There’s a moment near the end of The Substance, director Coralie Fargeat's latest provocative horror movie, where Sue/Elisabeth is getting ready for a big show. She's looking in the mirror, putting earrings on, and the famous Bernard Herrmann music from Vertigo starts to swell in the background. A little while later she faces an angry crowd, yelling back at them that she’s not a monster; that she’s "still the same person!" And I immediately thought, “Oh shit. This movie is about Kim Novak!”
OK, that may stretching it, but no one is going to tell me it was not at least partly inspired by Kim Novak’s 2014 Academy Awards appearance, and the horrible online reactions to her face, which only emphasized the lose/lose situation older women in the public eye find themselves in. Look old, and you're relegated to the sidelines. Do what you can to look "younger," and you risk a botched job and being called a monster.
In The Substance, Demi Moore stars as Elisabeth Sparkle, an actress-turned-TV celebrity who, after her 50th birthday, is fired from her show, as the network head (played, almost too disgustingly, by Dennis Quaid) deems her too old to host. She receives a mysterious offer to try something called "the Substance," which promises her regained youth, with a catch: she must live one week as her own age, and one week as a younger version, switching back and forth every seven days. Don't make the switch, and bad things will happen.
Bad things happen.
Margaret Qualley plays the youthful version, who deems herself just "Sue." She instantly gets hired for a new version of the show Elisabeth was fired from. That the show, supposedly a monster hit, is, essentially just an exercise show (it brought to mind the ridiculous Aerobisize videos from the early 80's), reducing her stardom to, literally, just her tits and ass, is one of the many ham-fisted details in the film; this is not a subtle movie. But that is not a criticism, per se. I think it's very much by design - everything in it is an off-kilter or exaggerated version of celebrity life, from its version of Hollywood, which consists of seeminly one palm tree-filled street, to billboards that face into apartments and not the city below. Setting The Substance in this bizarro version of L.A. better prepares you for the completely unrealistic way "the Substance" itself works.
This tone can often throw the movie into camp territory, but what saves it from become something you'll do nothing but laugh at are how fiercely Moore and Qualley throw themselves into their roles. This is not a tame horror movie; it is at times really horrific, a result, much of the time, of how committed the two actresses are to just going full throttle into it. More than once I was reminded of Isabelle Adjani's remarkable turn in Possession. This is no holds barred body horror that even Cronenberg could see as going too far. (Along with many Cronengberg films, it also briefly brought to my mind 1989's insane Society).
Yes, The Substance is not subtle, but neither is removing fat from your ass and injecting it in your face. Surgeries and treatments to prolong youth can be gory; the self-inflicted violence some women feel compelled to commit on themselves because society has deemed them no longer fuckable, or sellable, or just...able may not be as horrifying as some of what The Substance shows us, but it can still be pretty damn horrifying, and in the end, you may still just be called a monster by a crowd that once claimed to love you.
In Never Let Go, Halle Berry plays a mother trying to survive in the woods with her young twin sons after an evil has taken over the world, turning everyone into literal monsters. An old family cabin provides shelter, and the family is protected as long as they are inside, or tethered to the house via long ropes tied around their waists.
It becomes clear pretty early on that mom may not be entirely sane, and the fact that only she can see the "demons" haunting the woods gives credence to that. The first half of the movie plays with that notion, but knowing that all of this horror may just be in her mind actually makes the film a tough watch. If she is imagining all of this, then what she is putting her boys through is essentially horrific child abuse, and the question becomes, what is the real horror?
I won't say where the movie lands, but I will say, after what is a pretty shocking twist about three quarters of the way through, it heads in a direction I would have been satisfied with, and then veers off towards an ending that, to me, did not make a lot of sense. Never Let Go has good performances from Berry, and Percy Daggs IV and Anthony B. Jenkins, the young actors playing her sons, and being a movie set in an old cabin in the woods, it has some good scares. But in the end, it just lost me
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