At some point in the last decade or so the movie-discussers really latched onto the term “body horror.” They kinda act like if you can identify a movie as body horror that means it’s legit. But also when they say it they almost always mean one thing: it has some David Cronenberg-inspired New Flesh type stuff at some point. I kinda wonder how many of the people comparing any vaguely misshapen flesh to Cronenberg bothered to see his last movie, but I suppose that’s irrelevant.
THE SUBSTANCE definitely fits the category, and there are reasons to compare it to Cronenberg, but tonally, I gotta say, this is way more Frank Henenlotter and Brian Yuzna. Picture a movie that’s a descendent of SOCIETY and the BASKET CASE trilogy and makes you wonder what Screaming Mad George is up to these days, but that also boasts an acclaimed lead performance by Demi Moore, won Best Screenplay at Cannes and is distributed by MUBI. That’s what THE SUBSTANCE is.
For me it was a must-see because it’s movie #2 from Coralie Fargeat, writer/director of REVENGE (2017). It sucks that it took her 7 years to do another feature (with only the serial killer convention episode of The Sandman in between), but thankfully she struts into her delayed sophomore outing like she has diplomatic immunity. She brings along her stylish design, blood-smeared rich people homes and mythic battles between beautiful women with star-shaped earrings and awful men, but this time in a sci-fi vein and much broader, sillier and more indulgent. I’m not sure if I would’ve noticed it was 141 minutes if I didn’t know it going in, but I love Fargeat’s dedication to overdoing absolutely everything, beginning with its narratively redundant (but all the more beautiful for it) time lapse sequence about the lifespan of a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. (read the rest of this shit…)
