I don’t have anything quirky to say about eating disorders. The subject matter is a little too serious for that. Disordered eating is one of many psychological issues believed to have emerged in the Industrial Era, when individualism became the norm and one’s self-image became more important than ever. Young people who found themselves with little to no control over their lives in a time when it was supposedly easier than ever to take charge of one’s destiny sought to take control over one of the only things they could – how they ate (or didn’t eat). But this attempt at control could often slip out of control, becoming pathological. Becoming an eating disorder.

Shapeless follows Ivy (Kelly Murtagh) and her day-to-day life in New Orleans. By night, she is the lead singer in a jazz band at a bar very few people visit. By day, she’s stuck in an unfulfilling job at a dry-cleaning shop, barely making the money she needs to get by in the city. She fills her cupboards with sugary junk foods, binge eating and then purging. But the more she struggles to keep food down, the closer she comes to unleashing a monster living just below her skin.

Shapeless is a very artistic film, and it treads very carefully through the territory of portraying social issues through the lens of horror. Almost too carefully. It takes a long time for the monstrous side of Ivy’s condition to show itself. There’s some foreshadowing that there may be more to Ivy’s disorder than most, but a lot of it could be dismissed as simply how she handles her disorder. No two cases are exactly alike, and people develop unique quirks in how they handle their disorders.

For the most part, Shapeless is a very slow build, making sure the audience knows in excruciating detail how unfulfilling Ivy’s life is. A version of “St. James Infirmary Blues” – a hard-luck tale if there ever was one – threads through the film as a sort of motif. The worst renditions of it, intentionally or not, are performed by Ivy herself, her inability to invoke the emotion to effectively sing the blues a sort of parallel to her inability to ask for help. While it’s not apparent she’s turning into a monster until late in the film, it is apparent – if anyone bothered to look – that she’s drowning within herself.

I find my feelings about Shapeless hard to pin down. It doesn’t commit enough to being horror to be effective as a horror film, but it’s not unique enough of a drama to fall back on being a drama. The premise itself is unique, but the execution is very standard. Shapeless is a reasonably well-made film with an important message, but I can’t see that wide of an audience finding it interesting.