2025 Academy Awards Best Picture Nominee - The Substance
Cathy's Review:
I started writing this review during a lunch/bathroom/popcorn-popping break about halfway through the movie. At the time, I thought it might just be the finest horror movie ever made. With my bowl of popcorn in hand, we started watching again, and the third quarter was just as excellent ... and then, WHAM, the final 25% hit us like someone dumped a vat of pig's blood on us.
The movie has so much going for it. The acting is flawless and spectacular. The makeup perfectly supported the story. The camera work couldn't have been better, and it switched between a neutral gaze, character POV gaze, and even male gaze, which was deliberately overdone at times in a nice bit of visual sarcasm.
The storytelling was tense, creepy, beautifully and artistically filmed, and up until the final 30 minutes, occasionally gross. There are visual homages to the hotel in The Shining and The Backrooms, and Alien. It also uses color in a wonderful and symbolic way - yellow symbolizes (both figuratively and literally) egg yolks and mitosis and division of the soul, and white seems to represent purgatory, while black symbolizes imprisonment and vulnerability. Happiness is shown with bright and cheerful pastels ... except when it's not.
The characters were fascinating - the movie uses stereotypes as metaphors, much the way morality plays did 500 years ago. Instead of Everyman, Good Deeds, and Death, we have Old Actress and Ambitious Starlet. And the men - they are nearly all pigs. They aren't just any stereotype-as-metaphor; they are the stereotypes that women have for men, like the Uncaring Executive and the Thinks-He's-God's-Gift-to-Women. To be fair, Former Classmate wasn't a pig (just a little sad), and neither was Doctor, but Creepy Nurse was a complete swine; his morality play name would be Leads-Us-Into-Temptation.
Demi Moore's Elizabeth Sparkle (Aging Actress) and Margaret Qualley's Sue (Ambitious Starlet) were perfectly matched. Both women performed fully naked at times, and it never ever felt gratuitous because it furthered the story and made sense. There was also no male gaze during the nude scenes except when Sue first discovered her body was now firm and young; she was also evaluating how she would look to others).
Dennis Quaid (Uncaring Executive) played Harvey with awe-inspiring gusto, and he leaned into his vile character perfectly, with disgusting eating habits and crass behavior like urinating while talking on the phone, talking smack about the aging actress while she overhears. I think he represented the elderly version: "Boys will be boys."
But, I've never had a movie quite so completely ruined by its ending before. To be honest, I feel robbed. The Substance was shaping up to be a powerful commentary on our society's sexism, unreasonable beauty standards, and obsession with remaining youthful, but the final 30 minutes jumped the rails (mixed metaphor absolutely intended), and that message and the story were completely overshadowed by the crescendo of gore that went on and on and on.
It's a pretty bad sign that I stopped caring about any of the main characters, got bored and numb, and just wondered when it was going to end. I think the director should have followed Stephen King's advice to "even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings" and ended the movie very differently (and much sooner). I'm not looking for a happy ending; that wasn't possible, but something pointed (yet still tragic) would have been great.
Chris's review:
The first hour and forty-five minutes of The Substance is a masterful tension-building creep-fest with an important message. The final thirty are a weird combination of ham-fisted melodrama, overwrought spectacle of technical theater, and, in the final scene -- a Gwar concert.
I honestly don't know that I've ever seen a movie where I liked it as much as I did and then, at one identifiable moment, started to hate it as thoroughly as I did. I'm still processing, and I'm not sure what I'll think in the end, but it feels like they really had something and just pissed it away because someone didn't know how to kill their darlings.
(Pithy Reviews; and Ranking of 10 out of 10 nominees):
The Substance (Beautiful horror movie ruined by ending; Cathy: 1, Chris: 1)
Unranked/yet-to-be-seen:
Unwatched -Anora(NYC sex worker marries a Russian oligarch)
Unwatched - Conclave (Conspiracy thriller while picking a new pope)
Rewatching - Dune: Part Two (House Atreides kicks House Harkonnen off Arrakis)
Unwatched - Emilia Pérez(Conspiracy to help a transgender mob boss disappear)
Unwatched - Wicked (Retelling of The Wizard of Oz)
Not available yet - The Brutalist (Jewish architect rebuilds his life in America after the Holocaust)
Not available yet - A Complete Unknown (A biopic about the early days of Bob Dylan's career)
Not available yet - I'm Still Here/Ainda Estou Aqui (A Brazilian politician's wife makes a new life after her husband is disappeared in 1971)
Not available yet - Nickel Boys (1960s-era reform school survival story)
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Neither spam nor mean comments are allowed. I'm the sole judge of what constitutes either one, and any comment that I consider mean or spammy will be deleted without warning or response.