#the substance
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rholsof-film · 2 days ago
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This is the funniest bts shot I’ve seen since Annabelle
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animusrox · 2 days ago
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MY LETTERBOXD
TOP 10
1.    Dune: Part Two 2.    The Substance 3.    Hundreds of Beavers 4.    Anora 5.    Dìdi 6.    Nosferatu 7.    Nickel Boys 8.    The First Omen 9.    Sing Sing 10.    Civil War
GRADE A 
11.    No Other Land 12.    Robot Dreams 13.    The Peasants 14.    Conclave 15.    Smile 2 16.    Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes 17.    We Grown Now 18.    Memoir of a Snail 19.    The Last Stop in Yuma County 20.    A Real Pain 21.    It’s What’s Inside 22.    Red Rooms 23.    Sometimes I Think About Dying 24.    A Different Man 25.    Better Man 26.    The Brutalist 27.    Heretic 28.    His Three Daughters 29.    Hard Truths 30.    Evil Does Not Exist 31.    Late Night with the Devil 32.    Alien: Romulus 33.    MadS 34.    Rebel Ridge 35.    Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person 36.    Challengers 37.    Strange Darling 38.    Flow 39.    All We Imagine as Light 40.    Longlegs 41.    Saturday Night 42.    The Apprentice 43.    Terrifier 3 44.    The Seed of the Sacred Fig 45.    A Complete Unknown 46.    A Quiet Place: Day One 47.    Juror #2 48.    Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl 49.    Oddity 50.    Kneecap 51.    Touch 52.    Mayhem! 53.    The Order 54.    In a Violent Nature 55.    Small Things Like These 56.    Twisters 57.    Hit Man 58.    Woman of the Hour 59.    Stopmotion 60.    The Wild Robot 61.    Deadpool & Wolverine
[Tap 'Keep Reading' For My Full Graded List]
GRADE B
62.    The Devil’s Bath 63.    The Bikeriders 64.    Sasquatch Sunset 65.    The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim 66.    Monkey Man 67.    Last Straw 68.    Abigail 69.    Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga 70.    Tiger Stripes 71.    The Book of Clarence 72.    The Instigators 73.    I’m Still Here 74.    The Coffee Table 75.    The Return 76.    Problemista 77.    Trap 78.    MaXXXine 79.    Love Lies Bleeding 80.    You’ll Never Find Me 81.    Between the Temples 82.    Marmalade 83.    Blitz 84.    Speak No Evil 85.    Asphalt City 86.    Piece By Piece 87.    Wicked Little Letters 88.    We Live in Time 89.    Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story 90.    V/H/S/Beyond 91.    The Dead Don’t Hurt 92.    Suncoast 93.    Maria 94.    My Old Ass 95.    Immaculate 96.    The Truth vs. Alex Jones 97.    Cuckoo 98.    Daddio 99.    We Were Dangerous 100.    The Outrun 101.    Infested 102.    Monolith 103.    Azrael 104.    The Last Showgirl 105.    Babes 106.    The Fire Inside 107.    Lisa Frankenstein 108.    Here 109.    Thelma 110.    Queer 111.    Out of Darkness 112.    Y2K 113.    Handling the Undead 114.    Bad Boys: Ride or Die 115.    I Saw the TV Glow 116.    Arcadian 117.    Transformers One 118.    Never Let Go 119.    The Piano Lesson 120.    Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F 121.    Wicked 122.    Gladiator II 123.    Carry-On 124.    Blink Twice 125.    Self Reliance 126.    Fly Me to the Moon 127.    Boy Kills World 128.    Kinds of Kindness 129.    Nutcrackers 130.    Skincare 131.    Ezra 132.    The Front Room 133.    Mothers’ Instinct 134.    Inside Out 2 135.    Omni Loop 136.    Girls State 137.    Beetlejuice Beetlejuice 138.    Your Monster 139.    Babygirl 140.    Mufasa: The Lion King 141.    The Greatest Hits 142.    Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1 143.    Magpie
GRADE C 
144.    The People’s Joker 145.    Nightbitch 146.    Road House 147.    Young Woman and the Sea 148.    Am I OK? 149.    Music by John Williams 150.    The Killer’s Game 151.    Oh, Canada 152.    Wolfs 153.    Sting 154.    The Idea of You 155.    Don’t Move 156.    1992 157.    Werewolves 158.    The Killer 159.    The Shadow Strays 160.    Rez Ball 161.    MoviePass, MovieCrash 162.    The Fall Guy 163.    Lee 164.    The End 165.    Godzilla × Kong: The New Empire 166.    The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare 167.    Madame Web 168.    Caddo Lake 169.    Watchmen: Chapter II 170.    Watchmen: Chapter I 171.    Salem’s Lot 172.    The Exorcism 173.    The Watchers 174.    Kill 175.    Jackpot! 176.    Rumours 177.    Damsel 178.    My Spy: The Eternal City 179.    Drive-Away Dolls 180.    IF 181.    Spaceman 182.    Joy 183.    Joker: Folie à Deux 184.    Megalopolis 185.    Monster Summer 186.    Lovely, Dark, and Deep 187.    Bob Marley: One Love 188.    Kraven the Hunter 189.    Moana 2 190.    I Used to Be Funny 191.    Goodrich 192.    September 5 193.    Hold Your Breath 194.    Apartment 7A
