Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Samantha Aldana
Starring: Kelly Murtagh, Bobby Gilchrist, Jamie Neumann, Marco
Dapper, Erika Ashley, Gralen Bryant Banks
Despite being one of the more fantastical strands of horror,
body-horror also tends to be the most relatable. Sure, none of us will
ever experience our stomachs turning into VHS players or our bodies
transforming into human-fly hybrids, but for most of us, the biggest
personal scares we'll receive in our lives will come courtesy of our
bodies. It begins when we're infants with our teeth falling out,
continues in puberty with hair appearing in strange places and then
begins to take on more worrying forms like unexplained lumps and strange
rashes. And then there's the constant struggle to keep our bodies within
socially prescribed parameters, the never-ending weighing and measuring
of flesh. Most of us are concerned with how our bodies look to some
degree, but for some it can be an all-consuming obsession.
That's the case with the tortured heroine of director
Samantha Aldana's Shapeless. Ivy (Kelly Murtagh, who co-wrote the film with
Bryce Parsons-Tweston) is a talented jazz singer, but she's based
in New Orleans, which is akin to being an accomplished footballer in Sao
Paulo. She's doing better than most though, as she has a steady gig with
her quartet in a local bar, albeit she has to supplement her earnings
with a day job at a dry cleaners. When she's discovered by the owner of
a larger, classier establishment and offered a spot, it seems
everything's moving in the right direction for Ivy.
But Ivy suffers from intense self-doubt linked to an eating disorder
that sees her binge on food only to subsequently vomit her guts up.
Whenever Ivy gets hunger pangs, her body begins to display open sores,
and at one point hands even break out of her back as though she's the
human embodiment of that wall in Romero's Day of the Dead. It's left ambiguous as to whether this is all being imagined by Ivy
or whether her body really is displaying such fantastical anomalies.
Either way, it's ruining Ivy's social life, to put it mildly, as she has
to keep anyone who displays an interest in her at a distance. One of
Ivy's bandmates, nice guy bass player Oscar (Bobby Gilchrist),
has romantic intentions towards her, and it seems the feeling is
reciprocated. Many viewers will relate to Ivy's fear of getting naked in
his presence, which destroys any possibility of intimacy.
Ivy's constant vomiting begins to take a toll on her vocal chords,
putting her career in jeopardy, but she continues on, keeping her issues
a secret until her bandmates can no longer put up with her
unprofessionalism. This aspect of the story makes
Shapeless a cousin of sports movies like
The Wrestler,
The Racer
and
Jockey, where athletes try to conceal their ailing physical conditions
through an unwillingness to walk away from the one thing they excel at.
Played with utter sympathy by Murtagh, Ivy is a relatably tragic
heroine. Even those of us who don’t suffer from eating disorders may nod
knowingly at some of Ivy's idiosyncracies, like how she chops up a
breakfast bar into small pieces which she plans to ration, only to end
up consuming the whole thing in one sitting.
Shapeless is arguably more mood piece than narrative
feature, heavily reliant on the dreamy visuals conjured up by Aldana and
cinematographer Natalie Kingston, along with the immersive and
nightmarish sound design of Evan M. Flory. Both aspects are used
to blend the horror with seductive atmosphere of late night N'Awlins,
with its jazz chanteuses floating on clouds of neon and smoke, drifting
saxophone chords tangling with the rumbling of Ivy's stomach. Mirrors
prove Ivy's enemy, taunting her with distorted images that give her a
demonic appearance. At one point Ivy is engulfed by the detritus of her
diet as it wraps its tendrils around her like a Transformer made from
trash. It all adds up to a visual and aural nightmare that sadly, many
viewers will know all too well.
