The Substance, by Coralie Fargeat. How to make a film out of the filmmaker's brutal despise of the female gender.
"How to Make a Horror Film Out of the Filmmaker's Brutal Disdain for her own Gender .” A review of Coralie Fargeat’s anti-feminist stance in The Substance (2024). When a friend first recommended The Substance to me, mentioning its thematic association with Dorian Gray, I assumed, perhaps naively, that the protagonist would be male. However, I did not investigate further, and was consequently unprepared for the film's content. Upon viewing the film at the Odeon in Oxford one evening of October 2024, it quickly became evident that the director sought to engage with the tradition of narratives exploring the theme of the "double"—as exemplified in works ranging from Frankenstein to The Picture of Dorian Gray —and construct a “mirror” image to represent duality within the complex identity of a troubled female psyche. And in doing so, she appealed to iconic cult horror films such as Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and Stanley Kubrick's Shining (1980). The d...