Coralie Fargeat follows her brilliant Revenge with an equally subversive and even more audacious work.
Like Fargeat's previous film, The Substance is voyeuristic, confronting and ultimately weaponizing the male gaze, this time cast upon women — particularly aging women — in the entertainment industry, but ultimately resolves in a much sadder interrogation of our relationship with ourselves; obsession with appearance, self-hatred, dysmorphia, eating disorders, fear and repulsion of growing old and the degeneration of our bodies.
Homages to Cronenberg and Kubrick, yes,…
