Demi Moore in The Substance
THE SUBSTANCE
No matter the season, we can always stand to have more movies like writer/director Coralie Fargeat's The Substance in area release. I don't necessarily mean more movies that win Cannes Film Festival prizes (Fargeat's nabbed one for its screenplay), or routinely feature Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley fully naked, or boast more blood and squishy viscera than the collective filmographies of David and Brandon Cronenberg. There would no doubt be passionate fan bases for all three sub-genres. What I believe we truly need in our cinematic diets are more works that inspire, and maybe even incite, passionate argument and debate – works such as Fargeat's queasy body-horror comedy about aging, addiction, the fickleness of show business, and other themes presented, sometimes admirably, with almost no subtlety whatsoever. Fargeat's is one of those movies that tends to be tagged with “You'll either love it or hate it,” and depending on the source, The Substance was either one of the best or worst titles to debut at Cannes this past spring. For my part, I found it fairly easy to meet the film somewhere in the middle. I'm cheered, however, in knowing that the reactions of others aren't so wishy-washy. Heaven knows we need more cineplex options to be passionate about, even if that passion is inseparable from loathing.
With its narrative, in rough outline, reminiscent of a Charlie Kaufman fun house in which impossibilities are treated with matter-of-fact normalcy, The Substance casts Moore as Hollywood fixture Elisabeth Sparkle. An Oscar winner whose career path, à la Jane Fonda's in the '80s, led to her becoming a celebrity fitness guru, Elisabeth has spent apparent decades as the beloved host of a popular workout program for morning television. But as she learns from the network head (Dennis Quaid) – a Tinseltown titan so abjectly repellent that he's inevitably named Harvey – her days on Sparkle Your Life with Elisabeth are numbered, given that the woman has committed the unpardonable sin of turning 50. Elisabeth is promptly handed her walking papers, and upon witnessing the mortifying sight of her Los Angeles billboard being torn down, she just as quickly gets into a violent car accident. But there might be an upside to her hospital visit, because it's there that an attendant, sensing Elisabeth's needs, surreptitiously hands the fading star information on “The Substance” – a black-market serum guaranteed to tun users into younger, more beautiful versions of themselves.
Up to this point, French auteur Fargeat's sophomore feature – her first was the 2017 revenge thriller justifiably titled Revenge – is deliberately overripe yet hardly unreal, at least depending on your tolerance for Dennis Quaid acting to the rafters and beyond. (He's clearly delivering the blunt, nauseating performance Fargeat wants; whether it's anything we want is another matter.) True, the film's interiors, particularly the hallways and bathrooms, tend to resemble locales from The Shining's Overlook Hotel. But Elisabeth's home-workout show looks like a legitimate home-workout show, and the beaming Elisabeth looks like that type of program's ideal host, and the radiant, 61-year-old Demi Moore is entirely convincing as an aging starlet whose professional courtesy and friendliness are barely disguising her escalating panic, insecurity, and self-loathing. Even though Elisabeth is rich, successful, and gorgeous, Moore deconstructs the character's inner frailty so exquisitely that you completely understand why she'd take a chance on reclaiming everything she feels she's lost by becoming a new form of herself. It's doubtful, though, that she imagined the process would be so painful. Or so gross.
Upon ingesting the Substance, you see, Elisabeth doesn't merely shape-shift into another being werewolf-style. She literally births another being – through a tremendous rip in her back, no less – while shrieking in agony, the older woman falling unconscious as a younger woman (Qualley), one who will assume an identity as “Sue,” effectively takes her place. Although the actors themselves look nothing alike, one of the trickier successes in Qualley's portrayal is her ability to convince us that Sue isn't someone else: She's still Elisabeth, only now viewing the world through the eyes of an “upgraded” replacement. However, in order for this physiological miracle to continue, there are, as the Substance's instructions state, a few ground rules. Every seven days, Elisabeth and Sue must switch circumstances, meaning that Elisabeth can be her younger version for a week but must then be the older version the following week. (When one of them is “awake,” the other remains hidden, nude and lifeless, in the bathroom.) Every single day, “stabilizer” fluid from the unconscious version must be injected into the conscious version, but again, never for more than seven days in a row. And the third rule, as the instructions routinely remind Elisabeth, is that she can never forget that she and Sue are not separate entities – they are a single person, and whatever damage is inflicted on one portion affects the whole. As you might imagine, The Substance, just like Gremlins, proceeds to demonstrate what happens when its three golden rules are violated.
