by Michael McCarthy
After watching Project Wolf Hunting yesterday, I decided to watch another movie. And I decided to watch another movie that was supposed to be really strange and genre-bending, The Substance starring Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley, a young actress I don’t think I’d ever seen in anything before. Moore plays a woman who’s extremely famous for doing workout videos. But the network wants to replace her with someone younger. Then she’s offered something called “The Substance,” which can create a second version of you, a younger, more attractive version. And she ends up injecting herself with it. What follows is a biting social commentary about celebrity and aging and who society considers attractive, etc. It’s really. interesting and it really makes you think. For the first hour and a half of this movie, I thought it was a suspense thriller. But then the last 40 minutes it turns into a grotesque horror movie. A lot of people were put off by that. I read a lot of reviews online where people said they loved it up until the last half an hour. My feeling is that it didn’t need to turn into a gross out horror movie but I still enjoyed it when it did.
The movie extremely stylish. It was written and directed by a French woman named Coralie Fargeat. Previously, she directed an episode of the Netflix series Sandman and a movie called Revenge from 2017 that I am planning to watch soon. Her style is really unique. You’ll either love it or hate it. There are lots of extreme close ups and weird camera angles and stuff. But that’s part of what makes it so unique and fascinating. And the movie is also very colorful. Everything from the clothing to the walls tends to be really bright, vivid colors. All in all, I found it to be a very intoxicating film. It truly grabs ahold of your senses and sucks you in. I think that’s why some people were so put off by the last half hour. It’s like you’ve been brainwashed and then the person brainwashing you makes you do something awful. The film has sucked you in so far that when it gets gross and even stranger, it’s kind of dizzying. I don’t know how else to explain it.
This is definitely a movie you’re going to either love or hate. If you don’t like weird movies, this is definitely not a movie for you. But if you do like weird movies, you’re in for a great one.
I should also mention that Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley are fantastic here. At first I didn’t like Qualley because her version of the character, Sue, is such a diva. But you’re supposed to hate her character. But she’s so good in the role, that it kind of makes you hate her personally, too. Or at least that’s what it was doing to me initially. But when I realized, wow, this actress is fantastic at making you hate her and it clicked in my head that that’s how you’re supposed to react to her then I realized she was doing a great job.
Final thought: if nudity offends you, this is not a movie for you. It has a lot of it.
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