[3] Eleven-year-old Toni trains with her brother Jermaine in the boxing gym at the Lincoln Community Center in Cincinnati.

Toni watches a newscaster reporting on “the fits”, stating that city officials are working with the county health department to investigate the cause.

The film then cuts to shots of Toni and the dance team in uniform performing on the stairs, in the gym, the boxing ring, and in the empty pool.

The Fits was funded through grants from the Venice Biennale College-Cinema initiative,[4] which supports "teams of directors and producers to make their first or second micro-budget audio-visual work".

[8] Examples of outbreaks of seizure-like attacks and uncontrollable spasms date back to the Middle Ages, but there are still cases of this occurring today.

In 2007, a group of high school girls in Virginia suffered from "twitching arms and legs" that eventually resolved itself.

Holmer discovered the Cincinnati-based Q Kidz Dance Team on YouTube while she was still working on her pitch for the Venice Biennale College's program.

[11] After receiving, Holmer relocated to Cincinnati and began working with Q Kidz's coach, Marquicia Jones-Wood, and hired her as a producer on the project.

Holmer commented that Hightower had "this amazing power of listening and observing...she was really in tune with her body, in a way that is necessary to play Toni.

"[12] Hightower worked in depth with movement consultant Celia Rowlson-Hall to appear bad at dancing in the beginning of the film.

They were developed in isolation so that the rest of cast only saw the performance on the day that it was filmed in order to create a unique and impactful moment for each girl.

[14] Of the film, Holmer said, “This had the most female department heads and most gender-balanced crew that I’ve ever worked with, and that came directly from the three of us being the key decision-makers and hirers.

The site's critical consensus reads, "As gripping as it is unique, the thrillingly kinetic The Fits marks debuting writer-director Anna Rose Holmer as a singular talent.

[17] Similarly a critic for Variety called it as a "promising debut feature" and all praised it for its "meticulous mood of psychological isolation and beguiling mystery.