It’s rare to grow up a girl in the United States and not know at least one person with an eating disorder. When confronted with it in film and literature, I initially struggled to understand. I was raised by immigrant parents who at times during their childhoods were so poor that they had to skip dinner, so meals in our household were a precious thing, a cultural currency of love. The first time I went out with friends to get pho, I was so surprised that none of them packaged the leftover broth to take home. Wasting even a drop of food had always been unthinkable to me, but the barely-dented plates of my friends told a different story. I began to understand, then, that to be a beautiful American girl was to eat only what was necessary, and never more. On Tumblr, I stumbled across ED blogs and began obsessing over the point where my thighs touched, over the stretch marks on my hips. Food had once been easy for me– something I loved and looked forward to– but as I matured amidst the cultural throes of toxic health culture and social media aestheticism, food became complicated, a source of stress rather than comfort.

But an eating disorder is a different beast entirely. Those afflicted feel food-related anxiety with an intensity that is all-consuming and life-altering. I have never once induced vomiting or starved myself to the point of losing hunger cues, but this is common practice for victims of eating disorders. While most people harbor some body image issues, far fewer experience body dysmorphia, which the DSM describes as “the obsessive idea that some aspect of one’s own body part or appearance is severely flawed and therefore warrants exceptional measures to hide or fix it.” What is it like to fear food so much so that the ingestion of it becomes an insidious threat, rather than a bodily pleasure and daily social ritual?

In Samantha Aldana’s debut horror feature SHAPELESS, amateur lounge singer Ivy’s vision of happiness is an eerie, slow-motion dream of herself on stage wearing a glittery blue dress. Against a pensive soundtrack of atmospheric strings that build from layered, dissonant vocals, the camera moves slowly over the contours of her arms and the spotlight shining bright and white from above. It’s fitting that at no point during this dream do we see Ivy’s face or hear her voice, because despite aspiring to sing, Ivy’s true obsession lies with her form.

SHAPELSS is a detailed character study that guides its viewers through Ivy’s tense world via meticulously-framed close-ups and slow-moving pans. Returning always to her dimly-lit bathroom, Ivy bends over the toilet and upheaves what little she ate for the day. In the dry cleaners where she works, an internal battle ensues between herself and her reflection in the vending machine, culminating in a frightening, discordant sequence of Ivy dispensing snack after snack with a Kubrick-esque violence. With a combination of harsh cuts and screeching musical crescendos, Aldana’s ability to elicit fear from a grocery store checkout line and a bowl of hospital oatmeal is truly a masterclass in terror. Body horror elements are also scattered throughout, reminiscent of Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan but uniquely horrific and artistic in their own right.

But the undeniable standout of SHAPELESS is lead actress Kelly Murtagh, who also wrote and produced the film. Murtagh plays Ivy’s stage persona with reserve, conveying all at once the obvious potential of her talents as well as her obvious inability to access them. Recurring characters in her life are a jovial barista and a more successful lounge singer whose shows she frequents, but at no point does Ivy consider reaching out to any of them for help. Murtagh spends a large amount of the film watching, thinking, and observing, her discomfort just subtle enough that the audience feels privy to it even as it goes unnoticed by everyone she interacts with. Over time, her disorder begins to manifest as anger, alcoholism, and entitlement, but Murtagh never overplays these emotions, remaining measured enough that they just narrowly avoid being read as misguided cries for help, to Ivy’s own detriment, of course.

SHAPELESS is an incredibly impressive, empathetic debut feature and I’m excited to see what Aldana and Murtagh do next. Together, they’ve created a visual experience both massively unsettling and beautifully poignant, a film bound to prove cathartic for anyone who even remotely struggles with their body image. I know it did for me.

SHAPELESS is being released in theaters on February 10, 2022.