Suitable flesh

Year of release : 2023

Run time : 1h39m

Genre : Horror / Suspense

Cast : Heather Graham, Johnathon Schaech

The movie is based on H.P. Lovecraft’s 1937 short story “The thing on the doorstep”.

The movie opens with doctor Upton who is checking a body with a mortician. After, she visits a patient who used to be her friend. The patient asks her if the man she tried to k1ll is dead. And starts telling her an incredible story, as doctor Upton tells her she has paranoid schizophrenic symptoms.

 

Psychiatrist Elizabeth Derby has everything, a successful practice, a perfect husband, until one day, a young man (to me he looked like a teenager) comes to her office seemingly scared, asking for her help, telling her he’s not crazy, and that his father is using his body, meaning his soul enters his body, while his soul goes into his father’s body. As he tells her this, his phone rings, and he eventually answers, as he doesn’t want to, as it’s his father. I don’t understand why did he answer since he knew what would happen, and why didn’t he run away!?

Anyway, the moment he hears what he says to him, he has a seizure, and when he comes out of it, he is changed, acting more sure of himself, and not scared.

Although he’s acting weird, and even sexually abuses her (puts his hand between her legs), she is attracted to him!

Home, she keeps on thinking of him, and when doing the nasty with her hubby, she pictures the guy in his place.

The next day she goes to the address the young man gave her, and finds the old man passed out, with occult books opened in front of him. When she leaves, he cuts her with a knife, and puts it, with her blood, on one of the occult books, which absorbs it.

The young man, Asa, comes back to her office, when she is with a client, and tells her again, his father wants his body, but she thinks it’s sexual in nature. Asa says he’s stealing his life, but she doesn’t understand his meaning.

At night, she receives a call from Asa who is scared, and goes to his place. When she gets there, she wants to help the old man, but Asa won’t let her, and worries about how long the brain lives after the body dies. Asa says that whatever the thing on the floor is, is not his father, it’s the thing which stole his father’s life and now it wants his. Asa also says it always comes in 3,and if the thing is gonna take over his body again, it’s over for him.

As the old man comes back to his senses, he grabs Asa (he is pretty strong for a dying man), and whispers something in his ear, causing his seizure.

The collapses, and Asa comes out of the seizure completely changed.

..And they end up having s3x, next to the body on the floor! While doing so, Asa says the magic words in the foreign language, and they swap bodies. It doesn’t last long, and after a while, Elizabeth brushes it off, thinking she imagined it!

Turns out the man on the floor isn’t dead, and comes back, asking her for help, but the new Asa stabs him in the neck.

Elizabeth runs away, and talks to her friend, doctor Upton, who gives her the psychobabble talk, as she thinks it’s all a metaphor for what she goes through.

Elizabeth goes home, and finds the police there, who give her the phone back (the phone Asa threw out the window), and she tells her hubby she cheated. She goes to her office, and plans to throw herself off the window when it starts happening again. But she has an erotic dream about Asa.

Going back home, willing to do whatever it takes to patch things up with hubby, the body swap happens again, while she’s taking a shower. The new Asa ties himself to a pole in his basement, so she won’t be able to run away. And calls her, saying those foreign words again. Asa, in her body, has rough s3x with her husband, and when the police come, hits on the female cop.

Elizabeth realizes everything Asa told her is real, and decides to k1ll “Asa” in order to keep her body.

I personally enjoyed the movie. One thing that I didn’t get, and bother me, was, this entity, in my opinion a demon, is taking people’s bodies once it cut them, so it got their blood, but in the beginning it could only work if it said something in an unknown language to them, but at the end, it didn’t matter that they weren’t in the same room, and didn’t hear it, to trigger the swap. How did it even work?!

At first I thought it wanted the younger body because it had an old body, but it seemed it just swapped bodies like crazy, it only used them for a little while. The entity was supposed to be ancient, at this pace, it would have gone through the entire humanity! It would have made more sense if it just wanted a new body, like in “The skeleton Key”.

Whenever this change happens, the entity can’t use one hand. That’s the give away.

I liked how it was directed (it reminded me of the Brian de Palma movies), the colors, the places they filmed at, the costumes. The only thing I didn’t like were the visual and sound effects they put when the characters were swapping bodies, probably to show us how unnerving and disturbing it was.

I loved the acting, especially from the leads (like Judah Lewis, Heather Graham and Bruce Davison), having to play the possessed, as they had to play “more characters”.

The visual effects were good.

The soundtrack was good.

The movie received mostly positive critics reviews, with a 84% score on Rotten Tomatoes , and a 64 Metacritic score; and a 61% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, and a 5.8 user score on Metacritic.

Viewer discretion is advised, as the movie contains mature content.

You can watch the full movie for free, if you follow this link :

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x9t6sbq

Rating : Worth a watch !