Review by Benjamin Poole
Directed by: Liz Cairns
Starring: Amy Forsyth, Rachel Drance, Susanne Wuest, Eric Gustafsson, Eric Sebastian
We all eat to live, but the wisest of us, the eudaimons, know that to live is to eat. Food is life itself; food is love, and the changing seasons of the year are marked by auroral menu shifts to match. At the moment it's peach and cherry salads topped with oozing burrata, gently morphing into roast squashes stuffed with sauerkraut and cream as the nights draw in, before the deep stews of sautéed winter veg sustain us until Christmas. Meals are made to be shared, to be laughed with, to bond over. Sometimes, I actually prefer making food to eating it: the everyday alchemy of disparate ingredients combined to manifest something which will satisfy and enrich (humankind's greatest invention, with its cocoa merge of science and fancy, is easily chocolate). Nonetheless, they argue that "nothing tastes as good as skinny feels," and perhaps they have a point: temperance is key, of course. Being an epicurean involves discipline, the counting of calories, the measurement of waistlines, the daily workouts (I rhapsodise about chocolate, but rarely allow myself it - just a nibble on the most rarefied of occasions). Like every meaningful and important bond, our relationship with food is to be treated with respect and caution: like love it is impossible to live without. And like love it can become imbalanced.
The premise of writer/director Liz Cairns' introspective Canadian drama Inedia intrigues (as does a sensational trigger warning intertitle which warns that the filmic depictions of bulimia nervosa "could evoke strong emotions") with its proposition of a young woman, Cora (Amy Forsyth), suffering an increasingly destabilising allergy to food which leads to joining an isolated and radical community (aren't they all) who claim that human beings can survive solely on light (the phenomena provides the film's title).
We first meet Cora as an affected twentysomething: estranged, joyless and disturbed, she purges at a dinner party after learning her sister has used an egg white to bind the fritters (thoughtfully she had left out the recipe's blue cheese though, another trigger food for Cora). From the bathroom floor, Cora also unceremoniously dumps her nice-enough and understanding date. "It’s a different food every time," Madeline (Rachel Drance) remonstrates with her sister, as Cora goes home alone to rewatch videos pertaining to her condition (a self-perpetuating dynamic), while a doctor later argues that stress or external influence could be the source of the malady. Cora has none of it, insisting that food is the cause as she indulgently rubs cream into her ruddied skin and sighs dolefully as her phone rings the moment she has managed to sink herself into a painful bath. Girl, ignore it! One wonders if there's a sense that Cairns is satirising Gen Z solipsism in these early sequences...
Certainly, Jeremy Cox's cinematography is wittily controlled in this first act, with monochromes of cool blues and silver glooming the stylish interiors. We see moths gather excitedly about the tangerine phosphor of streetlamps, priming us for the wide-open reveal of the retreat, which is brightly photographed via the same blue, leafy sheen of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Here we meet Joanna (Susanne Wuest), the gnomic head of the sect who believe that photosynthesis is all we need, along with her disparate acolytes. Joanna is creepy from the off, shot to look more Skeletor than Sadhguru as she peddles her homilies and breatharian nonsense. The rest of the group consist of the usual hopeful but hopeless archetypes, including a few children and a pregnant woman (who are used, bluntly, as factors in the final act's moral arbitration). How far you get on with Inedia from this point will depend on your tolerance for cult films...
As someone who is fortunate enough to be self-sufficient, for this reviewer a cult narrative must really demonstrate the overriding attraction of the closed community, and the abject loneliness of the participants. Conversely, Cora seems all too eager to be a part of the faction, who duly enable her psychological paradigm. Certainly, a cult mentality abides in the real world: we see it in the increasingly berserk tribalism which characterises global and domestic politics, the unthinking devotion of fandoms. And so, inevitably, as Cora submits; giving up her car, cutting off family ties, allowing magical thinking over medical procedure; the feel is one of grim familiarity.
Crucially, the food factor is used as one of control, Joanna's push/pull force, and the film becomes less about relationships with food (although, in a neat touch, the cult makes a living by selling the fruit produce which they farm), than one of cloistered social dynamics (the main cast, young and lovely, remain physically unchanged throughout weeks of supposed, reckless fasting). As mentioned, towards the end there is peril involving children, who are an easily deployed ethical touchstone. The grim infant fate portrayed ultimately sidesteps the true adult reckoning which Cora's story deserves, overall rendering the social horror served up by Inedia slightly lacking in bite.
Inedia is on Canadian VOD from August 5th. A UK/ROI release has yet to be announced.
