Thinestra made its World Premiere on June 20, 2025, at the 33rd Raindance Film Festival in London — the UK's largest independent film festival and one of Variety's top 50 unmissable film festivals in the world, with a history that includes the UK debuts of Pulp Fiction and Memento.
Directed by Nathan Hertz and written by Avra Fox-Lerner, the 87-minute body horror film stars Michelle as Penny — a Los Angeles photo retoucher whose quiet war with her own body image leads her to take a mysterious weight-loss drug called Thinestra, with grotesque and devastating consequences. Michelle's real-life twin sister Melissa plays Penelope, the monstrous doppelgänger Penny literally births — a casting choice that brought an eerie, unmanufacturable authenticity to the film's central horror.
Critics responded strongly. Horror DNA called it a film with a "phenomenal lead performance and enticing, often sumptuous visuals," while Flickering Myth praised both sisters as "excellent in their respective roles," noting the film's skill in capturing the internal horror of self-image. The Movie Waffler highlighted Michelle's ability to portray a deeply relatable insecurity — crediting the film with treating its subject with a seriousness rarely seen in the genre.
While comparisons to The Substance were inevitable, critics consistently noted that Thinestra carves its own space — leaner, more tragic, and more squarely on its protagonist's side. The Raindance premiere launched the film onto the international festival circuit, leading to a screening at Sitges Film Festival in Spain and the Vortex Award for Best Sci-Fi/Horror at the Rhode Island International Film Festival.
