DVDanger: Excess Flesh

Bound by flesh: Bethany Orr and Mary Loveless in SXSW 2015 Midnighter Excess Flesh, available on VOD now.

When Excess Flesh played at SXSW 2015, it was as a Midnighter, the traditional domain of horror. Yet director Patrick Kennelly is wary of the terror tag. "We've been put in this box," he said, "but if there's horror in this, it's the horror of the self. It's about the horror of consumption."

Excess Flesh charts the devotion and dysfunction between stay-at-home Jill (Bethany Orr) and her roommate, hard-partying model Jennifer (Mary Loveless). Jill is nervous about her weight and looks, and is both drawn to and angered by Jennifer, who can shovel a microwaved burrito dipped in corn chips down her throat and never gain an ounce. Inevitably, something snaps, and that something is Jill's sanity.

More arthouse/psychological/body horror than a riff on Single White Female, Excess Flesh is mostly a two hander, told from Jill's perspective. Orr said she and Loveless saw the pair as "rival antagonists," and the pair workshopped and rehearsed intensely to create the easy adoration and animosity between the characters. Orr said, "I found myself having a lot of character thoughts during the course of shooting. For example, I got really jealous of Mary for several reasons, and that was perfect. It wasn't something that was trying to be created, but at that point we were really in it."

However, as Jill's internal monologue becomes more frantic, the line between 'they' and 'she' breaks down. Orr added, "I don't see it as an external relationship. I see it as a relationship with self. That push and pull that we all have inside of us of how we want to be perceived, and who I probably am but don't want to accept. The worst that I can be, and maybe my deep fear that I am that. I feel that's what's being externalized between Jill and Jennifer."

As Jill's sanity unravels, she becomes an increasingly unreliable narrator. Kennelly said, "I really wanted to blur the idea of what we were seeing. What is real? Who is the real person? Is there a real person?" He also assiduously avoided giving any easy answers for the audience. "We didn't do that thing in Fight Club or a lot of these movies where you jump back in time at the end and it solves the riddle. I didn't want to do that, because probably everything didn't happen in the way that it happened in the movie."

That sense of surreal and cerebral ambiguity clashes with visceral disgust whenever food appears. Mastication replaces evisceration as the source of disgust, with Kennelly's camera capturing every spittle-drenched crumb and unclean filling. When she read the script, Orr said, "I didn't know exactly how it would be shot, but I'm happy with the way it turned out. It is grotesque, but that only brings out the story more."

The ultimate moment of disgust may come when Jill eats a pot of pre-mixed mac and cheese, shown in one single, gruesome, close-up. Kennelly said, "We wanted to see the stuff in real time, to prolong these moments and really put yourself in the head of these characters."

That scene keys into the story's underlying discussion of body image and body dysmorphia among women, and some male directors would avoid this as an issue that is so charged. Orr had those same concerns when she first was shown the script, and researched Kennelly's previous work. She said, "I wanted to be sure that there would be a sensitivity there, and it just so happens that most of the work that Patrick's done has been in theatre, and they've always been female-centric pieces, and that's something that he's very drawn to." Moreover, she's defensive of Kennelly after he faced allegations of misogyny just because he's a male director tackling the subject. "I think that's pretty silly."

For Kennelly, the fact it's a subject that is somewhat alien to his own personal experience is exactly why he wanted to do it. He explained: "To me, one of the great things about doing work is that it's not 'I have a story I want to tell.' To me, it's a learning process. There are questions that I have that I want to explore, and this was the framework, and the ideas of women and identity are things that fascinate me. It was a question of channelling myself through this prism, and in the process I found a lot about, not just this subject, but about myself."

Excess Flesh is on VOD now.

DVDanger returns after SXSW.