Film Box
“Pretty girls should ALWAYS smile!”
So says Harvey (last name not revealed, but you can guess what it might be), a sleazy producer played by Dennis Quaid in The Substance, which I just saw yet am willing to crawl out on a limb to say is the best new horror film I’ve seen in the last five years, probably more. It’s the second feature by French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat, who with this and Revenge (2017) is carving a niche with satirical feminist takes on typically male-helmed sub-genres. With Revenge it was the rape/revenge film, with The Substance it’s body horror.
The story is that Jane Fonda-style fitness guru Elisabeth Sparkles (Demi Moore) is fading from the limelight due to LA’s misogynistic repulsion for ageing female bodies. Forced into retirement, she’s introduced to The Substance, a shady medical treatment that when injected causes your physical form to split in two so that for seven days you can live as a younger, fitter, “better” version of yourself.
During this time a new persona called Sue (Margaret Qualley), of perky breasts and silky glutes, becomes Harvey’s new commodity. But Sue starts growing tired of Elisabeth, while their use of The Substance causes the latter to start… changing.
The film speaks to a long lineage of horror, surrealist, and other genre properties, evoking The Shining (1980), Sunset Boulevard (1950), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the Davids Cronenberg and Lynch, and even 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the latter used for both psychedelic and at one point comic effect. Yet it stands head and shoulders above Cronenberg's most recent work and pretty much all horror made by man or woman in the studio system in recent years. I’m hesitant at this early stage to call The Substance a masterpiece, but it’s a straight 4/4 and to some degree, at least a new classic that moviegoers interested in original horror “should” watch.
Fargeat has emerged as an artist like Quentin Tarantino in that she takes genres and tropes associated with schlock and injects them with a vital artistic vision. Beyond the allusions above, The Substance calls to mind Frank Henenlotter movies, the sort of thing your general filmgoer would have too high an opinion of their own taste to go near.
Like Basket Case (1982), about a man on the run with a murderous flesh homunculus who was once his conjoined twin, or Frankenhooker (1990), in which a grieving man tries to resurrect his wife by sewing her back together with parts from sex workers. As in Manny Farber’s auteur theory, Fargeat uses such material to shove art up into the crevices of dreck.
Part of what’s so refreshing about The Substance is seeing this type of gross-out body horror from a feminist perspective, a female gaze if you will. Where Henenlotter’s jokes about sex workers were relatively shallow satirically, Fargeat brings strong gender commentary to the same dark humour, fetishised shots of youthful female bodies, and descent into carnage.
In the tradition of a lot of great horror, The Substance is also a comedy, most comparable to David Lynch’s candy-coloured, painterly depictions of American society with their tongue-in-cheek characterisations. Los Angeles stereotypes are mercilessly skewered and at its core, the story is a classic simple tale of disgusting Hollywood shallowness and greed, made literally disgusting with the horrible mutations that develop as Elisabeth/Sue chase lost youth. The body horror stuff is mesmeric, especially in a climax so wild and blood-soaked and weird it might set some kind of record, reminiscent of the conclusion to Society (1989).
Nausea is a prominent visual motif, not just in the mutations but for example how Harvey is depicted, slopping and slipping and crunching his way through dozens of prawns with heads attached in a restaurant, their carcasses soaking in sauce like the discarded women he’s probably burned through. Or how he sloppily relieves himself in a public bathroom while yelling about how useless older women are.
Demi Moore meanwhile gives what might be the performance of her career. There’s a tradition of Hollywood sex symbols going into horror once they’re no longer young, so much so that it’s even a named subgenre, “hagsploitation”. An extended sequence of Moore cooking while made up like a frazzled hermit is both shocking and hilarious, and honestly admirable in how she sends up her sex symbol image, allowing herself to be filmed so raw and vulnerable.
I’ll be seeing The Substance again, probably several times. It’s the most exciting and mature horror film to come along in years.
Rating: 4/4
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I just saw Megalopolis and although it’s not cool to say so, I enjoyed it. It’s an eccentric satirical and symbolic piece filled with characters with names like Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), and inspired by the Catilinarian conspiracy of Ancient Rome. Set in the city of New Rome (New York in our world, retaining the icons of that place, like the Chrysler Building and Central Park), it follows an architect called Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver) who’s discovered a miracle substance called Megalon that he plans to use to build Megalopolis, a utopian society regarded with suspicion by the philistines in government.
