You can't escape from yourself.

The Substance — 2/5

I think this is the signal we're in a new era, friends. Every frame is potential for some other director's future pitch treatment. It's all overdone, highly stylized to the point of not needing an actor's performance to carry the story as the camera and hyper-pop set design will communicate the feeling and editing will piece it together in post. Nothing can be boring, let there be no rest. I'm half-disappointed in myself for disliking this movie because the premise is fun and it's devolution into body horror should be fun, but at 2 hours and 20 minutes, it's mostly just tiresome. Demi and Margaret are good enough in their roles, but there's nothing to them, they're mostly empty shells, no interiority. In many ways, the movie feels like a 1920s silent movie in how BIG everything is. You don't need words to understand who the bad guys are, the visuals and wild gesticulations tell the story. And much like Emerald Fennell, the movie points you towards 'the male gaze is bad', creating an exciting villain for the leftists, only to not much do anything with that and instead focus on how women will defeat themselves in order to chase love and adoration.  "The executioner's willing citizens." They're not wrong, but the denouement could have brought those two threads together towards epiphany vs. gross-out humor. Like 'Death Becomes Her,' it'd rather be silly than say something.