Horror

The Substance: Twice as Vice

Jeremy BeckReviews
Demi Moore in The Substance

Coralie Fargeat’s first feature, about a female plaything who gets used up and left for dead only to rise from the metaphorical ashes and transform into a retaliatory angel, was aptly called Revenge. The same title might also apply to The Substance, Fargeat’s explosive, provocative, and decidedly gonzo follow-up of feminist reduction and wrath. Revenge, one of the best movies of 2018, was memorable in part for how it kept things small; its taut, sharp setting, involving just a handful of people and locations, imbued its typical thriller construction with an elemental ferocity. In quantitative terms, The Substance is similarly intimate—there are only two characters of any depth—but its scope is far more expansive, creating an intricate mythology while taking satirical aim at the boys’-club institution that is Hollywood. The target of Fargeat’s vengeance is no longer one man but the male gaze altogether.

What persists, beyond an undercurrent (overcurrent?) of righteous anger, is her supple craftsmanship. The Substance is a big movie full of garish violence and sweeping ideas, but its images are composed with elegance and precision. Consider its first few scenes. The ominous opening shot finds an unknown hand pumping a liquid into the curdled yolk of a fried egg, which then magically belches out another foodstuff that looks nearly identical, except that it’s slightly more pristine; as your eye takes pleasure in the contrasting colors—the yellow yolk sits on a complementary sky-blue surface, while the fluid is a distinctive puke-green—your brain instantly downloads both the film’s inherent mystery and its thematic preoccupation with doubling. Then comes the time-lapsed overhead view of a Walk of Fame star, progressing from its flawless manufacture to its gradual disintegration: the life cycle of a Hollywood starlet, distilled into a few cracks of stone. Without moving her camera or opening her mouth, Fargeat has primed you for her ensuing fable about the perils of female aging in Tinseltown. Read More

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Speak No Evil, Beetlejuice 2, and Movies Nobody Asked For

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Michael Keaton in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice; James McAvoy in Speak No Evil

One of the most common rhetorical questions you’ll find on the internet, posed in response to the green-lighting of a new movie, is “Who asked for this?” It’s a derisive expression meant to impugn the upcoming film’s artistic integrity and belittle its commercial viability, even if it really functions as a statement of personal taste; the literal answer to the question is invariably, “Lots of people, just not you.” It’s also correlative of asking whether a picture is “necessary,” which is equally foolish. Strictly speaking, no work of art is necessary because we’re talking about entertainment, not food or shelter; philosophically speaking, art is absolutely necessary because it provides us with pleasure, anger, knowledge, and the opportunity to get mad at people online when they disagree with us. We may not need movies to survive, but to quote the captain from Wall-E, I don’t want to survive—I want to live.

And yet: In our era of perpetual IP churn, it’s occasionally worth pondering why certain pictures are made, and whether their cinematic execution can transcend their facially dubious justification (which is, of course, that studio executives hope they might make money). The two movies currently atop the domestic box office, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and Speak No Evil, inspire this sort of metaphysical musing, given that they’re typal cousins: the long-delayed sequel to a beloved classic, and the English-language remake of an acclaimed foreign work. They both have their virtues; they both also raise questions about whether they should exist at all. Read More

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Blink Twice, Strange Darling, and the Third-Act Problem

Jeremy BeckFeatures, Reviews
Channing Tatum in Blink Twice; Willa Fitzgerald in Strange Darling

Movies are built for catharsis. Regardless of genre—the romantic comedy’s race through the airport, the murder mystery’s unmasking of the killer, the sports picture’s big game—cinematic endings are designed to cash the checks that their films have spent the past two acts writing. The paradox of this construction, at least when it comes to the modern thriller, is that most directors are more skilled at building tension than unleashing bedlam. Auteurs such as Ari Aster, Osgood Perkins, and M. Night Shyamalan (to name a few) are all capable craftsmen, wielding their razor-sharp technique to amplify our unease, but while they’re skilled at manufacturing suspense, they often struggle to pay it off in ways that are genuinely unpredictable or exciting.

Last weekend saw two new releases acutely vulnerable to this common pitfall. One tumbles into it. The other does its best to evade it, partly by rewiring its chronology. At the risk of evoking that head-tapping “Roll Safe” meme, your third act can’t ruin your movie’s ending if it arrives in the first 15 minutes. Read More

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Alien: Romulus: Razed by Wolves

Jeremy BeckReviews
Cailee Spaeny and David Jonsson in Alien: Romulus

The first Alien was a very scary movie, but it also spawned a franchise that was unusually fearless in terms of reinvention. Made seven years apart, Ridley Scott’s singular original and James Cameron’s pluralized sequel share a few commonalities (Sigourney Weaver, those snarling xenomorphs), but they’re dramatically different in terms of tone and style; one is a gritty, claustrophobic creature feature, while the other is a boisterous, kinetic action extravaganza. David Fincher’s Alien 3 isn’t nearly as good as either of its predecessors, but it earns points for its despairing atmosphere and its defiant refusal to just replay the hits.

But the longer a series runs, the harder it is for each new installment to distinguish itself. Alien: Romulus, which is either the seventh or ninth episode (depending on whether you count its crossovers with the Predator pictures) of outer-space screaming, is a modestly diverting blockbuster, featuring some decent character work and a few scenes of nerve-jangling suspense. But it lacks a true identity or personality, instead feebly mirroring the first Alien (and the underrated Resurrection). The only thing scarier than a monster bursting from your chest, it seems, is the prospect of nudging this franchise in a new direction. Read More

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Longlegs: Into the Spider-Curse

Jeremy BeckReviews
Maika Monroe in Longlegs

It’s fashionable to judge horror movies based on how scary they are. It’s a fair albeit reductive question; if comedies are supposed to make you laugh and tearjerkers are designed to make you cry, then a good fright flick should presumably make you catch your breath and clutch your armrests. By this measure, Longlegs, the fourth feature from writer-director Osgood Perkins, is moderately successful; it’s a thoroughly unsettling experience, even if it’s unlikely to have you covering your eyes in abject terror. But in terms of cinematic construction—its building of mood, its manufacture of tension, its rattling spookiness—Longlegs is a small-scale triumph. This may not be the scariest modern horror movie ever made, but it is surely one of the creepiest.

Conceptually speaking, this is nothing new for Perkins, whose prior pictures—the re-titled Blackcoat’s Daughter (changed from February), the annoyingly titled I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, and the gender-flip-titled Gretel & Hansel—all cultivated an inescapable sense of doom. They felt weird and looked great (Gretel & Hansel made my Best Cinematography ballot in 2020), but they prioritized bone-chilling atmosphere over legible plotting. With Longlegs, Perkins has properly calibrated his nerve-jangling sensibility, locating the proper balance between apprehension and entertainment. He hasn’t curtailed his gift for upsetting his audience—a number of scenes here are deeply disturbing—so much as channeled it into a more propulsive story. He has his cake and taints it too. Read More

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