Review: Toxic

Director:  Saulé Bliuvaité

Stars:  Vesta Matulyté, Ieva Rupeikaité, Eglé Gabrénaité

Brought up in the neglected ghettos of industrial Lithuania, teens Marija (Vesta Matulyté) and Kristina (Ieva Rupeikaité) dream of glamourous lives far away as fashion models, their escapist desires preyed upon by the guru of a local modelling agency. At the outset of Saulé Bliuvaité’s piercing Toxic the two girls are estranged. Marija has a limp she’s been born with which, in a microclimate that preys on weakness, has made her an awkward exile. The other girls mock her ambitions to strut catwalks as deluded. But when Marija is able to procure booze for the underage kids – proving her usefulness – she’s welcomed into the fold.

As one might well imagine from an art house film from the Baltic region focusing on a predatory industry that exploits the young, Toxic is quite an unsparing experience. Bliuvaité’s gaze is steely and unflinching, quite far from the aesthetics of Western success that these young girls pivot towards. Toxic ranges from hyper-controlled camera moves to the bracingly freeform, often utilising the switch between the two to maximise impact. High vantages often infer a sense of being kept down. Of suppression.

Poverty and cruelty are normalised in her streets, but her eye is studious and painterly, finding handsomeness even in abject squalor. There are tableaux here redolent of Roy Andersson or Aki Kaurismäki. But Bliuvaité’s mood and tempo are all her own, and some of the moments of contemplation rank among the year’s best. A shot of Marija and Kristina in silhouette against a dusky blue sky featuring just one star and the moon is justly lingered upon, while an early cut from Marija locked outside the modelling school to a shot of its empty, sealed interior suggests some kind of Schrödinger’s Dance Studio, existing only in potentia.

When we meet Kristina she already shows signs of an eating disorder. She disposes of meals out the window and is looking up tapeworm eggs online. Through these behaviours we feel a sense of danger from the comparatively naive Marija. Even having gained access to the studio, Marija is othered. Practicing their catwalk strides in pairs, she is the odd one out, forced to walk alone.

As much if not more time is spent cataloguing the humdrum lives of these kids outside of their spurious vocation. Drug parties with peers in derelict buildings or in the shadow of domineering power arrays. Bleakness and strewn trash that often abuts beauty, both natural and manmade. Toxic fizzes with this sense of contrast and collision, with the real and the too large to touch.

The kids frequently vandalise the posters for the modelling agency – burning through the eyes – suggestive of a complex psychological relationship to the ideals of fame, success and beauty. A mix of jealousy and outright hatred toward the very system they also claw at for entry. A love that also teems with resentment. The young performers are all pretty brilliant, the two young leads especially fleshing out their characters into the truly believable. And while Bliuvanté’s essay on this – yes, toxic – industry doesn’t exactly teach us anything we didn’t already know or suspect, it powerfully underscores an urgent need for betterment in her native Lithuania, using the girls’ desperate escapism to reflect back on a landscape seemingly abandoned.

The tapeworm storyline I could personally have lived without (especially after The Ugly Stepsister earlier this year), but the inevitable downfalls of this drama – while cruel – aren’t nearly as gratuitous as one might fear. Bliuvanté weaponises how trivial such injustice has become. Toxic is devastating, for sure, but in ways that feel grimly unsurprising. Ends that, one comes to feel, all of these characters saw coming. Marija listens at the door while the modelling school’s steely madame reveals how she’s scammed a pair of incredulous parents. But she’s still in. Still carries on. The real desolation of Toxic, then, is that there seems to be no other choice.