The Substance

9/20/2024

The Substance delivers an intense, visually mesmerizing commentary on the entertainment industry's obsession with youth and outward beauty. Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley offer remarkable, maybe even career-best performances, with Dennis Quaid excelling in his role as well. Coralie Fargeat explores how aging stars, particularly women, are discarded when they no longer meet the industry's strict beauty standards. Moore's character, haunted by the memory of her former fame and beauty, goes down a dark path in pursuit of a "better" version of herself. The story is also a sharp critique of power dynamics, with white men controlling who's in front of the spotlight, while women are pitted against one another for validation. The film's production is equally impressive, especially the makeup a

9/23/2024

For a film that’s laser-focused on the human body, it’s gloriously on point that THE SUBSTANCE begins with a freshly cracked, bright yellow egg yolk. Eggs are the ‘giver of life’, right? They’re the origin of all of us. Gleaming and plump, the yolk suddenly gets pricked – not by a fork, but a syringe. That’s the first juicy visual metaphor of many in this meaningfully bonkers body horror, for which French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat picked up the prestigious Best Screenplay prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. To call the film ‘bold’ is a weapons-grade understatement. It’s an audacious, jaw-dropping examination of what screens & billboards demand of women (especially as they age), and how laughably impossible it is to meet those demands. Well, if you didn’t laugh, you’d cry.

9/26/2024

Demi Moore's performance in The Substance is so potent that it's hard to tell what's more intoxicating; her inevitable Best Actress win or Coralie Fargeat's razor-sharp screenplay that's already got the Oscar in the bag.

9/28/2024

There’s a big difference between being funny and being laughable, yet the latest from writer-director Coralie Fargeat has somehow found a way to be both. After amassing a considerable amount of largely well-earned cinematic goodwill in the film’s opening segments, the picture mercilessly squanders that support in the final act with an overlong, meandering, disgustingly gratuitous and grotesque exhibition of utterly bad taste. This story of an aging actress (Demi Moore) who seeks to revive her career by retrieving some of her lost youth with the aid of an enigmatic injectable follows her grand misadventures when the mysterious substance prompts the emergence of a younger doppelganger (Margaret Qualley), who becomes a Hollywood sex kitten sensation virtually overnight. To make this experimen

9/28/2024

This takes a logical step on from Coralie Fargeat's earlier "Reality+" (2014) drama, only this time it takes a much more substantial swipe at all things vain. "Elisabeth" (Demi Moore) has been at the top of her fitness game for many a year when her boss "Harvey" (Dennis Quaid) decides that she's now too old and that a younger model is needed to present those programmes we all saw on the television of gorgeous, fit and healthy, people showing us how to exercise on a mat in from of our televisions each morning. Distracted by her imminent removal, she is involved in a car accident that introduces her to an handsome young nurse (Robin Grear) and then to a curious invitation to test out a mysterious fluid that can essentially give her her cake and eat it. In best "Jekyll and Hyde" tradition, in

10/10/2024

Certainly an experience! <em>'The Substance'</em> is <b>a lot</b>. It's one of those sorta movies that I needed to let settle in my mind before I even started to think about reviewing it. I'm not even sure where to start. It's insane from pretty much the beginning to the very end of its 140 minute run time, some scenes are particularly rough to watch unfold! I think the only body horror flick I've seen up until this point is David Cronenberg's <em>'Crimes of the Future'</em> from 2022, which I found to be solid enough but it came across, at least to me, as a bit too forced for shock value. This 2024 release has plenty of that, if not more, but it somehow feels totally at home with what surrounds it. The story itself is fascinating, even taking out all the craziness with the gore e