When I left the theatre, my friend Alexander Litvinoff asked, "What did you think?" My response was, "I wasn’t disappointed, but I wasn’t impressed either."
Perhaps this sums up my biggest issue with The Substance: after hearing the logline, the film plays out exactly how you’d expect. Every story beat, every so-called twist, and every character follows a predictable path. I experienced no surprises during its unnecessarily long 140 minutes—except perhaps for the jarring tonal shift in the denouement. The…
