Horror movies have taught us to shudder before a bathroom mirror, lest an assailant suddenly appear, looming behind an unsuspecting protagonist, as the medicine-cabinet door swings shut. But not all reflections are jump scares in waiting, and not all victims and predators are distinguishable. This week brings two pictures, each a conceptually bold, mordantly funny cautionary tale, in which a mirror bears witness to an astonishing transformation—a miracle, or so it seems, that gradually curdles into a nightmare. In “A Different Man,” a disfigured face is peeled off, revealing smooth skin and chiselled features just underneath. In “The Substance,” a woman’s dream of eternal youth is fulfilled as she gives violent birth to her own younger, shapelier doppelgänger. You needn’t be a David Cronenberg fan (though I suspect one of the filmmakers is) to find yourself murmuring his most famous mantra: “Long live the new flesh.”
In “A Different Man,” a thrillingly mercurial third feature from the writer and director Aaron Schimberg, Sebastian Stan plays Edward Lemuel, a mild-mannered New Yorker with a genetic disorder called neurofibromatosis. With bulging tumors above the neck, he’s “facially different,” in the parlance of a workplace sensitivity-training video in which he appears as an actor. But little such sensitivity greets Edward in the real world. People gawk and flinch on the subway; a comely neighbor, Ingrid (Renate Reinsve), upon meeting him, lets out an involuntary shriek. She and Edward soon strike up a friendship, but the suspicion lingers that Ingrid, an aspiring writer, might be nosing around for good material. Sure enough, she later drafts a semi-biographical play, titled “Edward,” which she keeps shredding and rewriting, struggling to walk an empathetic tightrope over an exploitative chasm.
Schimberg is consciously walking that tightrope himself, though with such assurance and daring that, at times, he’s practically dancing. He has ingeniously structured “A Different Man” around a theme of mutability, with switchblade twists, droll reversals of tone, and a fluid sense of genre. The scenes in Edward’s apartment, a dump with a suggestively rotting hole in the ceiling, are a study in close-quarters paranoia, the camera prowling about like a trapped cat. Later, the movie becomes a mad-scientist fiction: Edward subjects himself to an experimental-drug trial, which proves stunningly successful. Stan, now prosthetically unmasked, projects Edward’s shock and exhilaration as a former pariah who suddenly finds himself an object of admiration, envy, and desire. But there is also a quiet unease in this dewy new skin. Edward, rather than acknowledge his medical miracle, takes on an entirely different identity. His new name, amusingly, is Guy.
Even so, his former life beckons. In a Ripley-esque twist, Edward/Guy worms his way back into Ingrid’s life, and into the lead role in “Edward,” a part he was surely born to play. Or was he? Before long, he and the movie are navigating the aesthetic pitfalls of appropriation and authenticity—concepts that the script gets at, shrewdly, without naming them. At every turn, Schimberg unleashes a nervy fusillade of ideas: about the unequal distribution of physical beauty, the social privilege that such beauty commands, the challenge of trying to probe these inequities through art. The director broached some of these in “Chained for Life” (2019), a cool-toned intellectual thriller that prominently features the English actor Adam Pearson, who actually has neurofibromatosis. Schimberg’s masterstroke in “A Different Man” is to deploy Pearson again, casting him as a roving bystander, Oswald, whom he lobs, like a grenade, into Edward/Guy’s path.
Whatever resemblance there is between Oswald and pre-op Edward, it ends at the physical: Oswald, far from being shy or forlorn, is the very picture of self-assurance—urbane, gregarious, effusively charming. Blessed with Pearson’s burbling wit, Oswald swiftly demolishes one of Edward’s foundational lies—that appearance confers destiny—and turns the movie’s very premise on its head. He also allows Schimberg to call his own storytelling choices into question, with delirious abandon.
In the interest of rejecting Hollywood ableism, would it not have been wiser to cast Pearson as Edward 1.0? Perhaps, though doing so might have replaced one variety of inauthenticity with another, denying us the exquisite sad-sack physicality of Stan’s performance: the defeated slump of his shoulders, the twitchy uncertainty over what to do with his hands. But then, in the context of what Schimberg is trying to provoke—a dismantling of conventional standards of attractiveness—does Stan’s slippery triumph here count as a kind of failure? Remarkably, as the movie accelerates into wilder, bloodier terrain, these contradictions don’t tear it apart; they deepen it. Schimberg may have concocted a madly inventive thought experiment, but to say that “A Different Man” merely deconstructs itself would miss how completely and satisfyingly it comes together. It’s a thing of beauty.
