The Substance

I watched this at Curzon on the 30th of October, 2024.

Harrowing and disturbing. It’s an incredible film and it gave me new phobias. The body horror is astoundingly good, there were so many scenes that made me flinch or look away:

• Qualley’s ears, nails, and teeth dropping off
• the first withered finger
• the bit where Qualley has stayed on a couple of weeks and Moore becomes really old
• the first glimpse of the monstrous Moore after Qualley stayed for three months
• the chicken leg coming out of her bellybutton
• the grotesque closeups of food and people

A really great commentary on Hollywood and the beauty industry as well, presented in a way that really leaves a mark. The ending let it down a bit, up till then it had been grounded in a kind of realism, but then it transitioned into a dreamlike sequence of the performance, the audience, blood spraying out in buckets, and a final bit where Moore’s face, surrounded by a lumpy organic sheets, slithers onto her Star of Fame, and dissolves.

But yeah. Utterly horrifying and grotesque. The sound design added to it, it was overwhelmingly loud and brilliantly disturbing.