Toxic: Golden Leopard winner offers an original exploration of familiar teen anxieties

• Reviewed from the 2024 Locarno Film Festival

It’s difficult to find anything new to say on the subject of teenage girls and body anxiety. But this debut film from Lithuania shakes up that women’s magazine staple with the eeriness of a fable. Saule Bliuvaite situates her story of two girls in their early teens in the industrial outskirts of Lithuania’s Kaunas, where the sun glints off the power station’s cooling towers and a young girl with a cheery smile can easily cadge an illegal bottle of booze from the wastelands where drunks sleep. 

Having been dumped with her grandmother by an indifferent mother and expected to make the best of it, the miserable Marija (Vesta Matulyte) is snapped up by one of the pop-up modelling schools (apparently common in the Baltic states) offering slender young girls from dead-end economies a potential way into a wider world. Marija, with her congenital limp and hangdog expression, is obvious prey. The girls have to pay, of course – for photographs, supposed training, introductions, flights to foreign lands – but it has to be worth it. All they have to do is stay thin.

Kristina (Ieva Rupeikaite), a younger but rather tougher nut, has read about one way to do that: swallow a tapeworm. She’s up for it, but Kristina is at a muddled stage between childhood and adulthood that means she is up for almost anything, including an unnerving visit to a reputed paedophile who pays on the spot for a massage. If there is one shot that sums up Toxic, it is the moment we glimpse Katrina sitting in her secret spot behind the shabby house where she lives with her father, a cigarette hanging from her mouth while she combs out her Barbie doll’s hair.

Bliuvaite’s inspired choice to interleaf her story with these insert shots mark her film – which won the Golden Leopard at the 2024 Locarno Film Festival, to nobody’s surprise – as a true original. In one moment, an abstracted vision of bicycle wheels in the fog cuts to still faces of local kids, then to Kristina’s father cavorting with his lady friend to disco music. A session at the modelling school suddenly reconfigures into a bizarre dance. 

In a film about something so familiar, everything Bliuvaite delivers is unexpected. Even scenes that approximate Loachian social realism are seen through gaps in a wall or at odd angles. There is a cumulative sense of being caught in a dream world, where hope is just within reach. Like adolescence, this too will pass. They will endure, they will even thrive in this glittering dump. Then, like Bliuvaite herself, they will leave.