Thinestra
Penny does the best she can at her job in an unreasonable and unforgiving industry working for a particularly ungrateful manager, photographer Niels whining endlessly and bitching about the demands of the clients and the talent he is supposed to work with, describing model Mariah as “an ugly Russian lizard” out of earshot and micro-managing Penny’s touch-ups on the campaign for Snog, the year-round vegan eggnog beverage.
The Christmas season just around the corner with the rounds of parties and the expectation of indulgence, Penny is killing herself at her spin class and fending off voicemail messages from her health-guru mother Amanda who believes her chants can inspire to lose the extra inches and get to her target weight, taking shelter in the comfort of glazed donuts until Mariah offers her a solution, a powerful drug not yet approved for launch on the open market, Thinestra.
A satire on the impossible standards of beauty mandatory for those who live in the California sunshine and the ugly industry which silently lies, presenting doctored images as truth, Thinestra is directed by Nathan Hertz from a script by Avra Fox-Lerner, starring twins Michelle and Melissa Macedo as Penny and her alter-ego Penelope, set free by the side-effects of the miracle pill.
A body-horror which sits happily as a companion piece to The Substance or The Ugly Stepsister, there are aspects of Doctor Who’s Partners in Crime with the apparent sentience of the expelled fat, more malevolent than the cute and non-threatening Adipose, and The X-Files’ Hungry where humans become a substitute for fast food, Penny managing to lose the weight but unleashing a beast which needs to be fed and has cravings for meat.
Switching between surreal dream sequences of an endless tunnel of donuts which can only be escaped by eating to the luxury of a quesadilla which tastes like Christmas magic to the nightmare of Penelope, Thinestra can only exist in a world in which people are punished for being imperfect and vulnerable, Penny confessing to Amanda (Norma Maldonado) that since childhood she has been conditioned to see her body as “a pathetic prison she can’t escape.”
Shamed by the snide comments of Niels (Brian Huskey) and the emaciated “perfection” of Mariah (Mary Beth Barone) salt in the wound, handsome neighbour Josh (Gavin Stenhouse) could be on the menu if the urges expressed in the form of Penelope could be controlled, Thinestra uneven but occasionally hilarious in the bizarre Snog commercial and supremely grotesque as Penny exudes great clods of oily fat from her skin, clogging the drain, Penny a tragic character driven to extremes rather than encouraged to love and accept herself.
Thinestra has screened at the Raindance and Rhode Island Film Festivals and will be screening at Sitges in October
