Obsession with perfection is a cruel thing that humans suffer with, and in Thinestra, we are given a tragedy, a bloodsoaked terrific tragedy. See this at the first opportunity.

Penny (Michelle Macedo) works in advertising and all she sees, day in day out, are “perfect” bodies or bodies that are retouched to look “perfect. Racked with body dysmorphia, she decides to take the mysterious Ozempic-esque drug Thinestra. That night, she violently expels a grotesque mass; soon, that mass forms a shape —the exact shape of Penny. Only this doppelganger calls herself Penelope, and it means to cause havoc.

You might be sitting there thinking that this is akin to a weight loss version of The Substance. Well, I am here to tell you to push any thought of that cracker of a film to the side and soak yourself in the glorious goopy madness that is Nathan Hertz’s Thinestra. This is its own grotesque, tragic beast.

Tragic in the sense that with Penny, she is a young woman, so for the body dysmorphia to take such a strong hold of her is devastating, especially in relation to how she actually looks. She is terrified of being alone, and after taking the tablets, despite how it makes her feel when expunging the fats from herself, how those around her treat her for only losing a stone (13 pounds), as someone who went through a significant weight loss journey an age ago. It was startling to see how differently people spoke and acted around me. So, to see that here is horrible, as it verifies all those doubts you had about yourself and your weight.

It is this authentic emotional theme that allows Thinestra to play so strongly. For anyone who has body dysmorphia and struggled with their weight, you will almost feel some pangs of trauma seep through the screen. Where the film also shines is in the horror elements that Hertz brings forward, which are presented in a wonderfully hideous way. Not satisfied with the internal horror of what someone like Penny would be going through, Hertz goes all out in giving us a nightmare to watch and spares not a drop of blood in trying to gross us out.

This meshing shouldn’t necessarily work as well as it does, yet Thinestra does. Perhaps it is that the film has a pitch-black comedic thread running throughout it that keeps the tragedy of Penny and the horror of those pills, as well as Penelope, from overwhelming each other. It demonstrates the script’s cleverness in knowing exactly when to pull back into the more emotional moments and when to push forward into the madness that will inevitably ensue. The fact that Thinestra never loses sight of the tragedy befalling Penny is what makes it such a strong and engaging film. A sensitivity to the subject is conveyed, and despite the gore, it remains the key theme.

Michelle Macedo is great here, and with a clever bit of casting, her identical twin, Melissa, who plays the toilet mess that eventually becomes Penelope (but also Penny when the weight loss is in full effect), also nails it. Both performances are difficult to manage, yet both are able to do so, and by ensuring that we always feel sympathy for Penny, they more than succeed in their performances.

Given how angry Thinestra is with the weight loss industry, you wish it had taken it one step further and removed a bit more of the comedy, playing it a little straighter, as this would allow those performances to dazzle us a little more. Despite that, what we get is something horrendously great. You won’t forget this one, and it is more likely than not the first of many modern weight loss body horrors set to come down the pipeline. A word of warning for those films, though. It will take something truly exceptional to surpass this.

★★★★

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