GRADE F
195.    The Platform 2 196.    Arthur the King 197.    Shirley 198.    Back to Black 199.    Land of Bad 200.    Poolman 201.    Emilia Pérez 202.    The Room Next Door 203.    I.S.S. 204.    Brothers 205.    Knox Goes Away 206.    Mean Girls 207.    Krazy House 208.    Slingshot 209.    Mr. Crocket 210.    Argylle 211.    Sonic the Hedgehog 3 212.    Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey 2 213.    Afraid 214.    Tuesday 215.    Spellbound 216.    Justice League: Crisis on Infinite Earths Part Three 217.    Justice League: Crisis on Infinite Earths Part Two 218.    Justice League: Crisis on Infinite Earths Part One 219.    The American Society of Magical Negroes 220.    Subservience 221.    Time Cut 222.    Night Swim 223.    Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire 224.    Red One 225.    This Is Me…Now 226.    Despicable Me 4 227.    The Union 228.    Ricky Stanicky 229.    The Beekeeper 230.    Honeymoonish 231.    Hot Frosty 232.    The Deliverance 233.    The Garfield Movie 234.    Lift 235.    Atlas 236.    Trigger Warning 237.    House of Spoils 238.    Borderlands 239.    Tarot 240.    Venom: The Last Dance
Bottom 10
241.    Imaginary 242.    Unfrosted 243.    It Ends With Us 244.    Dear Santa 245.    The Crow 246.    The Strangers: Chapter 1 247.    Harold and the Purple Crayon 248.    Rebel Moon - Part Two: The Scargiver 249.    Dirty Angels 250.    Miller’s Girl
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vampirecorleone · 1 day ago
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"You haven't changed a bit! You're still the most beautiful girl in the whole wide world!" The Substance (2024) dir. Coralie Fargeat
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rhaenyra-the-gracious · 2 days ago
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MARGARET QUALLEY
photographed for Critics' Choice Awards (February 2025) via Instagram
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riseswind · 1 day ago
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THE SUBSTANCE (2024) dir. Coralie Fargeat
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thejingshi · 1 day ago
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Demi Moore as Elisabeth Sparkle
THE SUBSTANCE (2024) dir. Coralie Fargeat
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neveare · 2 days ago
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The Substance (2024)
Starring Mettaton as Mettaton and Mettaton Ex as MTTX!
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starsbythepocketful · 1 day ago
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Let's go!
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mrs-stans · 1 day ago
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For God’s Sake, Let’s Talk About a Different Movie
By Angelica Jade Bastién
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For months, cinephiles have claimed to find substance in a certain body-horror movie. I am politely asking you to look elsewhere.
About 40 minutes into A Different Man, the face of Edward Lemuel, the striving actor played with wounded insecurity by Sebastian Stan, begins to fall off in reddened, meaty chunks.
Edward is a man with neurofibromatosis, which manifests most noticeably as tumors on his cheeks, forehead, and chin. In public, he is vigilant, picking apart the ways people gaze upon or ignore him, viewing himself from the outside like a passenger in his own story. In more private moments, he is awkward, needy, and hopeful, like in interactions with the burgeoning playwright Ingrid (Renate Reinsve), who moves in next door. When he opts to participate in a drug trial whose clinicians market it as a cure, he accepts a cast of his face as a premature token of remembrance for when the drug proves efficacious. His is a kind of pathetic that inspires neither scorn nor pity, but a universal, sorrowful connection — his yearning for a different face is a consideration of what makes a human being legible and thus able to be understood, known, even loved. That Edward is a struggling actor only renders this consideration more acute.
