Flesh Impact gives us the intriguing prospect of seeing Marilyn Monroe aged 100, as well as Dakota Johnson donning a platinum blonde wig and beauty spot as the star shortly before she died.

Written and directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, this new short film – running at just 22 minutes – looks to offer insight into the woman behind the iconic persona, and behind her beauty, at different life stages.

Screening at Venice Film Festival, it stars The Exorcist actress Ellen Burstyn, 93, as the centenarian Monroe, alongside Johnson, Gyllenhaal’s husband and frequent collaborator, Peter Sarsgaard, and The Pitt’s Sepideh Moafi.

Flesh Impact already made headlines with its first-look image released in July of Johnson, whom many didn’t recognise while others claimed her transformation into the Some Like it Hot star was less than convincing.

Since then, Gyllenhaal has revealed she experimented with mapping Monroe’s face onto Johnson’s with AI and Burstyn has recalled her real-life encounter with the Hollywood icon.

… But how was the movie?

My honest review of Flesh Impact

Let’s get this out the way first – Flesh Impact is actually an advert, seeing as it was commissioned and ‘presented’ by car brand Genesis, in order to celebrate Monroe’s centenary.

To fulfil this brief, it opens on Burstyn’s Monroe in 2026 driving a sleek new electric SUV from the company, trailing her hand out the rolled-down window before pulling up alongside  the pavement and – with a little electrical sleight of hand – plugging it into the streetlight to charge.

While it’s a less-than-elegant shoehorning in of product placement, there’s also an undeniable fascination to seeing a star who died in 1962 alongside the technology of over 60 years’ later.

Ellen Burstyn is completely luminous

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Burstyn’s Monroe then bustles into the theatre to audition – unrecognised with her cane and the cloak of old age, and going with the name ‘Jane Doe’ after introducing herself by her birthname, ‘Norma’, and mentioning a few previous surnames like ‘DiMaggio’ and ‘Miller’.

However, she still has a piece prepared for a 25-year-old character. While pointedly mentioning she’s ‘a bit mature’ for the role, the director (Sarsgaard) and his associate (Moafi) then relent and allow her the chance to perform, although cruelly because ‘it might be funny’.

Cue Burstyn beginning a meandering monologue that covers her lonely childhood in and out of orphanages, being blamed for the death of co-star Clark Gable and the Billy Wilder quote that gives the film its name: he said it felt like people could reach out and touch her.

It’s an intensely theatrical set-up, almost too artificial to ignore – and yet Burstyn completely captures your attention with her spirit. She looks completely luminous too as Monroe, now-white hair still carefully coiffed, beauty spot on cheek and an immaculate outfit of pencil skirt, monogrammed blouse and white heels (which she takes off to act).

Now 100, Monroe must command with her acting talent to be noticed – skills she felt were never truly appreciated in her youth, having claimed renowned acting coach Lee Strasberg said she was ‘as good as Brando’. It’s not a subtle message, that age has eclipsed beauty – which is all Monroe was ever made to feel she could offer – but Burstyn nails it.

Throughout her speech, we are thrown back to earlier points in Monroe’s life as well, where Materialists actress Johnson appears – either to stride through the 20th Century Fox backlot in a negligee as part of Monroe’s rebellion against studio head Darryl F. Zanuck or to offer her Blanche DuBois from A Streetcar Named Desire in the bathtub.

Dakota Johnson has captured some of that famous essence

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Johnson doesn’t really look or sound like Monroe, but it doesn’t really matter because – like Burstyn – there’s a fitting quality to her performance that’s captured some of that famous essence, and the well-documented vulnerability. But there’s nothing that beats the kick out of seeing Burstyn at an age Monroe never made, certainly for a classic Hollywood nerd like me.

I would have happily lapped up the feature-length version for a more immersive take on what could have been for Norma Jeane.

What have the cast said about the film?

At the Venice Film Festival on Monday, ahead of the film’s public screening, Burstyn recalled her real-life encounter with Marilyn Monroe in a nightclub, explaining how it had informed her approach to playing her in Flesh Impact.

‘She was sitting across from me. And of course I was enchanted by just looking at her. She was such a magical creature,’ the Oscar winner told Metro and other press, ahead of receiving her Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement from the festival.

‘Then she looked at me and nodded at me. I was very early in my career and I thought, was I just recognised by Marilyn Monroe? And I was; I carried that in my heart forever.’

Burstyn, who trained under Lee Strasberg at The Actors Studio in New York like Monroe, said that this meeting – and also sharing the same masseur, Ralph Richards – helped with her performance as the star.

‘He had been Marylin’s masseur and, not only that, but her confidant. So I used to get my massages on the massage table and hear Marilyn stories.’

Her favourite, Burstyn shared, was that Monroe’s ‘whole persona was a construction, that that wasn’t the way she was at all’.

‘I said to Ralph, “Well, what was she like in person?” and he said, “She was like you.” He said she could get on an aeroplane with a scarf over her head and no makeup and nobody would pay any attention to her.’

He also told Burstyn of watching Monroe engage the famous façade after they were walking down a street in Beverley Hills, causing no fuss.

‘All of a sudden all the cars started honking their horns and calling “Marylin!” and [they] had to duck around a corner. And [he] said to her, “Did you do that on purpose?” And she said, “Yeah. I just felt like being Marilyn Monroe for a minute.”’

Meanwhile filmmaker Gyllenhaal explained how the commissioners of the short had asked her to use AI, having used ‘licensable AI, training it off of Marilyn Monroe films that we had licensed’.

‘I went for it. I was like, all right, I’m curious, I don’t know, let’s see,’ she explained during Venice Film Festival.

‘The idea was that we trained it on her, we then put her face on Dakota’s face. We worked hard at it, and in the end, I threw it away because what was coming through Dakota playing Marilyn Monroe was so much more moving, human, alive,’ she revealed, per Variety.

However, Gyllenhaal decided that it ‘fundamentally did not work’

‘All the reasons we decided to make this project to begin with were killed off in the AI version,’ she added.

Flesh Impact premiered at the Venice Film Festival on Monday, September 7. A release date is yet to be confirmed.

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