė’s film, which follows two teenage girls living in the shadow of a Lithuanian power station whose best hope for escape––a dubiously dangled carrot of catwalk fame in Tokyo or Paris––rests on their willingness to stay matchstick-thin.
Social realist filmmakers have always been drawn to that period of time in a young person’s life when hope and naivety are at their most potent. What sets the young people in Bliuvaitė’s film close to those in Andrea Arnold’s is that they aren’t so much following their own dreams as being swept up by larger forces. Toxic‘s chief antagonist is the matriarch of a local modeling school that cherry picks the community’s most waifish and sets out to make them waifier still. One protagonist goes by Marija (Vesta Matulytė) whose height and Balenciaga-coded looks make her a prime candidate, even in spite of the pesky limp she’s walked with since birth. At film’s start, Marija is new in town––the opening scene shows her being bullied by a group of girls who tease her gait and steal her jeans. She eventually gets them back from the film’s other main character, Kristina (Ieva Rupeikaite), a short, endearing scrapper who seems to believe that the only way to beat the other, taller girls is to be willing to do whatever it takes: this leads to everything from self-ingested parasites to visiting a local pedophile who pays young girls for massages. After a scuffle in the rain, the unlikely duo become fast friends.
Little of this is for the faint of heart, but Bliuvaitė’s refusal to relish in her protagonists’ misfortunes or bury them in misery gives Toxic a compelling and rebellious energy: this world is rife with danger, of course, but the girls have each other, and their home lives, while hardly conventional, are not without love (Marija lives with her kind grandmother; Kristina with a hapless but no-less doting dad). If there is a counterpart to Bliuvaitė‘s style, it might be Sean Baker, a filmmaker whose tendency to aestheticize never blunts his films’ sharper edges. (Though we should note that Bliuvaitė’s background is relatively close to the one she has depicted here.) Toxic stays unforgivingly tethered to reality even as Bliuvaitė allows for occasional flourishes: a hypnotic dance sequence between Kristina’s dad (Giedrius Savickas) and his girlfriend is a high point, as are the madame’s sterile modeling drills. Keen to impress her new pal, Marija soon joins Kristina at the school and is quickly singled out as a potential talent––a position that will draw about as much scorn from the other girls as it does the attention of the older boys in town.
Alongside DP Vytautas Katkus’ coarsely mesmerizing imagery, the key factor in Toxic‘s success is the remarkable performances Bliuvaitė draws from her two amateur leads. Matulytė, the audience’s eyes and ears, plays Marija with the intense interiority of a far more experienced performer, but Rupeikaite, the film’s beating heart, is even better: just wait for the shot of her brushing her Barbie’s hair out the back garden, lit cigarette dangling from her mouth; or the way she chokes up after suggesting one of the older boys might pay her for sex, almost surprised at herself for having found a line she won’t cross. When Toxic was selected for Locarno this year alongside Laurynas Bareiša’s Grade: A-