It's Time To Go Insane

This is my review of "The Substance."

🚨Spoiler Warning for Speak No Evil (2022), Speak No Evil (2024) and The Substance🚨

If you’ve seen literally a single movie in theaters over the last 12-15 months, there’s a near 100% chance, you’ve seen the trailer for the American remake of Speak No Evil. The original —a Danish horror film about the worst couple you can meet on vacation—came out in 2022, so why exactly we needed a James McAvoy two years later is still unclear to me. Nevertheless, I saw the new one, because I’m a rube and was immensely disappointed.

The original is unrelenting in its horror, more than happy to kill off main characters, hurt anyone you care about and show viewers how sinister things can quickly become. It has its flaws, but you can’t say it doesn’t go for it and put all of its chips on the table, regardless of making its directors or actors look “good.”

The remake, on the other hand, falls into big-budget traps, always taking the easy way out and never going too far so as to alienate its audience. It’s well-made and well-acted and as hollow as these types of movies can get. It’s so scared to lose its own audience that it fights against its predecessor and ultimately falls flat in the process. It’s a well-lit acting exercise instead of a movie.

The new Speak No Evil is far from the only well-marketed and widely-seen horror/thriller with little to say. It’s an epidemic of sorts. The Watchers, Blink Twice, Maxxxine and even Beetlejuice Beetlejuice are so reverential to their own characters and myth-making that they become too precious with what they want to say and end up saying nothing at all.

You can say a lot of things about The Substance, but you can’t say that it doesn’t go for it.

The Substance, magnificently directed by French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat, is a body horror in the vein of David Cronenberg and John Carpenter (and also fellow female French director Julia Ducournau), which feels like a roller-coaster ride but only if the tracks were ripping apart as you sped through its loops. At any second, things can go awry, and yet the directing and cast (Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley and Dennis Quaid) hold everything together.

It’s not a subtle movie, throwing everything in your face from the over-the-top sex appeal of Margaret Qualley to the mish-mash of time periods to the gonzo final act, but it certainly feels more than relevant to an age of social media filters, cosmetic procedures and, of course, Ozempic.

The basic premise is that a fading star finds herself being thrust out of the limelight on her 50th birthday and she comes across a cell-replicating substance that can make her into a younger and better version of herself. As you can guess, things go really well and everyone ends up happy and they all shout hooray as the film fades to black.

The well-handled but ultimately uncomplicated plot is not what makes the movie work, but instead, it’s the purposefully excessive filmmaking that makes it different than everything you’ve seen before. It’s exaggerated to the fullest extent, almost closer to a fairy tale than a run-of-the-mill thriller. And I say … why can’t we do this more often?

The best movies this year are creating (or recreating) worlds that we rarely get to check out. Dune: Part Two and Challengers both feature Zendaya and worlds that we rarely get a chance to dive into. Even though the latter is ostensibly in the real world, it takes us behind the scenes of a culture we rarely get to see behind the curtain of and Luca Guadagnino gets to bust out all of his filmmaking tricks. They’re both masterfully shot despite their obvious differences and feel like fully-formed statements. The same can be said of other favorites of the year: La Chimera, Furiosa, Longlegs and Civil War.

The Substance is saying something, sure. But it cares a lot more about how it’s saying it than a lot of its counterparts normally do. At a certain point, the lesson is learned and the movie’s plot is essentially finished, and then we get the last 20 minutes because we’ve made it this far. Let’s really let the freak flag fly.

I guess what I’m saying here is that The Substance rules. You should see it. But also, you probably shouldn't.