Toxic (Akiplėša)
Lithuanian filmmaker Saulė Bliuvaitė’s feature-length debut Toxic (Akiplėša) captured global attention when it won the Golden Leopard at the 2024 Locarno Film Festival. As unsparing as a measuring tape and as sharp as high heels, the story looks at the exploitative fashion industry through the eyes of determined teenagers and paints a portrait of girls zigzagging between competition and friendship.
The story revolves around Marija and Kristina, two teenage girls from the industrial outskirts of Kaunas. Bliuvaitė, places the body at the core of her vision, crafting a coming‑of‑age story that glows with compassion for the bruises of shortened adolescence. Marija, abandoned by her mother and living with her florist grandmother, and Kristina, a tougher, street‑wise girl, form an unlikely bond when they both sign up for a modelling agency. The price of their dream is steep: they stuff their mouths with cotton wool, skip meals and, in one shocking moment, swallow tapeworm eggs. The directory is shaped in a way that cuts from bicycle wheels in the fog to the father cavorting with his lady friend to disco music, creating a dreamlike, unexpected rhythm
Despite the bleak subject matter, their friendship radiates warmth. Moving on from the devotion you cling to at 14 years old with trembling hands, bruised knees and smudgy eyeliner, a Letterboxd review summarized the whole thing as “a story of unrelenting cruelty told with such humanity and care.” The movie’s signature is definitely its coquette‑trashy‑Eastern Euro vibe. Phew, what a word that was. Toxic manages to confront harsh realities without losing its tender heart in a way that makes this unique perspective into a relatable one.
Bliuvaitė deliberately steers away from typical teen‑movie cinematography. In an interview she explained that she avoided the “constant zooming into faces” of most teenage films, insisting that the atmosphere and environment are as important as the characters. As a result, the camera roams through fog‑shrouded bicycle wheels, Soviet‑era cooling towers and the blue‑tiled walls of the modelling studio. The director drew inspiration from the documentary Girl Model, which follows real‑life model scouts, and from her own memories of Baltic schoolgirls being plucked from classrooms by modelling agencies. Some feelings from the pictures definitely stick in a haunting way; the “surgical lights” of the agency, Gediminas Jakubka’s electronic score amplifies the girls’ strained bodies, while slithering sound design evokes the tapeworm hiding in Kristina’s gut.
Toxic refuses to moralise while confronting the dark side of the modelling world. Instead, it brings us close to Marija and Kristina’s inner lives. Rooted in the director’s own teenage memories, it exposes the wounds inflicted by beauty standards and consumer culture. It also shows how the idea of selling your body as an “escape” is born from a capitalist pressure that feels inevitable.
It’s a beautiful mix of poetry and brutality. You might want to look away sometimes, then immediately get warmhearted as Marija and Kristina embrace each other. With her Locarno win, Bliuvaitė is poised for wider recognition. Both familiar and foreign, harsh yet deeply human.
As we roll through the credits of this hauntingly beautiful world, we are inviting you to our playlist inspired by the movie: