By Keri O’Shea
At its best, horror has a great deal of power to question and probe aspects of modern life. By turning a uniquely distorting eye on social and cultural norms, it can make us reconsider them – or see them in such grotesque and new ways that we can’t thereafter see them as we did formerly. Even if the attempt to do this on-screen isn’t perfect, there is a lot we can pick up along the way; for instance, last year’s Starry Eyes managed an effective, grisly pastiche of the desire for fame and fortune, even if it did so by being literal and visceral rather than subtle or necessarily original. And then there’s Excess Flesh (2015), hailed by many as being ‘this year’s Starry Eyes’, doing for female body image what the earlier film did for the hunger of the Hollywood machine and the people who get consumed along the way. Oh, my. I usually make it a point not to read reviews before writing one of my own because this can unintentionally skew your own thoughts and feelings, but curiosity got the better of me with regards Excess Flesh; I just had to see what others had made of it. I’m therefore surprised to see the majority of viewers hailing it as incisive and much-needed exploration of the body image issue, because in my book, it doesn’t do this successfully at all.
Jennifer (Mary Loveless) and Jill (Bethany Orr) live as flatmates, but they couldn’t be more different. Jennifer is tall, attractive, abrasive and self-centred, pinballing from her glamorous day job in fashion to wild nights out via casual sex and overindulgence. Jill on the other hand is an altogether unlikely friend – mousey, a little overweight, self-reproachful and with a wildly unhealthy attitude to food. She seems to be bulimic, but then sometimes her technicolour yawning seems stress-induced, so it’s not completely clear what’s going on – but suffice to say, she’s clearly unravelling and Jennifer isn’t exactly sympathetic. The tense living situation seems to come to a head where Jennifer promises to keep her hands off a guy called Rob (Wes McGee) for the sake of her friend’s interest in him, but fails to keep her word. Binge-eating macaroni cheese only goes so far, and so an irate Jill flips out and chains Jen to a wall where she (guess what!) torments and tortures her, whilst rejecting the world outside the apartment altogether.
The following paragraph contains a spoiler…
Because, folks, there’s a twist in the tale. I say twist, yet because director Patrick Kennelly decides to do things such as going left-field, ‘breaking the fourth wall’ by showing the Excess Flesh cameras on-screen and then filming trippy interludes which contribute little, it took some serious reflection to even connect the dots and appreciate this fact (and I’m going to take it as a given from here on in, although the fact that some reviewers didn’t seem to get it either would suggest that it’s not just me). Yep, stopping short of the old ‘it was just a dream’ cop-out, Excess Flesh does the other thing, and goes for the ‘it was all in her mind’ cop-out – two bloody tedious, hackneyed ways to wind a film down. Jill and Jen are not in fact two characters but one, see, meaning that everything which happens – all the histrionics, all the relationship drama, all the underwear scenes, even all the bags of Doritos – matter naught. As far as this sort of thing goes, it’s hardly Fight Club, and I feel that Excess Flesh is a particularly weak example of all-in-the-head filmmaking, because the film elects for body (image) horror first and foremost, omitting any further convincing characterisation or subtleties which would make this plot device work. I almost missed it altogether, because I was beaten back by yet another film where someone gets tied to a chair/wall etc. and I found my attention wandering. The all-in-head motif also renders all of the hysterical drama which precedes it null and void because it doesn’t really take place anyway, so the overall sensation I felt was one of being ….yeah, scammed.
As for body image, I thought the film was gearing up to turn its guns on the fashion industry, considering its beginning – how it focuses on a young woman who works in the industry, and with its early scene of a cluster of young women (whom we later find out to be models) discussing issues relating to weight and vanity, but this doesn’t really go very far beyond that. Jennifer’s job role is more or less a moot point, seeing as we only see her within the confines of the apartment. The bar conversation where the models discuss their diets et al is simply an aside which has no bearing on the plot either (except to helpfully point out that thin women are of course evil bitches who hate everyone). In fact, any opportunity to really get beneath the skin of the issues isn’t followed up. What we get instead is a simplistic exploration of eating disorders and dysmorphia via turning food into something repellent. Every mouthful of food consumed during the film is rendered repulsive, and to be fair this is something which is done effectively on its own account, but it’s overused and all in all, a very simple way to approach the topic of eating disorders, when there was adequate space and time to do so much more. In places, I felt angry that we were asked to see a woman who had been through an intense trauma represented again and again as simultaneously volatile, needy and nasty. An eating disorder is so much more than making food ugly, and negative body image is so much more than the sort of shrieking repugnant behaviour we see here.
Some of the criticism I have seen of this film has focused on the fact that it was co-written and directed by a man, and how could a man really get what it’s like for women etc. but I honestly don’t think that’s the issue. It shouldn’t need explaining that men are perfectly capable of writing about/directing films about women, whether on their own or as part of a team, and in innumerable examples within cinema over the past eighty years or so they’ve done so sensitively and cleverly. My problem with Excess Flesh is really more that it’s a wasted opportunity. It opts for an unconvincing narrative before pulling the rug from under our feet altogether. Starry Eyes this ain’t. All in all, Excess Flesh feels it has to push the shock factor to make its points, when its actual point could more than have delivered on the shock factor, had it been explored more elegantly.