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Anna Rose Holmer’s The Fits clocks in at a svelte 72 minutes, but it packs a lot into its short running time. The story centers on Toni, an eleven-year-old Black girl who spends most of her time hanging out at the local community center, where her brother is teaching her how to box. (Toni’s playful, supportive relationship with her brother is one of the highlights of the movie: he seems to be the only person with whom she truly relaxes.)
But although Toni loves boxing with her brother, she seems to exist on the outskirts of the mostly-male world of the boxing gym, and she is drawn by the camaraderie of the Lionesses, an all-girl dance troupe that also practices at the gym.
But soon after Toni joins the troupe, the dancers begin to experience a mysterious ailment which they call “the fits,” which are some sort of cross between a faint and a seizure. (Each girl experiences the malady slightly differently, making a more exact description difficult.)
The adults in the community (who remain only a shadowy distant presence for most of the movie) are alarmed by the fits, and seek a physical explanation: is the community center’s water supply contaminated? But it turns out that the answer is no, the water is fine (after all, the boys who also use the community center haven’t been suffering any fits). No one advances this explanation in the movie, but the viewer is left with the impression that the fits are some sort of psychological contagion - that suffering a fit has become a mark of full belonging for the girls, and that is why these fits continue.
This setup feels like it ought to lead to thematic meditations about the price of belonging, or the lengths to which people will go to belong, or something, and of course in a way it sort of does - it certainly raises the questions - but it doesn’t even gesture at an answer.
But then, how do you come up with some kind of definitive answer about “belonging”? If the price is having a single alarming but basically harmless fit… Well, how high is that price, exactly? The movie doesn’t tell us; it only offers a strange, haunting, ecstatic end, where Toni stands at the bottom of an empty pool and imagines dancing there with all the Lionesses, in perfect unison, in silence.
But although Toni loves boxing with her brother, she seems to exist on the outskirts of the mostly-male world of the boxing gym, and she is drawn by the camaraderie of the Lionesses, an all-girl dance troupe that also practices at the gym.
But soon after Toni joins the troupe, the dancers begin to experience a mysterious ailment which they call “the fits,” which are some sort of cross between a faint and a seizure. (Each girl experiences the malady slightly differently, making a more exact description difficult.)
The adults in the community (who remain only a shadowy distant presence for most of the movie) are alarmed by the fits, and seek a physical explanation: is the community center’s water supply contaminated? But it turns out that the answer is no, the water is fine (after all, the boys who also use the community center haven’t been suffering any fits). No one advances this explanation in the movie, but the viewer is left with the impression that the fits are some sort of psychological contagion - that suffering a fit has become a mark of full belonging for the girls, and that is why these fits continue.
This setup feels like it ought to lead to thematic meditations about the price of belonging, or the lengths to which people will go to belong, or something, and of course in a way it sort of does - it certainly raises the questions - but it doesn’t even gesture at an answer.
But then, how do you come up with some kind of definitive answer about “belonging”? If the price is having a single alarming but basically harmless fit… Well, how high is that price, exactly? The movie doesn’t tell us; it only offers a strange, haunting, ecstatic end, where Toni stands at the bottom of an empty pool and imagines dancing there with all the Lionesses, in perfect unison, in silence.
