Director: Anna Zlokovic
Year: 2023
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Creature Feature; Body-Horror
Plot:
Taking a job at a high-end fashion designer, the stress of the situation starts to impact a young woman’s life to the point where she notices an odd growth on her body that soon becomes a sentient living being detached from her body that forces her to try to contain before disrupting her life.
Review:
This was an intriguing if somewhat problematic genre effort. When this one works the best is when it manages to bring about the kind of intriguing backstory nature of the whole event and what's happening to her. With the background establishing her job and how that's impacting her life with the various stresses and demands of the profession involving the demeaning boss and her struggles for acceptance, the resulting growth that arrives from the birthmark on her body seems to be a well-done setup to get the creature's appearance out of her body and as a physical form requiring her to constantly have to tranquilize it due to the fear of it escaping. As a result, this setup provides an intriguing set of body-horror aesthetics to play out over the first half with the idea of the creature spouting from a medical condition enhanced by the stress of the situation and turning into a real creation that's handled quite well enough during this setup.
That provides enough of a starting point for the later half to turn into a strong series of encounters later on involving the reveal of what the creature really is. With this setup basing itself on the idea of the growth coming to life and eventually wreaking enough havoc in her life that the impact of the support group becomes necessary to deal with it, that setup offers the kind of setup for a fantastic reveal about what they’re actually about. The wholesale reveal of this and what they’re about to accomplish in the group sets this off on a wild path that becomes immensely creepy and unsettling with the way that turns into a solid identity crisis piece which is full of several great twists that offer up some appealing effects-work, some fine encounters that have some intriguing action, and some rather surprising factors employed here to provide a lot to really like.
There isn’t much to dislike here, but it does have a few minor drawbacks. The main detriment on display is the surprising lack of fear generated here even though the doppelganger version of herself attempts to take over her life. With the presentation of the growth turning into a life-size version of herself, itself only coming into play with the inferred knowledge that the injections actually spurred it into action as there’s no concrete data on this in the film itself, the implication that it has to keep her alive causes this to devolve a lot of the tension potential in the concept as there’s not much of anything happening in this part of the film that’s all that terrifying. Since it just goes through so much of the middle part integrating the growth version of herself into her old life with her friends and work-life trying not to draw attention to itself, this just doesn’t evoke any kind of fear or tension so it can come off quite dull as a result.
The other big drawback here is the inherent lack of explanation for anything happening throughout here. The presence of the spurt itself makes no sense since it just magically appears on her body as if everyone with that condition suddenly produces one which makes no sense how it’s not reported at all even with the idea of the underground support group to try to mask this. As mentioned earlier, how the growth turns into a carbon-copy version of herself is only inferred through the use of the management serum given to her and everyone else in the group but the actual method is a complete mystery, while the finale is immensely underwhelming due to the complete disregard for the type of action presented just before not spawning any kind of investigation and then carrying on far beyond its usefulness including several other factors to try to present its case even though none of it makes any sense. Overall, these are enough to take this down just slightly.
Overview: ***.5/5
A solid if slightly problematic creature feature/body-horror effort, this one manages to be enjoyable enough to rise above a couple of factors that do bring this one down. Those with any interest in the subject matter or are intrigued by the concept will have the most to like here while most others out there turned off by these factors should heed caution.
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