IFFI 2024: Saulė Bliuvaitė’s Toxic is a harsh portrait of adolescence and desirability

Winner of the Golden Peacock at the festival, Saulė Bliuvaitė’s Toxic unfolds in a small Lithuanian town where hope and idealism seem lost. People mill about with fatigue and disillusionment writ on their very faces. A lot of them work in the town’s factories; the place itself is stuck in residual disuse. The cost of living is less, the lives led modestly. However, youths hanker for more comforts, mobility, fancy pleasures. The film centers two teenagers, Marija (Vesta Matulyte) and Kristina (Ieva Rupeikaite), as they navigate a gamut of personal dilemmas-a quest for desirability, racked by cripplingly low self-esteem, body image issues, to name a few.

Both are drifters, shorn of love and visibility within their own families. This is a film full of abrasive emotions swinging between rejection and disfavor. The girls are relentlessly fighting how their bodies may be perceived, hence twisting and circumventing projections. They want to turn it around and suit forced mandate of beauty paradigms. Like any other teenager, their self-worth is entirely predicated on whimsical validations of the other. In its absence, there is no language in which the girls can understand themselves or what they seek from the future. Bliuvaitė underscores the vividly disorienting effect produced when the self, the body is stretched beyond what one can bear. What’s particularly remarkable is how she builds the relationship Marija and Kristina have with a modelling agency they enroll at. The former isn’t instantly gung-ho about the prospect, while the latter, more driven and desperate, pushes forth. Quickly, Kristina starts exerting influence on Marija, who is drawn deeper and inexorably into curating her appearance. The prerequisite to attaining ideal beauty? Impossible thinness. The point at which the illusion of social ascent will shatter hovers close always.

Initially, Marija isn’t self-flagellating. She seems settled into perceptions of her body. The only thing that bugs her is her limp, a point of mockery constantly batted by others. When Kristina presents the idea of the modelling agency as something that can render Marija more conventionally attractive, the latter is allured. To them, it’s also promising a future beyond the sleepy, decaying town. They can forge an escape if they get a foothold in the agency. The sleeker the profile, the higher the chances are of them putting together a well-heeled life, where worry over resources and means wouldn’t tie them up. To grab this, the girls increasingly stop at nothing, hurling themselves through a ring of reckless decisions. But Bliuvaitė doesn’t judge them for their mistakes and misjudgements. So many rash deeds are done just to wrench the attention of their own families, which only casts them aside. The girls stray into toxic relationships in the belief they will be seen with tenderness within those.

Toxic is a ruthless, bleak drama. At times, you wonder if the film is just pursuing severity without advancing an ideological richness. Is it simply a nihilistic navel gazing exercise in portraying a bitter, broken world? If you can look past the blasé critique of tailoring bodies to damaging extremes for popularity, there are twisted, provocative layers to admire in the central friendship. It doesn’t begin with sweet, cozy acknowledgements but slowly gathers a brittle mutual trust that survives many a nightmare. At least, they have got each other to weather bigger storms ahead.

Toxic won the Golden Peacock award for Best Film at IFFI 2024.