Toxic

Between the pale walls of a school changing room, we meet Marija (Vesta Matulytė), who is searching for her stolen jeans. After being bullied away by her peers for her limp, she continues the search on her own. Suddenly, she's transfixed by the hypnotic hollowness of an empty locker, the shot prolonging quietly. Submerging the first minutes of her first feature within a surreal realm, director Saulė Bliuvaitė signals a clear appetite for the eerie and the bizarre. Yet, they are used as expressions of a blunt reality that affects the lives of two girls who navigate their transforming identities. Placing the body at the core of her vision, the Lithuanian filmmaker crafts a coming-of-age story that glows with compassion for the bruises of shortened adolescence.

Marija lives with her grandmother (Eglė Gabrėnaitė) in a small industrial town, after being entrusted to her by her absent mother. Switching schools just as the summer break starts, the young protagonist spends her days helping with her grandma’s florist business. When she catches local girl Kristina (Ieva Rupeikaitė) wearing her jeans, Marija tries to take them back, which leads to a brief scrap in a drab alley. The confrontation ironically leads them to discover their feelings of abandonment and discontent, forming an unlikely bond. Finding out that Kristina is signed up with a modelling agency she'd also been considering, Marija finally decides to join.

Under the surgical lights of the agency studio, the two girls and the other candidates prepare for a photoshoot that could land them a job abroad. A reassuring red-headed representative tells Marija that she will teach her how to be confident, even going so far as saying that her congenital limp will go away by the end of the class. And yet, with each practice routine and runway walk, we see Marija struggle, the pounding electronic rhythms of Gediminas Jakubka's score intensifying the feeling of a strained body. Favoured for her androgynous features, the teenager again becomes an outsider, cast out by the other girls' envy. Kristina on the other hand, is pushed by the agency on a disgusting path towards punishing weight loss.

From stuffing their mouths with cottonwool to inducing vomiting and skipping meals, we constantly see the young protagonists struggle to meet their weight goals. As hopelessness creeps in, Kristina steals from her father to buy tapeworm eggs, which she ingests for the sake of the photoshoot. Despite Kristina's good mood, Bliuvaitė doesn't allow her viewers to forget about the grotesque implications behind her weight loss, employing a slithering sound design that haunts the sanitised studio, unsettling the glossy ambitions taking shape with each practice session.

Driven by youthful hope, the story keeps parental figures at a distance, acting as peripheral characters. Both protagonists find their households at odds with their aspirations in different ways. When Marija's unseen mother returns, demanding that she live with her again, the teenager confronts her and her controlling manner, triggering a match that the passive grandmother can only try to temper. Kristina's father (Giedrius Savickas) is mostly seen in bars, if not at home, forcing his daughter to eat alongside him. In contrast to Marija's parent, the man embraces his daughter's dream, even selling his car to help secure Kristina’s future. Despite their decent intentions, the grandmother and father, shaped by their industrial surroundings, represent what the girls want to escape from - a community worn down by dejected looks and noxious smog.

While the increasingly dubious modelling agency frames Marija and Kristina's narrative, Bliuvaitė also focuses on how the young protagonists experience adolescence outside of it. As interactions with the older local boys turn intense or even dangerous, the actual age of the girls resurfaces in a moment with sobering results. In her attempt to pull her protagonists from a world that feels increasingly surreal, the Lithuanian auteur strikes a delicate balance between sorrow and warmth, drawing the viewer into Marija and Kristina's relationship, where they find solace in each other's company.