The Substance, in “The Substance,” is a neon-yellow fluid that, when injected into your veins, causes you to black out; within moments, “a newer, better you” springs forth, fully formed, from a gaping orifice along your spine. How exactly your body survives this trauma is one of a few questions that the writer and director Coralie Fargeat (“Revenge”) leaves unanswered. (The unseen manufacturers of the Substance, operating behind anonymous lockboxes and a terse customer-service hotline, are no more forthcoming.) But such is the Faustian bargain struck by Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), a faded Hollywood star who has just been fired, for blatantly ageist reasons, from an aerobics show she’s hosted for decades. Alone and forgotten, she requires little persuading to try out the Substance and its promise of a second youth.
And so emerges Sue (Margaret Qualley), a citadel of physical perfection who, with taut glutes, voluptuous moves, and perfectly pink-chronized lipstick and leotard, lands Elisabeth’s old job in no time. But the old flesh is not so easily cast aside. The catch of the Substance is that Elisabeth/Sue is now one person in two codependent bodies, stuck in a brutally unforgiving regimen—involving liquid food packs, stabilizer fluids, and a nightmarish kit of intravenous devices—that makes even the fiercest diet-and-workout routine look like a trip to Shake Shack. Most inconvenient of all, only one body can be conscious at any moment, and Elisabeth/Sue must switch vessels at strict seven-day intervals. “Respect the balance,” the hotline intones, warning that the slightest deviation will have dire consequences. How dire? Let’s just say that the Substance is basically the Mixture of Dorian Gray.
Fargeat’s movie can be called many things: a body-horror buffet, a feminist cri de coeur, an evisceration of the sunny, surface-obsessed Los Angeles where it unfolds. It’s also a movie of process, deliberately paced, exactingly observed, and no less gripping for its sometimes gruelling repetitions. Everything is exaggerated, from the cavernous expanse and dark monochrome walls of Elisabeth/Sue’s apartment, which amplify her crushing solitude, to the uniform boorishness of the men on the margins, especially Elisabeth’s former boss (a repellent Dennis Quaid). Most flagrant is the Grand Guignol climax, in which Fargeat’s emphatic allusions to “Black Swan,” “Death Becomes Her,” “Sisters,” and other classics of double-decker female rage (plus a dash of “Vertigo”) pay off in spectacularly sanguinary fashion.
Such exaggeration, of course, is endemic to the language of both horror and satire, though whether it proves the glory or the undoing of “The Substance” is a thorny question. In the months since the movie premièred, at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won a screenplay prize, critics have at once hailed and assailed its value as a #MeToo-era provocation. Fargeat’s consideration of the female form leads her toward unsparing visual extremes, lingering on Moore’s and Qualley’s nude bodies one moment, pushing Moore toward haggard Baba Yaga cosplay the next. In making a near-fetish of both the lovely and the grotesque, does she reinforce the reductive, objectifying imagery that she seeks to call out? For me, the movie’s deeper flaw lies in its scattershot dualism: through no fault of the actresses, the sense that we’re watching one woman divided against herself, the victim of a self-inflicted psychological mitosis, never springs persuasively to life.
Moore, however, is persuasive, and for reasons that are painful to consider. At the height of her nineties stardom, she drew misogynist jabs aplenty from the press, who targeted her movies, her performances, and her personal life. Now sixty-one, and with a quieter Hollywood profile, she is as poignant an emblem of sexist, ageist industry neglect as Fargeat could have hoped to conjure. But Moore’s casting is more than just a symbolic coup. The most shattering moment in “The Substance” belongs to her alone: in a sequence of wrenching simplicity, Elisabeth, preparing for a rare night on the town, stares with utter desolation into her bathroom mirror, and what it reflects is not horror but heartache. Some of us will always see what we don’t want to see. ♦
