Curator Watchlist
A glossy, viciously funny camp fantasy with standout star turns and still-impressive practical effects. It’s especially rewarding if you like dark satire about beauty, vanity, aging, and bodies that refuse to behave.
Where to watch: Buy
Thu · 1h 44m
Director: Robert Zemeckis
Starring: Meryl Streep, Goldie Hawn, Bruce Willis
Madeline is married to Ernest, who was once her arch-rival Helen's fiancé. After recovering from a mental breakdown, Helen vows to kill Madeline and steal back Ernest. Unfortunately for everyone, the introduction of a magic potion causes things to be a great deal more complicated than a mere murder plot.
Robert Zemeckis
Meryl Streep, Goldie Hawn, Bruce Willis
A glossy, viciously funny camp fantasy with standout star turns and still-impressive practical effects. It’s especially rewarding if you like dark satire about beauty, vanity, aging, and bodies that refuse to behave.
Death Becomes Her is a gleefully nasty studio comedy that treats vanity like a supernatural curse. Robert Zemeckis stages the whole thing with a cartoonish confidence, letting the movie swing between glossy Hollywood satire, murder-mystery farce, and outright body horror without losing its sense of play. The effects are still the big surprise: the film’s visual tricks are so inventive that they become part of the joke, not just the punchline.
Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn lean all the way into the material, making the rivalry feel both absurd and weirdly plausible. Bruce Willis, meanwhile, is perfectly cast as the exhausted man caught between two women who have turned eternal youth into a war crime. The movie is knowingly excessive, sometimes messy, and occasionally mean, but that’s also why it works: it understands that beauty obsession is already a horror story.
What has made it endure is the combination of camp, cruelty, and craft. It’s a movie that wants to be admired and laughed at at the same time, and it succeeds because it never apologizes for either impulse. If you like your comedies poisonous and your fantasy a little repulsive, this is a very easy yes.
Jay (4★) · 12523 likes
this film is looking camp right in the eye
Willow Maclay (4.5★) · 10602 likes
"Flaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaacid"
Tess (5★) · 8569 likes
"Could you just not breathe?"
james💫 (4.5★) · 7197 likes
idk how to explain it but this was made for gay people
júlia (4.5★) · 6318 likes
they worked it out on the remix
A glossy mainstream comedy that shares the same taste for macabre wit, family dysfunction, and high-camp performance.
Even sharper and more openly queer in its comic sensibility, with the same love of deadpan cruelty and theatrical excess.
A pitch-black suburban satire about feminine performance, violence, and social masks, with a similarly gleeful mean streak.
Another glossy, adult-oriented fantasy about desire, vanity, and women weaponizing their social power.
A cult-friendly blend of camp, witchy fantasy, and broad comic villainy that pairs well with the film’s playful tone.
Essential camp cinema with theatrical excess, body transformation, and a cult audience that loves the same kind of outrageousness.
A sharp satire of ambition and image-obsession, with a cold comic edge and a fascination with media performance.
A glossy, poisonous comedy about beauty, status, and female social warfare that shares the same acidic energy.
A tightly controlled farce where escalating chaos and cruel comic timing drive the whole experience.
A polished mainstream comedy built on performance, identity, and heightened theatricality, with strong queer appeal.
A darkly comic takedown of social cruelty and status games, with a similar blend of style, bite, and morbidity.
A classic horror-comedy that balances genre parody, physical gags, and affectionate visual craftsmanship.
vanity, aging, beauty obsession, female rivalry, immortality, body horror, dark satire, camp
camp, dark comedy, body horror, fantasy, satire, immortality, beauty standards, practical effects, female rivalry, 1990s