Toxic

Marija has been left by her mother and comes to an industrial town to live with her grandmother. She limps; the other children notice at once. Kristina fights her on the first day. Then the two meet somewhere: there is a modelling school in the town and those who enrol are promised work abroad. The lesson is this: the measurements must hold. The girls go hungry, measure each other's waists and look for methods that take weight off faster. One of them tries swallowing a worm. They are thirteen and the school describes this as a career. Saulė Bliuvaitė writes and directs; it is her first feature. Vesta Matulytė plays Marija and Ieva Rupeikaitė plays Kristina. It is a Lithuanian production and its original title is Akiplėša. The film won the Golden Leopard, the top prize, at the 2024 Locarno Film Festival, and took the first feature award as well. Bliuvaitė wrote the screenplay out of what she went through as a teenager herself. After Locarno the film was shown at more than twenty international festivals. Neither of the two leads had made a film before. The matter it treats is hope built on a body; no other way out is visible in the town and the school sells this one. The narrative does not offer the girls' friendship as an emotional rescue; the relationship does damage too. The photography is cold; the town is deliberately shown without colour. Its limit is the watching; the narrative is hard, some scenes uncomfortable, and the film offers no hope. Who it is for: viewers who like Eastern European cinema and realist narratives of adolescence. Who it is not for: it is bleak, slow, and the ending bitter.