Films like The Substance: Rediscovering Titles are similar to the most fascinating body horror of the year.
Without a doubt among the most interesting titles of the 2024 cinematic year, The Substance directed by French director Coralie Fargeat has startled critics and cinephiles for its seductive and ambiguous charge, balanced between body horror and showbiz satire. But which are those films that we could define as similar or with some analogy compared to this fascinating and controversial film starring Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley? Let's find out in our top five titles that you should absolutely recover.
Themes and style of The Substance
The seductive and engaging film by the French director is an anomalous body horror that mixes black comedy and tragic psychodrama, in which at the center is the decadent parable of a showbiz star (played by Demi Moore in great form) and the obsession for the cult of beauty, and how it is conveyed by media standards, through the terror of the passing of time.
In short, The Substance is undoubtedly an ambitious product that manages to mix lightness and tragedy, the tones of the horrid and those of psychological anguish. On an aesthetic level, purely formal, the film seems to be able to change register, moving from almost Lynchian atmospheres (in the final part there is space, for example, for a sort of reference to Elephant Man, but we could also find elements on the female doubling, present in Mulholland Drive) to other refinements that expressly recall the cinema of Stanley Kubrick and to stay in more modern times, to the cinema of another great aesthete and provocateur, such as Yorgos Lanthimos. In this sense, the use of central perspective in various shots and the elegance with which the interior spaces are outlined are examples to consider.
Let's go, therefore, to discover which films can have valid points of contact with Fargeat's film, pointing out five titles.
1. Society (1989)
A great cult of horror cinema, Brian Yuzna's film is one of the first examples of body horror cinema (also known as Body Horror) to use the genre to set up a social satire, in this case against the hypocritical American bourgeoisie of the 80s. The final part of the film is very famous, in which we are catapulted into a real orgiastic sequence of bodies that are made and unmade, that liquefy and regenerate with a bizarre and ironic charge. Something that, probably, Fargeat herself must have remembered for the final part of her The Substance, even if conveyed differently and to talk to us about something else.
2. Death Becomes Her (1992)
The story, over several years, of two friends-rivals from Beverly Hills. A writer (Goldie Hawn) and an actress (Meryl Streep), obsessed with the fear of growing old, buy an elixir of long life from a seductive and mysterious “sorceress” (Isabella Rossellini) that makes them practically immortal.
The one who pays the price is the man who has “put up with” them for years (Bruce Willis), the husband of the latter and attracted to the former, an alcoholic and well-paid surgeon.
A black comedy that in 1992 had a good hold thanks to the digital effects (by George Lucas’ Industrial Light & Magic) and the very inspired cast, in which the two divas Streep and Hawn tower over the others histrionically and self-deprecatingly.
The result is a brilliant and peppery comedy, although not so provocative in its satirical intent, but biting in its own way, based on female hostility and envy, but also on the determined coalition force that can arise from the “fairer sex”.
But, what this brilliant black comedy and the recent The Substance have in common in advance is above all its small reflection on the society of appearances and on the acceptance of one's own body and of the time that is changing drastically.
3. ExistenZ (1999)
Allegra Geller created the virtual reality game eXistenZ, which involves the use of a semi-organic device (a gamepod) connected to a pseudo-umbilical cord, to be inserted into the players' bodies through a hole in the spine. Ted Pikul, an employee of Antenna Research, saves her from an attack during a public demonstration. Once inside the game, the two go through a labyrinth of fictitious experiences at the end of which it is discovered that everything was another virtual game (transCendenZ), created by a rival company.
A curious science fiction thriller in which David Cronenberg plays with the body and technology, almost abolishing the latter, machines are now "corporeal toys", virtual reality cannot separate from our dimension in a pessimistic vortex. The two-dimensional aspect (between two parallel worlds) links this film from the late 90s to The Substance, in which the parallel dimensions are those experienced respectively by the two protagonists, arising from the same body, through the body, just like in Cronenberg's work, in which the human body becomes a viaticum for new experiences and new worlds.
4. The Lobster (2015)
In The Substance, one could say that there is something of the cinema of Yorgos Lanthimos, especially in the aesthetics, made of elegant camera movements and perspective research inherited from Stanley Kubrick (not surprisingly, some shots and sets seem to recall A Clockwork Orange and The Shining). As if the formal refinement were not enough, between the film of the French director and the cinema of the Greek director we can find a certain analogy in the desire to be controversial and, therefore, to tackle issues of social development head-on.
In the case of The Lobster, one of the best films by the Greek director, we can expand this analogy with The Substance to the “metamorphosis” factor. It is no coincidence that in the 2015 film, starring Colin Farrell, the central theme is that of being “homologated” to social rules (not being able to be single anymore), under penalty of transformation, after a clinical examination, into an animal of one’s choice. The bodily change, therefore, is the needle on the scale to be “tolerated” by a society that imposes an absurd diktat.
5. Replace (2017)
Another interesting title that you should recover if you enjoyed The Substance, is this horror thriller that has remained rather unpublished by most. The story is of a girl who suffers from amnesia and discovers that she is undergoing a ferocious skin aging, starting from one hand. In search of a remedy, she finds empathy and affection from the young and charming neighbor, with whom she falls in love. But, she will soon have to find extreme remedies for extreme evils. Once again, the theme of bodily change and the passing of time, the terror of aging, are at the basis of this small-scale production, in which Richard Stanley, known to most for Demoniaca and The Color Out of Space, has a hand (in co-direction).