The Substance, France/U.K./USA 2024. Written and directed by Coralie Fargeat.
Bambi Theater, Row 1, Seat 5. Original version.
(This post also appears at my Letterboxd account.)
This movie got immense accolades from viewers and critics, won “Best Screenplay” at Cannes, and pretty much killed it at the box office. Thus, take my review with a grain of salt. I’m apparently an outlier here by thinking the movie is terrible. Also, mind that I’m in no way out for convincing anyone of anything—if you enjoyed the movie, that’s perfectly fine!
And with that, let’s go.
The cinematography of Coralie Fargeat’s 2024 The Substance feels to me as entertaining as flipping through a slick upmarket lifestyle photography magazine for two and a half hours while waiting for the doctor to return from a home visit which, somehow, must be even worse than the emergency patients already stacking the waiting room whose projectile expulsions of blood from terrible injuries intermittently spray over the pages I’m skimming through.
Just like in a slick upmarket lifestyle magazine, there is not one single unpredictable or surprising dramatic event in the entire movie*. And while these plot points, and also everything less predictable that happens in between, are always perfectly obvious, they are invariably accompanied by helpful texts, props, or dialogues to hit you over the head with blunt explanations in case you happen to have freshly arrived on this planet.
The music is not bad, not at all. But in the context of the movie, it too comes across as a kind of upmarket chic that’s piggybacking on scores like Levi’s from Glazer’s Under the Skin, in the same way that Kračun’s equally not-bad-at-all upmarket chic cinematography rides piggyback on Kubrickian lenses, set designs, and symmetries. (And in case you somehow fail to notice the latter, Strauss’s »Also sprach Zarathustra« is there to scream it with drill sergeant subtlety into your ear.) Same with the actors—great performances, but the characters they play are glossy appearances and not characters at all.
Then, the screenplay. It’s camp horror. The first reason why it’s camp horror is that in a horror screenplay that isn’t camp horror, there is one outlandish premise, and everything else that does not develop organically from that premise is as realistic—and therewith relatable—as possible. Here, we have the most outlandish premise alright, but then, just like in camp horror, the most logically incohesive unrealistic things happen all the time and in such numbers that they soon begin to trip over each other. The second reason why it’s camp horror is that in a horror screenplay that isn’t camp horror, deformations and blood & gore are horrific because they go hand in hand with emotional involvement (positively or negatively, doesn’t matter). Here, just like in camp horror, every deformation and every blood & gore scene happens for its own sake, in over-the-top fashion, and in scrupulously unsurprising ways. Is the blood firehose finale comedy or horror? Hard to tell. But whatever it is, I was more hilariously entertained by the “party’s over!” lawnmower scene from Jackson’s Braindead and more emotionally engaged by the prom scene from De Palma’s Carrie. That firehose finale did absolutely nothing for me.
Finally, don’t get me started on the movie’s purported feminist theme. Sure, all the men are raging assholes and all the women are brainwashed into eagerly meeting their expectations, which, yeah, is certainly sexism and bad. However, on the one hand, that’s so basic that we don’t need a movie to tell us, and, on the other hand, if sexism were really that simple, it wouldn’t be such a devastating and persistent societal scourge.
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* To be fair, there’s one single scene that is dramaturgically sound, the encounter with the other substance customer at the café. But even that is explained to death (flashback, deposit box card, dialogue); has no consequences whatsoever; and in the end is itself degraded to just another explanation of what’s going on instead of, say, serving as a punchy midpoint.
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