Have you ever dreamt of a better version of yourself? Younger, more beautiful, more perfect. One single injection unlocks your DNA, starting a new cellular division, that will release another version of yourself. This is the Substance. The Substance 2024 | dir. Coralie Fargeat
“The truth doesn’t care about our needs or wants- it doesn’t care about our governments, our ideologies, our religions- to lie in wait for all time. This, at last, is the gift of Chernobyl.” CHERNOBYL (2019) — dir. Johan Renck
“There are few things on film as vulnerable as Lee Pace drinking and weeping as he confesses his guilt, his hurt, and his grief to tiny, crying Catinca Untaru, who believed during filming, that Pace, like his character, could not walk. It’s not important to the climax of the film, but it underscores the relationship they have on film: naive, plain, exploratory. Singh asked Untaru to help shape the stories, and the fantastical sequences sometimes have a child’s endearing disregard for logic. But the end, when Roy comes undone, realizing what he’s implicated this little girl in, and realizing that he feels worse about that than he thought he could feel—this is the story of someone who understands guilt and pain and the bad choices we make while in their thrall, and the way we need to be forgiven, or accepted. The way we need enough space and enough love to let us fuck up and keep going. All of this, and I’ve said so little about Singh’s imagery: blood-red, sky-blue, saturated and full of butterflies and growling soldiers and places that seem solid enough in the real world until you line them up one after another, at which point they become a dream, a single land of everything beautiful. Everything still hurts in that beautiful land; everyone is betrayed, left alone, haunted, shouting his (alas, all his) pain into the sky. Everyone dies because Roy wants to die; Roy lives because Alexandria insists that his story is not the only story.”
