Mona (real-life bodybuilder Jacqueline “Jay” Fuchs, once listed as one of the “ten best female bodybuilders in the world”and who was Rosi in Mad Heidi) is fortysomething bodybuilder whose entire life is spent sculpting her body, which means not living or eating like other human beings as she creates a body that holds up to an unreachable ideal. Everyone she meets or knows is someone who does the same, as she’s pushed to try new drugs or avoid certain meals by her manager Kurt (Julian Sands). Her only companion is her cat.

As she gets into the last three months before a competition, she meets a man named Nic (Adam Misík) in the showers. Their quick encounter burrows its way into her subconscious and creates a break in her normally disciplined life.

So much of Body Odyssey feels like its trapped between a world that is trying to place human manifest destiny upon the fragile body and rigors of aging while the environments feel either alien naturescape or future bleak. There are many voices inside Mona, all battling for control, all as she struggles to fight back against time, against a body riddled by decades of steroid abuse, against denial of the very simple pleasure of eating a carb.

This film looks and feels like it’s own world is so much stronger for that. Director Grazia Tricarico has created a place that is at once our existence and then not, a world where someone can hear the voices in the water and then begins to doubt everything; where the only way to reclaim what you want is at times to destroy.

I’ve thought about this movie several times since I’ve seen it and keep reflecting back on the ways it shows liquid and sinew. We may not all want a body like Mona, but we have to consider that she has created something that belongs to her, even in a world where men feel no issue with telling her how they’d like to photograph her or how her image could be co-opted for marketing. They only know her for a fleeting moment; she has had to construct this form for many, many years.