Director: Joe Lynch
Stars: Barbara Crampton, Heather Graham, Judah Lewis
Horror royalty Barbara Crampton revisits her Lovecraftian roots in Joe Lynch’s latest genre offering, her casting a deliberate – and welcome – callback to those collaborations with Stuart Gordon from the mid-’80s (Re-Animator, From Beyond). She also takes a producer credit, while the promotional materials eagerly infer this connection to her past work. Here she plays Miskatonic psychiatric professor Dr. Danielle Upton, tasked with getting inside the head of former therapist now patient Dr. Elizabeth Derby (Heather Graham, herself no stranger to the fantastique). When we meet Dr. Derby she is ranting and raving about the need to cremate a body laying bagged and tagged in the hospital morgue, readily suggestive that someone – or something – has designs beyond the mortal coil.
Cue flashbacks. Derby encounters a patient named Asa Waite (Judah Lewis) – a student at Miskatonic – panicked by some malevolent ‘him’. Their session is interrupted by a phone call which triggers violent convulsions in the young lad. Something transformative occurs. Asa’s switch in behaviours smacks of possession, marked by his sudden sexual aggressiveness.
Compelled to follow-up after an explicit sexual fantasy about him, Derby pursues Asa, instead finding his ailing father Ephraim (Bruce Davison) and an ancient book of cryptoid monstrosities (a sequence which furthers the movie’s observations of male lechery).
Consent is a recurring theme in Suitable Flesh. Derby expressly asks for it when working with a patient through some hypnotherapy. Meanwhile, the advances and aggressions she encounters from both generations of Waite men deliberately address a lack of consent and how these interactions are intended to objectify or belittle her. Acts against her autonomy. The waters muddy when she responds to it… enjoys it…
In a move that connects the film to horror darling It Follows, sex seems to convey the possessing entity between Dr. Derby and Asa, bending the meaning of a mind and body connection. Under the influence of this thing, Dr. Derby ‘inherits’ the same sexual aggressiveness and so Suitable Flesh comes to feel like a comment on patriarchal terror of a sexually confident female. Graham, for her part, has a riot of a time with it, while director Joe Lynch gets gleefully eager with the blood and grue. A car’s reversing cam is put to particularly gratuitous use. “Too much?” one character metatextually enquires at one point.
Like horror movies such as Hammer classic Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde before it, Suitable Flesh explores feminine sexuality from an intrinsically male perspective. The inhabiting entity that exudes its carnal interest through Dr. Derby appears to have historically assumed male identities and exhibits an engrained form of chauvinism. Graham taps into this with comedic insight, playing the movie like it’s a frat boy body-swap feature. So cool to have boobs, bro. Yet there’s a hedonistic pansexual vibe, too. On spying Derby’s husband Edward (Jonathon Schaech), the entity gasps, “Nice”, appreciably. So yes, there’s a potentially troubling trans analogy lurking here, but it is remedied – for the most part – by an orgiastic, sex-positive streak that welcomes all-comers (pun intended).
Lynch is no stranger to the B-movie alleyways that crisscross behind the mainstream, responsible for such titles as Wrong Turn 2: Dead End and Salma Hayek Pinault action vehicle Everly. At no point along the way, however, has he really found a crossover hit that’s successfully courted both critical or commercial approval. Suitable Flesh seems unlikely to change that, but he has a better-than-average chance of locating a cult following with this one. In part thanks to its savvy casting choices, in part for its outright horniness; a trait that often encourages the material in question to be viewed ironically or through the lens of camp. It is perhaps this last that has gotten it compared favourably to Malignant.
Suitable Flesh is too dark and (t)horny to be considered camp, however, and that’s to its advantage. Lynch plays up the cinematic language of the erotic thriller, invoking the genre’s ’90s heyday, but co-mingles it with the transgressive inhuman perversities of both body horror and cosmic horror. His tone is strange, and deliberately so, playfully bringing to mind both the aforementioned Stuart Gordon and his contemporary Brian Yuzna (also an exec producer here!). To this viewer, such company is delicious; a hyper-specific throwback that suits Lynch well.
Ultimately budgetary limitations have maybe impacted the movie’s ambitions (though, admittedly, it is based on a short story). It feels, irksomely, as though it would love to spread its wings and indulge itself further, but is confined, sadly, to just a few characters and a handful of locations. As a result Suitable Flesh feels as though it bumps against its own glass ceiling. Crampton fans might also find themselves mildly frustrated that her role is limited in the first two-thirds to vaping surreptitiously around the margins. To those folks I would simply advise; be patient. You’ll get what you came for eventually. Besides, any disappointments in that regard are more than made up for by Graham attacking her leading role(s) with such gusto.
The Lost Highway Hotel 