‘The Substance’ and ‘A Different Man’ are the perfect Halloween double feature this year
In today’s day and age of social media glorying perfect bodies and airbrushed faces, it’s rare to find someone who is absolutely secure about how they look. And that’s why, for Halloween this year, the scariest thing you can do is catch a double feature of The Substance and A Different Man.
Both The Substance and A Different Man are essentially about insecure actors changing their outsides in the hope that their lives will drastically improve. They’re convinced that it would fix everything that’s not going their way because their appearance is the biggest impediment in them achieving success, love, money, respect, everything. They seek the help of science and medicine, illegal drugs and experimental treatments with risk to life. And to an extent, the new version of them does make life better…
But that’s when the real horror strikes—being beautiful on the outside doesn’t actually fix what was wrong on the inside. The issues only fester, to a point where these two protagonists became the embodiment of the very ugliness that they projected on themselves as others’ perception of them. And that’s what makes it scary, particularly for our current times where we’re all so busy using filters and treatments to make our outsides pretty, while we should be going to therapy to work on our insecurities and complexes and learning to treat ourselves with the same love and kindness we expect others to treat us with.
The Substance is easily a Halloween darling this year. People are already turning “The Substance mask” into a quick, last-minute Halloween costume that’s easy to pull off. The film isn’t just your run-of-the-mill body horror flick, but a wickedly clever satire about ageing, vanity, and the pressure created by the impossible beauty standards that are set for women despite all the conversation about body positivity and graceful ageing. It’s depiction of body dysmorphia is an incisive one—how despite being repeatedly told that both the body that you don’t like and the one you do are one and the same, and they’re both you, we’re rough on the parts of us we deem unworthy.
In the film, Demi Moore (in an award-worthy performance) plays Elizabeth Sparkle, a once-famous Hollywood bombshell living in Los Angeles, whose star is now fading. She’s about to be replaced in the one headlining gig for a fitness show by someone younger. Elizabeth then gets turned on to mysterious illegal treatment called ‘The Substance’, which creates a younger version of her, named Sue (a brilliantly unsettling Margaret Qualley). At first, it’s all rosy and fabulous as the perky Sue takes over Elizabeth’s life, her job, and resurrects her dead social life. But Sue is volatile, and Elizabeth cannot even fathom the side-effects that this neon green drug are going to wreck on her body and psyche. Let’s just say, Liz loses every last bit of her sparkle, and in the film’s climax, we get an ugly monster that director Coralie Fargeat described as “Picasso of male expectations” of a woman’s ideal body!
Watching The Substance with a 1000+ enthusiastic cinema lovers when it was screened as part of the MAMI Mumbai Film Festival, was quite an experience. The audience was audibly reacting to the film’s much hyped climax that—quite literally—sprays you in the face with body horror. It pays tribute to the genre greats, like David Cronenberg’s The Fly, and it’s scary how it nails its mockery of men and their ‘ideal woman’. When Demi Moore is such an absolute stunner, it further drives home the point that even someone that looks like her can feel insecure about her body.
A Different Man, on the other hand, isn’t exactly a body horror film—unless you count the scene where Sebastian Stan’s Edward Lemuel peels off his face gradually to reveal a new him. But it has its dark turns alright. it’s a psychological thriller set in New York, where Edward is an aspiring actor with neurofibromatosis, a condition that causes facial disfiguration. He sees his appearance as the root cause of his poor social skills and loneliness. When a playwright, Ingrid Vold (Renate Reinsve), moves into the neighbouring apartment, Edward falls in love and decides to undergo an experimental treatment that could completely reverse his facial disfiguration.
Now he looks like a total hunk, but life isn’t going as smoothly with a gorgeous new face as he hoped it would. In fact, the arrival of Oswald (a scene-stealing Adam Pearson) on the scene, a charming guy with the same condition as Edward, complicates things Edward, now a real estate agent and going by the very basic name ‘Guy’, realises his appearance was the least of his problems.
Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man tempers Edward’s obsession with his old face and slowly sliding into despair with dark humour. This was another film I caught at the MAMI Mumbai Film Festival 2024, and the scenes depicting Edward / Guy’s slow descent into madness elicited plenty of laughs. But the implied horror of missed opportunities, the unsettling feeling as you watch Guy waste away his second chance at the life he wanted because he never got to overcome his real psychological issues that affect his self-worth, those are not lost on anyone. It pinches a nerve, and nudges us about the hollowness of our picture-perfect lives, our faces hiding behind a mask that once again, we think, people want to see.
If I had a nickel for every time I watched a movie this year where the protagonist becomes obsessed with someone who hijacks their life and is leading it better than them, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t much, but it is weird that it happened twice so close to Halloween.
Thematic similarities aside, there are a few parallels you can draw between The Substance and A Different Man. For starters, they both involve masks of the face of the ‘older self’ that become central to the story. And they’re both going to show you a good time, make you uncomfortable, but also leave you with some lingering food for thought about how we see ourselves. Are we victims or are we simply subscribing to the wrong kind of thinking?
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