Toxic (2024)
First screened and reviewed in October 2024
Director: Saulė Bliuvaitė. Cast: Vesta Matulytė, Ieva Rupeikaitė, Giedrius Savickas, Vilma Raubaitė, Egle Gabrenaitė, Jekaterina Makarova. Screenplay: Saulė Bliuvaitė.
VOR:
③
Punches down hard on sexist standards and exploitative structures with which anyone is familiar, but I can't deny its weird-ass stylistic conviction.
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| Photo © 2024 Akis Bado |
Well, no denying that filmmaker Saulė Bliuvaitė has a style and a point of view, which is nothing to take for granted. However, I do wish they weren't so thoroughly cruel and pitiless. Presumably this movie means to foster at least some compassion for the barely-teenaged girls who get roped into a lurid, dishonest "modeling academy" in small-town Lithuania. But beyond the movie's inhumane gaze on all of its subjects, even those nominally deserving of pity (though there honestly aren't many of those), Toxic is the kind of film that badly needs there to be suffering and antagonism in the world, because they give the movie something to film with a kind of mod and sniggering disgust. There's some visual talent here, but astonishingly bereft of any compassion whatsoever, save for a couple, mostly late-breaking moments. Some truths are undoubtedly being spoken here, but when a writer-director's title declaims exactly what the film is, believe her. Given the predilections over time of the Locarno Film Festival, the conferring of its top prize on Toxic almost proves my point.
P.S. I'm bumping this up half a grade, since the movie's integrity in executing a firmly defined vision is sitting well with me a day out, and I can see at least a glimmer of human feeling for these characters in the later sequences. I still don't like it, in more or less the ways that people who hated Dogtooth hated Dogtooth (which I loved, in large part for its high-wire concept and razor-sharp directorial control, neither of which I see in Toxic's acrid view of its own milieu and characters), but I do feel some obligation to respect it. Grade: C+
(I originally wrote this review on Letterboxd.)