Thinestra

If you’ve been seeking a festive indie body-horror movie to act as an appetite suppressant fit for the Christmas season, where overeating can engulf all your health goals for the new year, then Nathan Hertz’s debut (with screenwriter Avra Fox-Lerner) Thinestra should keep your weight-loss goals on track. With a tasty blending of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, combined with added protein from The Substance and Ravenous undertones, the body beautiful lies behind a new drug, with some truly horrendous side effects. But no pain, no gain.

Rising to the surface amid the recent explosion of cinema devoted to the dark side of the search for physical perfection, Thinestra, low budget, high concept, tells of the unhappy journey of Melissa and Michelle Macedo’s Penny/Penelope, a young woman whose body is her prison. No matter the extremes she goes to, fasting, radical dieting, all for nothing.

Her self-loathing is eating her alive. But unfortunately, it’s not taking those extra pounds with it. The more Penny resists, the more she craves. The more she surrenders, the more she’s shamed. Her mother (Norma Maldonado) is no help, only forcing her to hate herself more; her friends try to encourage her but fail. All this comes to a head when, one day, while staying late at her job digitally touching up images for a festive photo campaign advertising SNOG, the only drink you’ll want this Christmas, Penny has a brief encounter with the miserable-looking model (Mary Beth Barone) from the shoot.

“The result is the stuff of nightmares, as Penny vomits chucks and hunks of fat and viscera…”

While Penny gazes enviously at the woman, the model looks at her with pity. Thus, on her way out of the studio space, she gifts Penny a sachet of Thinestra. “Not everyone can take it,” the model warns as she leaves. Penny stares at the sachet, the potential answer to all her image issues.

Hesitant to cross that bridge, Penny carries on with her abstaining from sweets, sticking to salads and guzzling diet drinks, right until, feeling some joy from the season, attends a Christmas party. Uncomfortable around people, Penny spikes her own drinks to take the edge off. Problem is, the drunker she gets, the more she can’t help ogling all the holiday sweets plated and waiting. Penny gives in, grabbing a cookie and indulging. But when caught and quietly ridiculed by her obnoxious photographer boss, Neils (Brian Huskey), she leaves the party and takes the pill.

The result is the stuff of nightmares, as Penny vomits chunks and hunks of fat and viscera, which literally are also melting from her body as though it were made of wax and standing beneath a heat lamp. Yet, Thinestra slowly works. It is chemically altering alchemy in Penny’s life. The pounds drop, her confidence increases, and her quest for love develops. Life is looking good.

Still, like any Faustian deal, even as a weight-loss drug, Penny soon realizes she has unlocked more than the secret to sexy. Her tortured psyche, once imprisoned, now escapes, as an increasingly skinnier Penny transforms into a cannibalistic night-crawling version of herself. That appetite suppressant is more of an appetite amplifier. Her shadowy alter-ego, slowly devouring Penny’s craving to look gorgeous, becomes an insatiable need to feast on anything, or anyone!

The real-life Macedo siblings carry the weight brilliantly of being both the emotional core and the terrifying antagonist of this fat-free foray into the maddening nature of societal pressures on the external and internal versions of ourselves. All are trying to make us change into round pegs to fit in round holes, whether we are square pegs or not. The desire to be desired leads to the kingdom of misery, and in this bold cinematic statement, despite its size, Thinestra is not so much the low-budget cousin of the films mentioned in the introduction, rather it shows again how the indies are only growing in strength and audacity, producing polished pieces such as this, that take the flavors of the day, and deliciously craft a such fine bite, horror-filled and carb-conscious.