Horror motion pictures have taught us to shudder earlier than a toilet mirror, lest an assailant abruptly seem, looming behind an unsuspecting protagonist, because the medicine-cabinet door swings shut. However not all reflections are leap scares in ready, and never all victims and predators are distinguishable. This week brings two footage, every a conceptually daring, mordantly humorous cautionary story, during which a mirror bears witness to an astonishing transformation—a miracle, or so it appears, that regularly curdles right into a nightmare. In “A Totally different Man,” a disfigured face is peeled off, revealing easy pores and skin and chiselled options simply beneath. In “The Substance,” a lady’s dream of everlasting youth is fulfilled as she offers violent beginning to her personal youthful, shapelier doppelgänger. You needn’t be a David Cronenberg fan (although I think one of many filmmakers is) to seek out your self murmuring his most well-known mantra: “Lengthy reside the brand new flesh.”
In “A Totally different Man,” a thrillingly mercurial third function from the author and director Aaron Schimberg, Sebastian Stan performs Edward Lemuel, a mild-mannered New Yorker with a genetic dysfunction known as neurofibromatosis. With bulging tumors above the neck, he’s “facially totally different,” within the parlance of a office sensitivity-training video during which he seems as an actor. However little such sensitivity greets Edward in the true world. Folks gawk and flinch on the subway; a comely neighbor, Ingrid (Renate Reinsve), upon assembly him, lets out an involuntary shriek. She and Edward quickly strike up a friendship, however the suspicion lingers that Ingrid, an aspiring author, may be nosing round for good materials. Certain sufficient, she later drafts a semi-biographical play, titled “Edward,” which she retains shredding and rewriting, struggling to stroll an empathetic tightrope over an exploitative chasm.
Schimberg is consciously strolling that tightrope himself, although with such assurance and daring that, at instances, he’s virtually dancing. He has ingeniously structured “A Totally different Man” round a theme of mutability, with switchblade twists, droll reversals of tone, and a fluid sense of style. The scenes in Edward’s condo, a dump with a suggestively rotting gap within the ceiling, are a research in close-quarters paranoia, the digicam prowling about like a trapped cat. Later, the film turns into a mad-scientist fiction: Edward topics himself to an experimental-drug trial, which proves stunningly profitable. Stan, now prosthetically unmasked, tasks Edward’s shock and exhilaration as a former pariah who abruptly finds himself an object of admiration, envy, and need. However there may be additionally a quiet unease on this dewy new pores and skin. Edward, quite than acknowledge his medical miracle, takes on a wholly totally different id. His new identify, amusingly, is Man.
Even so, his former life beckons. In a Ripley-esque twist, Edward/Man worms his means again into Ingrid’s life, and into the lead function in “Edward,” an element he was certainly born to play. Or was he? Earlier than lengthy, he and the film are navigating the aesthetic pitfalls of appropriation and authenticity—ideas that the script will get at, shrewdly, with out naming them. At each flip, Schimberg unleashes a nervy fusillade of concepts: concerning the unequal distribution of bodily magnificence, the social privilege that such magnificence instructions, the problem of attempting to probe these inequities via artwork. The director broached a few of these in “Chained for Life” (2019), a cool-toned mental thriller that prominently options the English actor Adam Pearson, who really has neurofibromatosis. Schimberg’s masterstroke in “A Totally different Man” is to deploy Pearson once more, casting him as a roving bystander, Oswald, whom he lobs, like a grenade, into Edward/Man’s path.
No matter resemblance there may be between Oswald and pre-op Edward, it ends on the bodily: Oswald, removed from being shy or forlorn, is the very image of self-assurance—urbane, gregarious, effusively charming. Blessed with Pearson’s burbling wit, Oswald swiftly demolishes considered one of Edward’s foundational lies—that look confers future—and turns the film’s very premise on its head. He additionally permits Schimberg to name his personal storytelling selections into query, with delirious abandon.
Within the curiosity of rejecting Hollywood ableism, would it not not have been wiser to solid Pearson as Edward 1.0? Maybe, although doing so might need changed one number of inauthenticity with one other, denying us the beautiful sad-sack physicality of Stan’s efficiency: the defeated droop of his shoulders, the twitchy uncertainty over what to do along with his arms. However then, within the context of what Schimberg is attempting to impress—a dismantling of typical requirements of attractiveness—does Stan’s slippery triumph right here depend as a sort of failure? Remarkably, because the film accelerates into wilder, bloodier terrain, these contradictions don’t tear it aside; they deepen it. Schimberg might have concocted a madly ingenious thought experiment, however to say that “A Totally different Man” merely deconstructs itself would miss how fully and satisfyingly it comes collectively. It’s a factor of magnificence.