Despite the ingenuity of Fargeat's premise, you might find yourself off-put, as I occasionally was, by the writer/director's undisguised blatancy. It's not enough that every significant male character, with one notable exception, is a leering, sexist creep – and the exception is a bit of a creep in his own way. These men are oftentimes shot, by cinematographer Benjamin Kracun, through a destabilizing fish-eye lens that shoves their irredeemable awfulness in our faces. (Quaid's Harvey also can't eat without slurping and spitting and making you want to fast for a month.) It's not enough for Fargeat to satirize “the male gaze” through porn-y pans of Sue's body when she begins hosting Pump It Up with Sue; she repeats this visual strategy, even when Sue is out of the studio, relentlessly, and for such long stretches that you almost lose track of the plot. There were more than a few sequences in which I felt like screaming “We get it already!” But even if I did, I'm not sure anyone would've heard me through the deafening techno that punctuates – more specifically overwhelms – the action at pivotal points. And by the time the gore reached its apex toward the finale, I was so inured to images of gooey entrails and geysers of blood that I found myself yawning. Moore and Qualley deserve all props for what they must have endured on set, yet I don't know why their discomfort had to result in such frequent punishment for viewers.
That being said, there was much of The Substance that I relished, beginning with Fargeat's faith that audiences will accept her fantastical situation as a given and not get bogged down with logistics. (Among the pedantic questions never answered are “Why doesn't 20-something Sue look anything like 20-something Demi Moore?” and “Does Elisabeth even have to pay for this service?”, as no mention is ever made of cash or credit-card transactions.) Until the effects become over-used, the outlandish gore on display is most often genuinely funny and always effectively rendered. I truly admired how Fargeat linked Elisabeth's and Sue's mutual devotion to the Substance to drug and alcohol addiction – Sue being the part of Elisabeth enjoying the highs while the older woman suffered the blackouts and withdrawals. Additionally, it was both pathetic and strangely moving that, having been granted this miraculous opportunity for rejuvenated youth, Sue was determined not to start her life over, but to go back to hosting the same tired TV show for the same hateful bosses. She's essentially choosing to damn herself to a life of degradation – but this time, with a perkier smile and tighter posterior.
Moore, meanwhile, is granted an extraordinary sequence in which Elisabeth nervously prepares for a date with the one kind man in her life; it's like a more ravaged take on Glenn Close's wiping-off-the-makeup finale in Dangerous Liaisons, and features probably the finest, most heart-wrenching acting of Moore's career. And even when Fargeat's film disappoints or irritates or downright angers you, there's likely to be something startling and inventive and hilarious just around the bend. (There's maybe no current form of praise higher than “I had no idea what was going to happen next.”) As a whole, after one viewing, I guess I'm still on the fence about The Substance. Yet even though I didn't wholly enjoy the film, I can't freaking wait to see it again.
NEVER LET GO
Directed by horror mainstay Alexandre Aja, Never Let Go is a post-apocalyptic thriller in which Halle Berry's character, a single parent referred to only as “Momma,” raises her fraternal twins Nolan and Samuel (Percy Daggs IV and Anthony B. Jenkins) in a remote, woodland farmhouse, desperate to keep them safe from the monsters that exist just beyond their front door. As compact fright-flick premises go, this one was pretty decent. But not long into the movie, something dawned on me: Didn't I just see this movie, only with Nicolas Cage in the Halle Berry role? Unable to recall its title or particulars, that thought gnawed at me through the remainder of my screening, and it turned out that yes, I did. It was director Benjamin Brewer's Arcadian, and it debuted this past April, and it was set in a post-apocalyptic world in which Cage's single parent, in his remote, woodland farmhouse, had to protect his sons from monsters that existed just beyond their front door. The kids were even fraternal twins! Five months seems a little soon for a reboot, but Never Let Go does differ from Arcadian is at least two regards. In Brewer's film, daylight theoretically kept everyone safe; now, also theoretically, clinging to a rope tethered to the house keeps everyone safe. And while the monsters in Arcadian were shriekingly literal, the ones in Aja's thriller might only be in Momma's head.
Despite Berry giving a reliably strong performance, trading vicious fanged creatures for possibly imaginary ones isn't an upgrade, especially given that there's so little mystery involved. We're not 20 minutes into the movie before Momma starts seeing hallucinations of her husband who died and her mother who (we soon learn) she was forced to kill, and so the only true engagement comes from the question: Will Momma's insanity lead to her murdering her own children before the boys wise up to the situation? Because this is a Hollywood release in the 21st century, there's never any true threat of the kids meeting grisly ends. So weirdly, and rather off-puttingly considering its director, Aja's latest emerges as more of a downbeat character study than any kind of horror movie, the extent of its drama restricted to witnessing the cruelty of hunger, desperation, and paranoia on one small nuclear family in the woods. This from the director of Piranha 3D! I didn't altogether dislike Never Let Go; Daggs and Jenkins give wonderfully naturalistic performances that mesh perfectly with Berry's, and there's a nice, nerve-racking scene involving a stranger who winds up on the wrong property. But if I couldn't remember nearly anything about Arcadian less than a half-year after seeing it, I'm afraid the same fate will greet our most recent blast of post-apocalyptic ennui, and I'll hardly be the only one experiencing the memory loss.
