Being unable to escape unreasonable beauty standards and society’s obsession with being perpetually young is nothing new. However, Coralie Fargeat’s ‘The Substance’ comes at a time when’s Ozempic times are over. Ozempic weight loss injections are a shot that seems to make what seemed impossible, apart from going out under the blade, a common and easily done routine with just the topical. Scroll into and the ads take over drop the weight and “feel like your old self again” and now you can try it out for cheap and you see fast results. It’s hard not to be drawn in, isn’t it? Well, that’S where the similarity between the film’s aforementioned mas in sa intech cals insight, which is called glp-1 weight loss drugs in layman’S temporer ling. So, Fargeat, who happens to be the writer and director of the film infuses the quest for “the fountain of youth” with gore, neon and kitsch.
In her younger days, actress Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) enchanted many a ticket holder, but as it turned out for her own star on the Walk of the American Actors, the sunsets have already been behind her.
She, the character that is played, is the one who is relieved of her duties when a morbidly humored executive, Harvey (Dennis Quaid), decides to take over the fitness program and make it youth oriented. After she is never given a chance simply because of her age, Elizabeth gets to know about a strange thing named The Substance. This strange thing creates a more perfect version of her which will help her to stay in the youth-crazed entertainment world. Of course, ‘The Substance’, like the monsters from “Gremlins”, comes along with a few rules: Activate the young self only once and the two have to alternately live their everyday lives every week without fail. Though the two seem to be slated to share the same consciousness, as the girls go ahead with The Substance, they learn the hard way the cost of eternal youth and its devastating consequences.
This is mainly because of the director who tends to feel sympathy for both characters’ ideals. The creation becomes the very first experiment of the new order of things. The approaches and treatment that is usually taken with the respect for people / human dignity is no longer followed.
“The Substance” brings up the works of David Cronenberg and his obsession with body horror, and Fargeat includes films such as The Brood where a pregnant woman becomes a victim of a mad scientist’s experiments, Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator, featuring a terrible green goo that reminds one of The Substance, James Whale’s The Invisible Man, a film about a scientist who goes haywire, and Brian De Palma’s Carrie, which also deals with a woman’s suffering depicted by volumes of blood and chaos. It might be an overstatement to say that the very use of Bernard Herrmann’s “Vertigo” theme feels more than a bit off but that particular theme fits in the story and within the mood of obsession nearly perfectly.
Fargeat as shown in her lean-and-mean feature debut revenge know how to write one more tight script about a very small cast of characters. To her equally outstanding themed choices in front of the camera, she matches her on-screen collaborators of immense talent with an equally formidable team behind the camera including cinematographer Benjamin Kracun who conceptualizes and executes the visually lurid and disorienting pink and blue color scheme of revenge into a more bright and childish one suitable for Beverly hills, dance costumes by Emmanuelle Youchnovski, broadening each characters’ personality with summating vivid colors and materials, and music by Raffertie who turbo-charges the speed of the movie through pointless traffic on the 405.
While “The Substance” may utilize frightful elements to address issues such as the show business or the billion dollar market of people willing to pay for any youth restoration procedures, it handles these subjects with such a flair of panache that it is still a good deal of fun. With the Orwellian caricature of Winston who is intolerably loud in every single shot Fargeat and Kracun have a habit of using a fish eye lens or very uncomfortable close-ups to make him even more grotesque and hypocritical for cutting Elizabeth’s show. Production designer Stanislas Reydellet and his team’s stylized layouts also contribute to the heightened sense of reality within the movie as evident in the TV studio where one of the hallways has the orange hues of ‘the shining’ carpet and an unnecessarily long corridor in a pharmaceutical depot which looks straight out of 2001: A Space Odyssey in which Elizabeth made a few stops.
Qualley is given a role of Sue and is forced to do gymnastics and is unpleasantly remade into a sexpot-next-door with a trashy-looking teenage-in-a-biased-way hot body who simply loves neon sport shirts.
In contrast to Elizabeth’s fitness video, those of Sue’s training cam focus on various body parts because those are the parts of the body that her executives, such as Harvey, are targeting, sexualizing and selling to the public, at the same time puffing the youth and its cloud-defying skin. As far as twirling the ends of the mustache for evil purposes goes_no I am not implying that Dominion actors cross-dress at all_If it comes to Quaid and Vought there are no worse pictures, he may even look like a level quite a good assistance without achieving and maniacal laugh, but having, as Harvey – an ostentatious personality, in the heart of a cold and unfeeling person. I am quite sure he is taking pleasure in over-gorging on the wickedness of mocking women in the industry. This is clearly not most of, but still the best I can understand, Quaid’s work of late. And that’s not even the best one in the movie.
The effectiveness of the film “The Substance” can in large part be attributed to the grace and ignorance with which Moore takes on the role of an ugly woman, one who loathes herself, who is ostracized by the world, and who finds strength in a pill pusher. In the scene where Elizabeth gets ready in front of a mirror just before an outing, she is overly detail-oriented, obsessing over her already perfect dress and blush. Although disappointment is more the expression on many faces Romneys’s face wearing the most glamorous make up one can imagine, as well more often than not, many grab a mascara first, go to the eye lids, mascara is applied every a few layers. But not everyone uses this kit in a pacifying, constructive way. So Elizabeth in front of the mirror is so critical that she starts removing the thick lipstick and fake eyelashes that were put on her. That is how her inability to appreciate her essence, one that will ruin her existence, begins. But while it may seem like a warning for the world we live in today, “The Substance” has these evils as there has actually been for a long time, and the problems that the film dares to reveal are not only so skin deep.
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