The Substance, in “The Substance,” is a neon-yellow fluid that, when injected into your veins, causes you to black out; inside moments, “a more moderen, higher you” springs forth, absolutely shaped, from a gaping orifice alongside your backbone. How precisely your physique survives this trauma is one of some questions that the author and director Coralie Fargeat (“Revenge”) leaves unanswered. (The unseen producers of the Substance, working behind nameless lockboxes and a terse customer-service hotline, are not any extra forthcoming.) However such is the Faustian cut price struck by Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), a light Hollywood star who has simply been fired, for blatantly ageist causes, from an aerobics present she’s hosted for many years. Alone and forgotten, she requires little persuading to check out the Substance and its promise of a second youth.
And so emerges Sue (Margaret Qualley), a citadel of bodily perfection who, with taut glutes, voluptuous strikes, and completely pink-chronized lipstick and leotard, lands Elisabeth’s previous job very quickly. However the previous flesh will not be so simply solid apart. The catch of the Substance is that Elisabeth/Sue is now one particular person in two codependent our bodies, caught in a brutally unforgiving routine—involving liquid meals packs, stabilizer fluids, and a nightmarish equipment of intravenous units—that makes even the fiercest diet-and-workout routine appear like a visit to Shake Shack. Most inconvenient of all, just one physique could be acutely aware at any second, and Elisabeth/Sue should change vessels at strict seven-day intervals. “Respect the stability,” the hotline intones, warning that the slightest deviation may have dire penalties. How dire? Let’s simply say that the Substance is principally the Combination of Dorian Grey.
Fargeat’s film could be known as many issues: a body-horror buffet, a feminist cri de coeur, an evisceration of the sunny, surface-obsessed Los Angeles the place it unfolds. It’s additionally a film of course of, intentionally paced, exactingly noticed, and no much less gripping for its typically gruelling repetitions. All the pieces is exaggerated, from the cavernous expanse and darkish monochrome partitions of Elisabeth/Sue’s condo, which amplify her crushing solitude, to the uniform boorishness of the lads on the margins, particularly Elisabeth’s former boss (a repellent Dennis Quaid). Most flagrant is the Grand Guignol climax, during which Fargeat’s emphatic allusions to “Black Swan,” “Demise Turns into Her,” “Sisters,” and different classics of double-decker feminine rage (plus a touch of “Vertigo”) repay in spectacularly sanguinary style.
Such exaggeration, after all, is endemic to the language of each horror and satire, although whether or not it proves the glory or the undoing of “The Substance” is a thorny query. Within the months for the reason that film premièred, on the Cannes Movie Pageant, the place it received a screenplay prize, critics have without delay hailed and assailed its worth as a #MeToo-era provocation. Fargeat’s consideration of the feminine type leads her towards unsparing visible extremes, lingering on Moore’s and Qualley’s nude our bodies one second, pushing Moore towards haggard Baba Yaga cosplay the subsequent. In making a near-fetish of each the beautiful and the grotesque, does she reinforce the reductive, objectifying imagery that she seeks to name out? For me, the film’s deeper flaw lies in its scattershot dualism: via no fault of the actresses, the sense that we’re watching one lady divided towards herself, the sufferer of a self-inflicted psychological mitosis, by no means springs persuasively to life.
Moore, nevertheless, is persuasive, and for causes which might be painful to contemplate. On the top of her nineties stardom, she drew misogynist jabs aplenty from the press, who focused her motion pictures, her performances, and her private life. Now sixty-one, and with a quieter Hollywood profile, she is as poignant an emblem of sexist, ageist business neglect as Fargeat might have hoped to conjure. However Moore’s casting is greater than only a symbolic coup. Probably the most shattering second in “The Substance” belongs to her alone: in a sequence of wrenching simplicity, Elisabeth, getting ready for a uncommon evening in town, stares with utter desolation into her lavatory mirror, and what it displays will not be horror however heartache. A few of us will all the time see what we don’t need to see. ♦