Developed incrementally over four decades, Godfather maestro Francis Ford Coppola’s vision is fantastic and it’s sad that critics especially have been so hostile to it. Not that anyone needs to like it, but it’s such a visionary and literate film that you’d think it would be appreciated for those qualities, at least. Anything strange and rich in personality, even if a failure, should be regarded as a precious rarity in this age of boilerplate corporate crap.
To address some specific criticisms made, I’ve heard it said that the film doesn’t have a plot until the last 10 minutes when two characters hatch a plan to take over the bank of New Rome. This just isn’t true. Yes, those characters only devise that precise plan near the end, but it’s the natural endpoint of their machinations throughout the story, which is taken up with the various indiscretions and schemes of the upper social strata of New Rome as Cesar tries to sell them on his utopian vision.
It’s been said that the plot at large is incomprehensible which, again, no it isn’t. It’s idiosyncratically told, I guess, and the film isn’t just about its plot. But at a narrative level, it’s easy to comprehend. Cesar Catilina is a genius architect using a miracle substance that expands and rebuilds structures, called Megalon, to design a new city that will improve the quality of life for all of New Rome’s citizens, but Mayor Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito) clings to tradition and is deeply suspicious of utopian thinking. Meanwhile, his daughter Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel) becomes Cesar’s protege and eventually his lover.
There are subplots and all sorts of narrative cul-de-sacs including Cesar’s wrongful arrest for his ex-wife’s murder, an attempt to defame him for deflowering a vestal virgin, and so on, but at a base level, it’s not more convoluted than what I’ve described.
Another specific criticism I’ve seen is of the dialogue, which Mark Kermode said was filled with unspeakable lines that should have stayed unspoken. Driver’s quoting of Hamlet’s “To be or not to be…” speech has come in for a kicking as pretentious and unmotivated, which, and I’m sorry to repeat myself yet again, but… no, it isn’t. It takes place at a televised city planning conference where Cesar is arguing for his vision of Megalopolis, and asking if his audience thinks it’s better to address the city’s problems by letting it die. Since the Shakespeare monologue is about suicide, it makes sense with the theme.
Cesar also has a line later on that’s come in for derision: “There are two things you cannot look at for too long without going blind: the sun, and your own soul.” (Probably slightly paraphrased.) Like the monologue, though, it makes sense in context. He’s addressing someone who’s just revealed a major, shameful indiscretion unbecoming of their office. I feel like in any other movie no one would care about that line, but for some reason, a lot of people seem to have it in for Coppola over this film, the reasons for which are complex.
I don’t say all of this as a Coppola fan. I’m not a fan, really. I like some of his films, my favourite being Apocalypse Now, but I’ve seen far from all of them and find him as a person to be pretty detestable for his alleged role in the traumatisation of Nathan Forrest Winters, a 12-year-old in the late ‘80s who was molested by Coppola’s friend/mentee Victor Salva (who’d go on to be known for the Jeepers Creepers films).
According to Winters, Coppola took over production of the film that Winters was starring in under Salva’s direction (1989’s Clownhouse, shot partially at Coppola’s home and funded by him) when the abuse was revealed, and berated the child about how he’d never work in Hollywood again while demanding he come in to complete vocal elements.
Coppola would go on to try to ameliorate Salva’s culpability by saying that it was a mistake and that Salva had been young too. Hopefully, he didn’t know at least when he made that remark that Winters was seven when the abuse started, and Salva in his late twenties.
So, yeah, this isn’t about polishing Coppola’s knobs or whatever. Artists are flawed human beings, just like plumbers and doctors and hairdressers are, go figure. Accusations have been made of inappropriate behaviour on the set of Megalopolis, though at least one actress has refuted this and hit out at the magazine Variety for publishing video taken from a closed set supposedly to prove Coppola’s misconduct (having watched these videos that show Coppola from behind, I can say that they’re not proof of anything, in my opinion), since Variety’s publication of this material represents a violation of her privacy.
At any rate, it seems as though the critical establishment has in large swathes had it out for Megalopolis. The only thing that sets it apart from the director’s other recent films is the budget and funding, handled by Coppola himself by selling his wineries. Otherwise, he’s been making this sort of strange, symbolic genre fare for well over a decade, including the fantasy romance Youth Without Youth (2007) and horror film Twixt (2011). The nature of time and consciousness has been his predominant theme, combining plots with elements of romance and mystery with abstract arthouse content, more concerned with symbols than simply narrative.
