SUITABLE FLESH - Mark Reviews Movies

Suitable Flesh, RLJE Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 26, 2023

Suitable Flesh is ultimately more an exercise in style than a convincing horror tale about some otherworldly force inhabiting human bodies. Here, director Joe Lynch approaches the material like a movie that might have existed around the time of the progenitor of its source material.

It's based on a 1937 short story by H.P. Lovecraft, and in terms of that approach, it's a broad melodrama with a few old-school techniques and theatrical performances that play to the balcony. Apart from the obvious fact that it's set in the modern day, the main distinction, perhaps, is that the sex and violence on display in Lynch's movie would never have passed through any studio of that older era.

The sense of that style overwhelms everything else here, unfortunately. It leaves us with an empty feeling, because everything is played at such a high pitch of intensity from the start that there's really nowhere for that tone to go. There's also no way for the psychological/supernatural stakes of the story to escalate, except for it all to go even further over the top than seems like a good idea.

The plot focuses on Elizabeth Derby (Heather Graham), a practicing psychiatrist and academic who literally wrote the book on the topic that will come into play here. We first meet her in confinement in the psychiatric wing of a hospital, being tended to by fellow psychiatrist and friend Daniella (Barbara Crampton). Elizabeth is apparently responsible for the death of one of her patients. She denies responsibility, and a quick trip to the morgue reveals that said death was quite brutal. When we actually see it later, that feels like an understatement.

Some time before this, though, Elizabeth has a seemingly perfect life. She has her practice, although it's mostly routine stuff with which she's dealing. She's married to the handsome and supportive Edward (Jonathon Schaech), whose primary shortcoming is that he isn't the most passionate lover.

Then, Asa (Judah Lewis), a college student, knocks on Elizabeth's office door. Over the course of this lengthy flashback that seems mostly for the audience's benefit (It's certainly not for Daniella, who is hearing Elizabeth's story, was there for a few significant parts of it, and has the pressing issue of the demolished body in the morgue with which to deal), things go terribly wrong. Soon, they become worse, simply because Elizabeth finds Asa's story about having mysterious out-of-body experiences fascinating and, for some apparent reason, finds his personality shift into a sexually aggressive guy to be attractive.

One has to get on this story's wavelength quickly, lest even the most basic elements of its plotting and characterizations fall apart to an assortment of questions. That's the inherent strength, perhaps, of Lynch's hyper-stylized tactics in telling this tale, as we get iris focuses and dissolves that were once so common but now mostly signal that a director wants us to think of an older type of movie. We don't need too much of that calling card, since everyone who's eventually taken over by this mysterious presence plays the possession with a sarcastic, sinister snarl.

We know, in other words, that there's a certain in-the-know-joke quality to the material, because Lynch and screenwriter Dennis Paoli know it could be perceived as kind of silly—the notion that some ageless and time-transcending demon would spends centuries or millennia occupying various human bodies for some sick thrills. How much of that, though, is the source material, and how much of it is the fact that the filmmakers just want it to be ridiculous in terms of its armchair psychology, its supposedly taboo-pushing (but fairly tame, to be honest) sexual content, and its occasional eruptions of grisly violence?

Maybe the real problem isn't the abundance of distracting style. Perhaps it's simply that Lynch doesn't want to take this material seriously in any way and for whatever reason.

The gag that this is meant to be seen as some kind of subversion of an old-fashioned melodrama only goes so far. That's especially so when those subversions amount to a spinning sex scene, a gruesomely sound-designed decapitation, and bodies—or just parts of them—coming back to life after what's surely fatal damage to them.

The horror elements, which seem to be of secondary concern to the filmmakers, are undercut because of that tone, particularly during a climactic showdown that involves the unseen corpse from the opening and more game-like body-swapping than seems necessary for the entity's goals. As for the characters, is there really any way to care about how a bunch of barely archetypical figures are overtaken or manipulated by a seemingly all-powerful entity from another dimension, when the results are played as a game or a demented joke?

There are certainly things to appreciate here, from Lynch's full embrace of the hyper-stylization at every level of the filmmaking to the fun Graham has with her dual roles as the quiet, guilt-ridden shrink and the hedonistic, amoral entity. Suitable Flesh, though, puts a thick coat of self-imposed irony on the proceedings, preventing us from seeing the supposed horror at their core.

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