As Edward’s fretting hands peel off the wet and bleeding parts of his post-trial face, the body horror is shown primarily in the darkened glass of a framed photograph. The chunks drop into his hands and he lets out gasps, and in each breath, Edward is reborn. The slim montage of transformation continues over the next three minutes, and a rhythm locks in place. He stumbles into his bathroom with a white undershirt stained with blood. He looks at himself with awe and confusion, observing whatever pockmarks and roughness still remain. His face itself is a liminal space: not quite who he once was, but certainly not who he will end up being. In the meantime, he spends evenings looking at Ingrid through his door’s peephole and eating microwavable dinners on the kitchen floor while inane whistle tutorial videos echo in his dingy apartment. Until one day, he closes the mirrored cabinet in his bathroom and confronts the face of a fully transfigured man.
Edward tentatively explores the city by foot with his new face. Shot from behind as he moves through the candy-colored lights of nighttime New York, his shoulders are hunched. He’s still on guard. When he sees his own reflection, he stands straighter. Marvels at himself. Is this what beauty feels like? The ability to take up more space without question? To look at yourself and not wince? As he spends more time with his handsome face, Edward decides to metaphorically kill his former self, taking on the new name of Guy — telling one of the doctors from the clinical trial who comes by his apartment that Edward is “really, really dead.”
Guy is a cutthroat Realtor with a spacious apartment who infiltrates new pools of society, auditions for the play Ingrid has written about her former neighbor (she doesn’t recognize Guy and Edward as the same man in ways that become increasingly hilarious and galling), and gets cast. That’s when a figure disrupts the new stasis of Guy’s life: Oswald, a charismatic Brit with neurofibromatosis, whose face is an echo of what Edward’s once looked like. But Oswald has none of the baggage Edward continues to heave around and is embodied with wit and charm by actor Adam Pearson, who actually has neurofibromatosis. Writer-director Aaron Schimberg spins a darkly comedic, profoundly existential, and gimlet-eyed film from this narrative setup, with Oswald eventually weaving himself intimately into Ingrid’s play, her life, and Guy’s imagined future.
When I first watched A Different Man, my mind immediately turned to The Substance. The Coralie Fargeat–directed body-horror onslaught is pure blunt-force trauma, a cocktail that is one part fairy tale, two parts hagsploitation, focusing on a woman named Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), a former Oscar-winning actress who hosted an aerobics morning show for decades before getting unceremoniously fired for the sin of turning 50. That’s when she’s introduced to an underground product that offers people a way to recapture their youth and become “simply a better version” of themselves.
Elisabeth injects herself with a neon-green liquid, only for a younger, prettier version of herself to be birthed bloodily from her back in the form of Sue (Margaret Qualley). They must switch places every seven days to maintain the balance of their dual existence; one body remains conscious, the other unconscious, spinal fluid crassly transferred from Elisabeth to Sue for stabilization. As Sue rockets into the stratosphere of fame, auditioning for and nabbing Elisabeth’s old role, the older woman watches from the sidelines as the younger one disregards their time limitations and forces Elisabeth to age into a cartoonish elder so grotesque the characterization dovetails into cruelty.
These movies do not invite neat one-to-one comparisons, but The Substance and A Different Man — released last year within a few months of each other — are two films inadvertently in conversation. They play with similar thematic terrain: doppelgängers, the body, disability, self-loathing, misguided desire, nihilism bred from consistently looking outside yourself for a definition of who you are. Both won awards when they premiered at film festivals; Stan earned the Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance at Sundance, Fargeat got the Best Screenplay award at Cannes. Both lead actors won Golden Globes for their work, giving committed performances set in hyperstylized worlds (the former existing in a fun-house, ’80s-inflected version of Hollywood inhabited by hopeless image-obsessed women; the latter in the conniving, parasitic world of New York theater).