Whatever you think of Megalopolis, it’s a beautiful movie to look at. It’s arguably “pure cinema”, an avant-garde movement that interpreted film as its own medium and focused on using its “language” - montage, close-ups, etc - to create emotional experiences unique to the form. I loved the sci-fi magazine aesthetic to the images of Cesar’s ideal city with all its amazing technology, and the sheer idiosyncrasy of Coppola’s symbolic imagery.
I wouldn’t say that Megalopolis is perfect because it isn’t. It could have done with a twenty-minute trim and has a habit of explaining character decisions in the dialogue that’s very tell-don’t-show, such as when Cesar autographs a child’s book and Julia helpfully informs us, ‘Cesar can never say no to a child.’
What I think that I mostly enjoyed was seeing how the tropes of Ancient Rome are applied to the sci-fi setting and characters, the abstract imagery, and the vision of utopia that Coppola sets out, where people can work together despite their differences to create a better world. The acting is good too, with Jon Voight and Shia LeBeouf giving surprisingly amusing performances as Donald/Eric Trump stand-ins, respectively, while Driver brings his usual gravitas to Cesar.
Rating: 3.5/4
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The basic appeal of the Terrifier films is that they’re of the same crude simplicity as the Friday the 13th franchise (1980 to 2009, as of Halloween 2024) and other Golden Age slashers, but with much more gore that you couldn’t get away with back then. It’s amusing to think of how slashers of yore were pilloried for their supposed assault on taste and values when now movies like Terrifier 3 get 88% on Rotten Tomatoes (when last I checked) despite being much more visceral and explicit than those films ever were.
SFX maestro Damien Leone has sole writer/director credit for all three of the Terrifier films and the story of the franchise is the story of him learning how to make a fully satisfying product. The main antagonist, Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton), appeared in shorts and an anthology, All Hallow’s Eve (2013) - wherein he was played by Mike Giannelli - before Leone brought both clown and Thornton to further attention in 2016’s Terrifier.
That was a film with basically no plot (if you think that the Jason Voorhees outings are thin script-wise, try Terrifier), although it’s a little more sensical than All Hallow’s Eve. I like elements of Terrifier, such as the structural circularity of its narrative (teased with a sign in the first murder scene that displays the phrase “THE END IS JUST A NEW BEGINNING”) and how it opens on Art destroying a television, possibly a reference by the clearly genre-literate Leone to the David Lynch Twin Peaks adaptation Fire Walk with Me (1992).
But really it exists for the gore and nothing else, to a point where for me it’s a “kill count” movie: films where you could get the same experience watching a 10-minute YouTube fan edit of all the death scenes. It’s also arguably the most misogynistic of this series, with an unsettling focus here and there on the destruction, mutilation, and mockery of female sexual organs.
It also, of course, has the wonderful Thornton, mute in all three Terrifier films and who gives a performance that can only be described as “Chaplinesque”. (Sorry, Charlie.) The only motivation he gets in the first film is when a character says that he tortures and kills because "he thinks it’s funny", but that’s all he needs. Thornton’s grinning and capering throughout the franchise is iconic, perfectly straddling that line between horror and humour, slapstick and sadism.
Terrifier 2 (2022) was a marked improvement in both direction, plot, and characters. Suddenly we had a story, mood… three acts, even. It's in 2 that we’re introduced to current series protagonist Sienna Shaw (Lauren LaVera), daughter of a late artist father who struggled with mental illness and conceptualised Sienna as the heroine destined to face Art the Clown, armed with a magic sword. The biggest problem with this entry in the franchise - besides a shrill and obnoxious mother character (who might only grate on me, to be fair) - is that it's two and a half hours long.
It reminds me of when my little sister first made bolognese (stay with me here): she hadn't yet figured out how to separate the meat so that it was evenly distributed amidst the red sauce, so it came out tasty but lumpy. Terrifier 2 is like that. It has all the requisite gore scenes at Leone's typical extreme level, but they almost feel like interruptions from another movie as opposed to following naturally from the plot and character stuff.
