Credit: Dangerous Minds / Bendita Film Sales

If you’ve ever dared to even search for something related to fitness and health, you already know that the weight loss industrial complex is coming after you with all its might for the foreseeable future.

From article suggestions about losing ten kilograms in 30 seconds to targeted ads for belts you can wear that will help you get a six-pack, few can survive that unrelenting barrage without losing their minds.

Lithuanian filmmaker Saulė Bliuvaitė’s debut feature, Toxic, is considerate enough to save you from this vicious cycle by directing you straight to what all the cool kids are doing: ingesting tapeworm eggs bought off the Dark Web. Or if that’s not really up your alley, it also has other nuggets of advice, such as sleeping pill-induced loss of appetite and bulimia, to guide you on your fitness journey.

Among the European festival circuit entries that were good enough to get noticed last year, Toxic is an incessantly grim vision of a small Lithuanian town, following two teenage girls who, like everyone else around them, want to get the fuck out. However, the only avenue available to them is a scam modelling agency that practically exports women from the region with lucrative offers and leaves them stranded once they realise that the things that were promised to them were never going to happen.

When we think of body-horror, the names that pop into our minds are the David Cronenbergs and Shinya Tsukamotos of the world, with obviously grotesque distortions of the human frame that are intended to transform the familiar into the gnarly. It’s a formula that even Coralie Fargeat followed on The Substance, albeit to deliver a timely feminist commentary about the unrealistic images flooding social media platforms that are shaping the minds of young women everywhere.

Although Toxic suffers from the usual flaws that come along with a debut feature project, where it stands out is Bliuvaitė’s hyper-realistic interpretation of the genre and how the horror completely relies on psychological and emotional strands of connection. We are sucked into this opaque part of the world that isn’t glamorous at all, but populated by young girls who are being spoon-fed dreams of Milan and Tokyo… and tapeworm eggs.

“That dark web was a fucking hassle. I even found a child for sale,” the guy who supplies the two central characters with the eggs says, demanding quick payment for a commodity that is supposedly in high demand. Bliuvaitė doesn’t need to rely on CGI or practical effects for the body horror elements; the scenes of young girls’ bodies being subjected to this amount of psychological pressure are enough to unsettle anyone, let alone those who have struggled with body dysmorphia all their lives and can feel this terror in their bones.

There’s a straight line that can be drawn from the advertisements mentioned in the introduction of this article to the methods that Toxic’s protagonists resort to in order to kickstart their careers as supermodels, and that line is an extremely slippery slope. While it’s understandable that the film hasn’t received even a fraction of the attention that accompanied The Substance with its compelling narrative and huge stars, Toxic announces the arrival of Bliuvaitė in a landscape that desperately needs such voices to shape the discourses that are endlessly peddled on the internet.

For those of us who have actually watched the film, you already know that swallowing the eggs of tapeworms to lose weight is a terrible idea. But if I have somehow convinced you to go on the hunt for them, don’t forget to cite me as your favourite pro-parasite fitness influencer the next time you’re invited to your friend’s podcast with 157 monthly listeners.