Get the latest tech news
The Substance is a grotesque takedown of our obsession with youth
Writer / director Coralie Fargeat wants to get under your skin with The Substance’s grotesqueness.
Films about the agony of living up to female beauty standards aren’t new, but The Substance weaves them into an incisive feminist parable that feels jacked directly into the moment that has given us on-demand Ozempic and Brat. As the drug continues to open more and more doors for Sue that were once closed to Elisabeth, The Substance begins to echo many of the beats that shaped All About Eve while channeling a dark eroticism evocative of Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls. But as Elisabeth and Sue’s fight for more control over their life becomes more pointed, the movie drives head-on into territory reminiscent of David Cronenberg’s Crash and Crimes of the Future, which Fargeat makes her own with buckets of artfully splattered viscera.
Or read this on The Verge
