Substance

Over three decades ago when I first started watching horror, my criteria were very limited. If a movie didn’t resemble Hellraiser or The Thing, I would rarely give it a chance, although despite that, I still watched everything, even gore and teen slasher films, which took quite some time before I started liking them. After a certain point when I could distinguish the different horror genres, I began to enjoy each one for what it had to offer, from sci-fi elements to campy horror comedies.

The Substance is that one-in-a-million film that combines and even transcends these genres. Body horror, gore, sci-fi, psychological, thriller, drama, comedy—all packed into a two-and-a-half-hour rollercoaster of terror that takes you places you wouldn’t imagine. Having already watched Speak No Evil, which I thought was fantastic this week, and with the even better Strange Darling to follow, I expected to “see something good” with The Substance, but certainly not the masterpiece I ended up watching. The film grabs you from the start and shovels elements of raw realism from the entertainment industry in your face, blending them perfectly with surreal elements in a way that the word “exaggeration” simply pales in comparison. And it does so by bouncing you like a tennis ball between scenes of utter depression, calmness, and loneliness, to a swamp of noise, colors, and pseudo-happiness, simply because that’s exactly how this phase is. When it’s not doing that, it pushes you to float in an apparently innocent and everyday scene, which, when it ends, leaves you with a shocking hidden meaning that always has roots in the voracious entertainment industry, the people behind it, and not only that.

I don’t want to compare it to anything; the movie stands on its own for what it is. It definitely winks at and pays homage to the greats of the genre (Kubrick, Cronenberg, Aronofsky, etc.), with thematic elements from horror comedies like Death Becomes Her, but without letting the comedy, the body horror, or any other element define or swallow it. I left the theater with that rare feeling of having watched a movie I will see again and again in the years to come, and which will be compared to the best of the genre. It is definitely “my new favorite horror movie,” . Honestly, when the movie ended, I wanted to thank every single person involved for what I had just watched.

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