Oh, I'll quote myself too!
The Substance (Fargeat, 2024) - Really wanted to like this one as it should have engage with my notoriously refined fancies (you've got some pretty naked girls, some original, stylished and
relevant horror, plus some pretty cool body horror - what's not to like?), but nah... I think it tries really hard to be clever, but it fails to find a story - it has the themes, it has the style, but it lacks in ideas, and tries to go to extremes to cover for it (you just won't care about the grandguignol ending - some of it worked on a minority of the little crowd I was with for its abject effect, but it's pretty much its only efficiency as horror, and it's very limited). I also felt it versed a little too much into hagsploitation, considering what it was trying to convey. At some point, I thought I should have stayed home and rewatch
What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? instead.
4/10
The Neon Demon is far more complex to me than something like
The Substance. In agency, for example: Moore's character is victim of her own decision, she is offered an absurd and counter-nature opportunity, which she accepts, with terms and conditions. I get that this simplification feeds the narrative, but that's exactly where I thought the film was weak. Fame and superficiality isn't presented as problems until they threatened to disappear, creating the tension needed to "tell the story". TND's character trajectory is a lot more subtle and opened to different readings. The film portrays the industry of images, its operation and philosophy, more than it's about Jesse's experience. The distribution of what's "evil" in the glorification of looks and superficiality is really complex too, and nobody gets out unstained, even the innocent and good boyfriend could be the "demon" (not only the Keanu Reeves character implies, by saying neither of them did it, that he might have been the one opening the door* to the mountain lion, but just before this incident, he runs back to Jesse and points to the moon, like Baphomet). And it's that type of details that makes it a complex film, one in which the spectator is invited to read from the diegesis more than he is fed from it. Another example, Keanu concludes that only Jess could have opened the sliding door, which refers to the Law of Invitation in demonology (the Neon Demon had to be invited in order to
lay into Jesse). And again, the moutain lion, maybe a wtf example of what you consider self-indulgence, but which finds echoes in the film through the stuffed cheetah (associated to Ruby when she is revealed to be "evil" too) and through the quote from
Henry V when the designer invites his models to be like the tiger and incites their primal instinct for violence (and the reference to Sharkespeare is an invitation to explore the intertext surrounding the association of cats to violence, evil or the demonic... a path that would lead me first to
Cat People, where Jesse's repressed sexuality would find significant echoes).
So yeah, maybe not your cup of tea, but certainly a film too complex and opened to different readings for me to tag it a "bad movie for sure". Anyway, I've at least convinced myself to push TND to
7/10!
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Also didn't care much for
Heretic
. As a certified cat lover and cat owner my entire life, I found myself overly uncomfortable at all the cat's distress. Not that I had any doubt about the outcome, but just the depictions of the events were enough for me to immediately find my cat and give him some well-deserved scritches when I got home (my short-haired, mostly black-and-grey furred cat at that).