HIS THREE DAUGHTERS
Starting with what I presume is its deliberately Chekhovian title, writer/director Azazel Jacobs' His Three Daughters (streaming on Netflix as of this past Friday) doesn't feel like a movie so much as a movie adapted from a play, much the way Fran Kranz's school-shooter therapy session Mass did in 2021. Despite the urban locale, the “action” of Jacobs' original script all unfurls in one of two locales: the interior of a spacious Manhattan apartment, and at a park bench mere yards from the building's entrance. Characters routinely recite lengthy monologues that sound less spontaneous than painstakingly written. A few minor figures occasionally pop onto the stage – sorry, the screen – to alleviate potential tedium. And familial crises and relationship issues introduced at the opening will all be resolved by the finale, with the bittersweet ending leaning more toward sweet than bitter. A lot of people hate movies like this. I hate them, too, when they're badly or even boringly done. But instead, and also like Mass, I adored this unapologetically theatrical (in the literal sense) tale of siblings tending to their dying father, and adored it for being a film and not a play, as it might've been difficult to secure for a weeks- or months-long run the collective talents of Carrie Coon, Elizabeth Olsen, and Natasha Lyonne.
Among Jacobs' Chekhovian three sisters, Coon is Katie, the uptight one raising a rebellious teen daughter and frustrated by what she sees as inattention to the well-being of the family's cancer-stricken, bed-ridden father (Jay O. Sanders). Olsen is Christina, the seemingly perfect mom to an adorable toddler and clearly established as the eternal mediator. Lyonne is Rachel, Dad's adopted daughter from another marriage who lives in the apartment with her father but, to Katie's and Christina's consternation, spends day after day smoking massive blunts and sports gambling, rarely entering Dad's bedroom. A number of well-written though purely functional monologues introduce these people, and for the next 100 minutes or so, we watch as preconceived notions dissipate, long-held hurts and grievances are brought to the fore, and everyone walks away wiser and closer. Again: potentially dreary, even dreadful stuff if not handled well.
Jacobs and his principal cast handle things exceptionally well. (So does the quartet of Jovan Adepo, Rudy Galvan, Jose Febus, and Jasmine Bracey, all of whom take on minor roles with significant style.) It's awfully challenging to portray a pill without coming across as a pill yourself, and although her readings sound more stage-bound than those of the others, Coon gradually fashions a figure whose exterior rigidity is an obvious shield against deep feeling; Katie's heartbreak vividly registers precisely because of how artfully Coon hides that heart from view. Olsen's Christina is like an exposed nerve with a smiley face – so determined to keep the mood light, and probably so used to the familial duty, that her anxiousness starts becoming inseparable from panic. And the beautifully throaty Lyonne enjoys one of her sharpest roles as the designated black sheep Rachel, a woman so disassociated from the visiting “family” who can't fathom her predicament that she'd rather shut down, and blaze up, than engage. Not since Woody Allen's Hannah & Her Sisters, perhaps, have I watched a trio of actors fall so comfortably and completely into the roles of female siblings, and even when Jacobs' film aims for higher than it can successfully pull off – as in the fantasy sequence that finds Dad, for a brief time, becoming not just coherent but chatty – Coon, Olsen, and Lyonne effortlessly bring us back down to earth. It may look and sound like a play, but His Three Daughters is actually a darned good movie.
TRANSFORMERS ONE
I'm almost positive that I didn't accidentally nod off during Transformers One … but the “almost” in that statement should tell you everything you need to know about my level of engagement. An origin story for Optimus Prime and Megatron, who were apparently, cloyingly best buds before the inevitable falling out detailed here, director Josh Cooley's animated action adventure is nowhere near as soul-sucking as the worst of Michael Bay's live-action installments (which would encompass everything that wasn't the 2007 original). But as someone who finds the sight of metal bashing against metal hopelessly dull, I can't say that watching animated metal bashing animated metal was preferable, despite the script boasting a handful of amusing lines and Keegan-Michael Key offering a particularly spirited vocal performance. (Sadly, vocally, former-and-likely-future Avengers Chris Hemsworth and Scarlett Johannson bring little of value to this party, nor do Brian Tyree Henry, Steve Buscemi, Laurence Fishburne, and Jon Hamm.) The animation is fairly impressive. The story, or what I remember of it, is serviceable. Transformers die-hards will surely leave happy. I couldn't have cared less.