This brings us to Terrifier 3, the best of the trilogy, with the greatest ratio of sauce to meat. It's still a touch overlong at just above 2 hours, but it develops a plot-based throughline that even rises to satire and emotion on occasion. It opens with a bravura prologue referencing several classic slashers, including in the Christmas-themed subgenre such as Christmas Evil (1980), which began with the anti-hero as a child coming downstairs to find Santa kissing mummy somewhere he shouldn't be.
There's also a flavour of the once infamous prologue to When a Stranger Calls (1979), which itself was riffing on the urban legend of "the babysitter and the man upstairs". Leone brings to it his unique capacity for gooey and gungy and crunchy effects, splatter strewn about the rooms of a middle-class American family.
From here we're caught up with the continuing lives of Sienna and her little brother Jonathan (Elliot Fullam), now a freshman at university, both of whom survived a massacre by Art that claimed their mother's life. Sienna has just been released from a psychiatric hospital after five years of therapy, but all's not well as the mistletoe's hung... Art the Clown is back from hibernation and keen to try out for Santa's job, accompanied by the demon-possessed remains of Victoria (Samantha Scaffidi), whom he brutally disfigured in the first Terrifier...
If all you want to know is whether this second sequel delivers the bloody goods, then good news, it does. And then some. Rarely have I heard squeals of pleased disgust from a hardened horror audience, but my screening gave them. As if responding to the accusations of misogyny from 2016's Terrifier, Leone focuses in large part here on the male form.
I didn't keep a tally, but most of the victims seem to be middle-aged men, while one young stud has his sexual organs placed in the proverbial meat grinder. If you're religiously sensitive you may not appreciate the blasphemy motif employed throughout (one character is forced to wear a thorny crown), although I can't imagine these films are popular fare for the evangelicals.
Part of my pleasure came from picking up on genre references during the splatter. We get cameos from Clint Howard - who I'm sure Leone knows played a slasher himself in the obscure 1995 direct-to-video feature Ice Cream Man - practical effects whiz Tom Savini, responsible for a lot of the best gore gags in the Friday the 13th series.
When Terrifier 3 was being advertised it caused controversy about its teaser's implication that a child would be killed, on Christmas night, by Art disguised as Santa. As it happens, children are victims in Terrifier 3, but Leone exercises discretion in how that's depicted. (As he'd have to if he wanted certification, I'd imagine.) I don't tend to take such controversies seriously anyway. Those crying offence are generally Twitter denizens who just enjoy being offended.
I consider myself a bit namby-pamby about violence in horror; however, because the Terrifiers are so detached from everyday reality, they don't affect me in a traumatic fashion. That said, Leone's script builds towards a fantastic set piece where Art and Victoria capture Sienna and her extended family. Scaffidi gives the film's breakout performance here, evoking a sense of real, profane evil as foul and brimstone-smelling as anything Art pulls off (so to speak). If you were to watch 2016's Terrifier in isolation, you might not believe that Leone was capable of creating a scene like this, which actually exploits the situation for pity and terror as well as gross-out.
He shoots on real film (or else it seems like real film), which gives his work the grainy feeling of an authentic grindhouse release from the 1980s. More so, in fact, than the adaptations of trailers from Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez's 2007 Grindhouse project, like the recent Eli Roth-helmed Thanksgiving (2023). If you can stomach it, Terrifier 3 is horrible fun. Without spoiling anything, it even teases a 4th entry akin to Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988). Bring on the blood.
Rating: 3/4
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A husband, Jesus (pronounced Hey-Zeus, played by David Pareja) and wife, Maria (Estefanía de los Santos), with their newborn baby, are looking to buy a coffee table. The table is composed of two nude women in faux-gold trim supporting a glass top.
Clearly, it belongs in a bachelor pad as opposed to a young couple’s front room, and the wife makes clear her distaste for it. She’s unpleasant and controlling, he’s frankly a bit dim and probably better suited to eternal singledom (or a wife who wouldn’t mind viewing him essentially as another child to manage).
Nonetheless, he gets his way. Right up until his wife leaves him with the baby and the disassembled table to buy something for lunch, and an unthinkable accident occurs…
I looked up and watched this subtitled Spanish-language film on Shudder after seeing it reviewed on Red Letter Media’s YouTube channel, on which it’s described as having an inciting incident that’s truly, outrageously vile. That’s certainly true.
