Tag Archives: Body horror

2024, Rent It Tonight

Body Horror Becomes Demi Moore in “The Substance”

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It’s generally cause for distress when your enchanted pumpkin carriage or lovable Mogwai has overextended forbidden activities beyond midnight. But age-old adages about the exact time when perceived Hollywood beauty expires go into audacious overtime in the contemporary satirical body horror film The Substance (A), written, directed and co-edited with glorious gore and gusto by Coralie Fargeat. A stunning Demi Moore lunges into a memorable central performance as a driven 50-year-old TV aerobics superstar facing career decline and experimenting with a black market medical regimen billed as a fountain of youth. Margaret Qualley occupies a symbiotic doppelganger role, an object of fantasy and fury in delicate balance with the leading lady. Both actresses are incredible in their mirror-image parts on various ends of the glamor spectrum, and it’s clear from how game they are in service to Fargeat’s vision that they are pursuing their roles with zero vanity. There are jaw-dropping sequences of blood and bombast, but the film’s watershed moment involves Moore’s character at the looking-glass, hesitating in numerous bittersweet ways as she prepares for a date because she doesn’t feel pretty. Benjamin Kracun’s candy-colored cinematography and Raffertie’s explosive score complement the outstanding 29-member makeup department and Emmanuelle Youchnovski’s standout costumes. Dennis Quaid and other male characters in the film are written quite broadly, which works well as parody but generates a distancing effect to interactions. Frequent allegory paints with a thick brush over a few inconvenient plot points. The overall grotesquerie will please ardent Fangoria Magazine readers but could turn away other viewers who would savor the fresh commentary. With her singularity of vision and hypnotic, horrific stylings, Fargeat invites comparisons to Kubrick, Cronenberg and De Palma but ironically could have nipped and tucked a few impulses causing the film to wear out its welcome long after making its point. This film itself is far from a fading star!

My new year’s 2025 “FilmThirst” TikTok review: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTY3wv7N6

2022

David Cronenberg is Back with the Peculiar “Crimes of the Future” (2022)

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Now in limited theatres.

Movies tug at heartstrings, provoke belly laughs, stimulate the mind and evoke physical reactions, so it’s a bit nerve-racking how “body horror” maestro David Cronenberg has fabricated such an inventive but ultimately soulless and anticlimactic work in Crimes of the Future (C). The veteran director undoubtedly engages in fascinating sci-fi world building with his near dystopian society in which humans feel no pain, but the film is largely bogged down in tedious exposition, rendering inert its mystery and momentum. The movie does no favors to its cast including Viggo Mortensen and Léa Seydoux, who play performance artists conducting surgery for audiences and extracting newly harvested organs against a backdrop of bureaucracy (embodied in an idiosyncratic Kristen Stewart) and would-be revolutionaries (Scott Speedman’s underdeveloped character). Cronenberg skims the surface of human transformation, examines peoples’ fetishizing of pain and pleasure and crams in tortured metaphors about inner beauty. What could have been a quintessential grotesquerie turns out to be merely an obtuse lecture. This trauma drama lethargically asks more questions about morality and mortality than it has the ability to answer. It has the bones of a really peculiar and provocative saga and rarely manifests into its most evolved form.