Moore and Stan have also been nominated for Academy Awards, though Stan is being recognized as a Best Actor nominee for his far less impressive work in The Apprentice. (That Pearson wasn’t nominated in the Best Supporting Actor category is a discussion for another time.) In the public eye, The Substance is the comeback contender that could earn Moore what many perceive to be an overdue accolade. Yet it’s only A Different Man (nominated only for Best Makeup and Hairstyling, and up against The Substance in that category) that has anything meaningful to say. One of the biggest sins of this Oscar season is that critics and audiences are projecting upon Fargeat’s movie a substance it doesn’t actually have.
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Where The Substance is unrelentingly direct, A Different Man is deliberately slippery. Where The Substance’s camp is too enamored with itself, causing it to trip into self-seriousness, A Different Man has genuine pitch-black humor wrung from discomfort and angst. Where The Substance is engaged in surfaces, bolstered by tremendous prosthetic work and special effects, A Different Man plunges into the murky depths of its characters, rendering the fallout of its lead character’s transformation as far more subterranean. Moore appears in mirror scenes not unlike the ones that occur in A Different Man, though in Fargeat’s the camera pores over Moore’s every feathery wrinkle, every ripple of flesh under harsh bright-white light. Let’s keep it buck; Demi Moore looks amazing at 62 years old thanks to all the privileges at her fingertips. But the camera sneers at her, creating a distancing effect that undermines the complexity of Moore’s performance. For all the film’s interest in the body, it has a remarkable lack of intimacy. The closer the camera gets to a legible face, the less you see of a soul.
Meanwhile, A Different Man’s camera treats the body’s appearance and movements as the richest way to connect. The body is still a site of horror, as the single sequence of Edward’s transformation implies. But more crucially, the body is rendered as a consistently fraught site on which identity is fomented and complicated, turning Schimberg’s film into a slyly constructed and powerfully caustic doppelgänger tale. Late in the film, Edward finds himself at a karaoke spot with Oswald. Against a backdrop of glittering red tinsel, Oswald performs a rendition of “I Wanna Get Next to You,” by Rose Royce. While everyone vibes to Oswald’s crooning, Edward’s face is masked with confusion. His eyes jut around, searching for a truth with which he can’t come to terms. In real time, through Stan’s pellucid physical performance, the audience experiences Edward coming to an understanding of the gulf of experience standing between him and Oswald. Edward has everything people have been culturally told in this country to desire: money, a social life, sex. But none of these gives him meaning or pleasure. It’s as if his own truest desires remain incomprehensible.
Meanwhile, Oswald lives a capacious life in spite of the very disorder Edward believed doomed him. Pearson plays Oswald with a light-on-his-feet charisma that becomes a stunning counterpoint to the heavy sorrow of Stan’s performance. It’s the most revelatory decision in the film, allowing Schimberg to bypass simplistic moralism about disability. The further Oswald encroaches upon Edward’s new existence, eventually swooping into the role Edward was meant to play on Ingrid’s stage and ultimately disrupting his romantic relationship with her, the more it dawns on Edward that his problem wasn’t his face but something more tricksy.
By contrast, there is no real pleasure in existing within any body in The Substance. Even when Sue, jejune and perfectly calibrated to modern beauty standards, stumbles onto her feet after tearing through Elisabeth’s back, she admires herself the way the camera does: with a leering quality, reflecting a hunger with no end. The visual language of The Substance is rendered in the machinations of gleaming advertisements meant to trade upon the fears embedded in women by a culture that argues death is preferable to aging. Fargeat adopts the dehumanizing gaze of 2000s beer advertisements or modern porn to heighten the exploitation of Sue’s dewy skin and taut figure, her eyes gliding over her own flesh, drinking herself in. Where the film sees abjection in Elisabeth’s body, it sees endless possibility in Sue’s.
But these possibilities are a closed circuit. All Sue desires is more. More youth, more beauty, more fame. That those possibilities curdle into exploitation is a result of Elisabeth’s own making. The film roots women’s problems not in the patriarchy that ushers them into single-minded desires, but in their choice to remain young — as if they really have a choice. Ads like Carl’s Jr.’s are unsubtle seductions, but what is The Substance trying to seduce its viewers into experiencing and considering otherwise? These aren’t characters but containers for derision.