While I’m not exactly sure what happens with the coffee table, the results are painfully clear and infused with a dark irony concerning the salesman’s claim that its glass is “unbreakable”. From here the film proceeds basically as an extended game of “what would you do if…”
I’m not as enamoured of The Coffee Table as others. (Stephen King raved about it on X, while /Film gave it a perfect score of 10/10. Its Rotten Tomatoes score is 86%.) It’s definitely worth watching if you enjoy outre horror premises and some things are good about it.
The four main characters, Jesus and Maria and another couple who show up for lunch are well-characterised and strongly performed. They feel like real people, and their actions proceed from whom we perceive them to be, adding tension to the plot as it takes on a horrible verisimilitude.
The premise, however, as distinctively cruel as it is, is better suited to a short than a feature, requiring a lot of drawn-out and repetitive scenes after a certain point. Its weakest elements, though, are oddly its most comedic, given that it’s marketed as a black comedy.
Its “comedy” scenes often come across as merely puzzling and fatuous, and misguided in the extreme. There’s an inexplicable subplot about a 13-year-old neighbour girl who’s infatuated with Jesus and threatens to tell his wife about an affair she thinks they’re having.
I have no idea why the girl needed to be 13. The only thing I can think is that since up until 2013 the age of consent in Spain was 13 (it’s since been set at 16), her age is a piece of culturally specific humour that I don’t get.
It still feels like something you’d see in a bad film from 40 years ago, however, before studios realised that sexual interactions between adults and minors aren’t hilarious. Also, perhaps this is me being overly woke, but it’s gross to have an underage actress say some of the things that this script requires her to.
On a story level it also just muddles the central thread, which should be focused morally on the dead baby in the room. Not weird tangents about whether or not the father is a child molester.
Similarly, a scene with the salesman who sold Jesus the coffee table starts well with a lot of Hitchcock-style tension but then degenerates into a weird “comedy” bit where it seems like the balding, fiftysomething (judging by appearance) salesman is trying to have sex with him. The joke being… search me.
I genuinely don’t know what the scene is trying to communicate. That the salesman has marked his customer as so dim and pliable that he can exploit him for sex? Haha?
Again, maybe I’m just out of step with the state of comedy in Spain. The film works well for the first 45 or so minutes, which is probably how long it should have been, and the ending is very good, a hard and inevitable twist. The best part of The Coffee Table is its probing illustration of that horrible question: what on earth would YOU do in this situation?
Rating: 2.5/4
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I just saw Conclave and it was great. Based on a novel by Robert Harris, it deals with the sequestering period in the Catholic Church when a pope dies and the cardinals must elect their successor. Ralph Fiennes plays the Dean of the College of Cardinals, Thomas Lawrence, a stoic and serious man caught up in internecine squabbling after a prologue in which he and his peers gather around the late pope’s deathbed, accompanied by candidates for succession including Tremblay (John Lithgow) and Bellini (Stanley Tucci). As the conclave begins and the cardinals vote, ambition and skullduggery bubble up.
I really enjoyed this film. I didn’t realise how much I was in the mood for an intelligent, extremely stylish thriller where the focus is on setting and characterisation to such a degree that it doesn’t rely on the usual violent set pieces and melodrama common to Hollywood films. Nor does it feel too small-scale, though, like it would be better suited to television, a la The Queen (2006) and other films that dramatise arcane institutions.
In this way it’s a small miracle by director Edward Berger, whose cinematography and score are exquisite, the latter mining mystery and tension to a level that you’d expect from a Hitchcockian movie with superficially higher stakes; and screenwriter Peter Straughan, whose dialogue crackles like that which you’d find in a classic noir. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, he has a play called Noir.)
The performances are fairly uniformly excellent. Fiennes is always fantastic and this is one of his typical imperious, troubled/troubling authority figures, although this time the dial leans towards troubled and Dean Lawrence is one of his more sympathetic characters. Lithgow is one of my favourite actors and elevates the ambitious, reptilian character whom he plays here. Tucci accentuates the complexity of his liberal but weak-willed cardinal.
The story’s themes of election, ambition, political skullduggery, fear-based conservatism versus progressive ideals, and sexual scandal are so prescient that I wonder if the film was commissioned to reflect the American election and invite comparison. In that context, Conclave’s final twist feels charmingly naive. It appeals to the cardinals’ better natures and the unstoppability of social progress. If only.
Rating: 3.5/4
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