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Schimberg’s characterization looks outward as much as, if not more than, inward. His work here demonstrates a remarkable interest in the ways the ideas we hold of ourselves clash into the reality of other people. His direction, the script, and Reinsve’s performance in particular explore the extractive ways of artists who worm their way into the lives of others and steal meaning for material. While having sex one night in the hushed darkness of her apartment, Ingrid asks, “You have the mask? Put it on,” referring to the cast of his face taken by the clinical doctors before he was “cured” of neurofibromatosis, which he used to audition for Ingrid’s play. Edward balks, “Why?” “Just do what I tell you,” her tone harsh enough to bruise. Edward tentatively goes into another room and returns naked save for the mask entrapping his face. When they start having sex again, Ingrid erupts in laughter. “This is so fucked-up. You look ridiculous!”
Scenes such as this reveal A Different Man to be the best kind of doppelgänger story — each figure brought to life in tight performances, offering enclosed, fully realized emotional and psychic realms. Stan often wears a strained, venomous smile when around Oswald, but the only person it’s poisoning is himself. You’re constantly waiting for him to succumb. And he does. After losing the role in Ingrid’s production — which goes on to find great success with Oswald in the lead — he crashes a performance, wearing the mask of his old face. His attempt to strangle Oswald leads a large prop door hanging above the stage to fall and crush Edward’s limbs, which are henceforth contained in thick casts. Oswald and a now-pregnant Ingrid handle Edward’s care, with his anger and dejection only growing. After his in-house physical therapist makes a remark about how the hell Oswald got with Ingrid, Edward snaps, stabbing the physical therapist and killing him in a sloppy fight in the kitchen.
The Substance ends in an even more violent fashion: a parade of blood and viscera involving Elisabeth’s fully deformed body and the consequences of Sue using the substance on herself. The finale recalls Brian Yuzna’s 1989 flick Society; The Substance is nothing if not committedly referential, though it never quite synthesizes its inspirations to give us new language in the forever fraught conversations around women and aging, or even what horror can do as a genre. After all, bodies in The Substance aren’t venues for truth but obfuscation, suffering, and self-loathing. Every body in Fargeat’s film is a hall of mirrors caving in on itself. When you take a look at the shards, it’s clear they’re reflecting nothing at all.
A Different Man has a coda to the violence Edward impulsively remakes his life with. Edward, out of prison, much older and graying, runs into Oswald — or, more accurate to their dynamic, Oswald runs into him. They decide to have dinner at an upscale sushi restaurant with Ingrid by Oswald’s side. “I’ve achieved everything I’ve ever wanted. I’m ready for the next phase,” Ingrid says about her decision to retire as a famed playwright and move with Oswald to a nude commune in Canada. Oswald calls Edward by his real name, confirming that his arrest would have finally outed the true identity of Guy. “Oh, my old friend, you haven’t changed a bit,” Oswald says, as Edward’s face fills the screen, Stan’s tight smile and gaze directed at the camera. Edward is paralyzed by the realization that shedding your skin, your name, and your history isn’t transformation but a futile disavowal. Written upon the bodies of the characters in both these films is a story their respective filmmakers obsess over, but only A Different Man understands that there’s narrative potential under the skin.
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venusbyline · 2 days ago
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OFF TOPIC... But I wanna know your opinions about the Oscars
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For my non-Brazilian followers, give us a chance and watch I'm Still Here. Fernanda Torres' performance is such amazing and she's so funny and charismatic in real life. And even if you want another actress or another movie to win the awards, I bet you'll get emotional watching this sad story unfortunately based on true events. 🩷🩷
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mediocre-megs · 5 months ago
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honestly more media should portray the anti aging industry as horrific and decidedly unhuman. it IS body horror it IS grotesque it DOES go against nature*. it WILL kill you. yes.
*this is NOT anti-hrt or anti-vax or anything of the sort. i love criticisms of the anti aging industry + sci-fi/horror. i also love trans people and vaccines and medicine and science. i also don’t care if you personally have botox. this was a shitpost i made while high and 2/3 of the way through the substance (2024). terfs dni. cheers.
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junkfoodcinemas · 3 months ago
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2024 + HORROR
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logray · 4 months ago
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THE SHINING (1980) HANNIBAL (2013-15) THE SUBSTANCE (2024)
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skullingwaydraws · 5 months ago
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Remember you are one
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freshmoviequotes · 4 months ago
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The Substance (2024)
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