You Are the Matrix

In Praise of The Substance: Chef's Kiss!

Lily and I went to see The Substance on Sunday, and I seriously cannot recommend this movie enough. I am still awash with the beautiful chaos of it; my bones are still tingling, my brain is sore.

I’m always on the hunt, especially this time of year, for a horror movie that doesn’t feel like it was written by fraternity bros (Here I imagine the pitch meeting for Nightswim: ‘What if, like the pool in the backyard is, uh….haunted, because, like, a little girl drowned there in the 80s? But there has to be a hot girl in a bikini’) or, is a clunky remake of a not-so-great-to-begin-with original (but with more blood).

In a world where the beauty of real horror gets lost in banal, recycled plot lines or pointless torture for torture’s sake (I’m looking at you, Terrifier. No one actually wants to watch a clown saw a woman’s vagina in half. Nobody), The Substance is a pitch-perfect piece of horror genius. Chef’s Kiss! It’s a start-to-finish carnival of intentionally over-the-top gore and visceral body horror, but with an actual plot and a social conscience. Plus, it’s impossible for a second to forget its overarching message, which Diablo Cody describes perfectly on her Substack: the film’s “central plot device reminds us that the only alternative to natural aging is violence. That’s it; those are your options.”

I think I needed this movie without realizing it. I was feeling freshly triggered by a weekend trip to my home town on Long Island, a place where, no matter how hard I try, I always feel like a square peg trying to squeeze into a tiny, perfectly rounded hole. I don’t know why this happens, but the second I cross over from Queens to Nassau County on the LIE I immediately morph into the grossest, oiliest, most awkward version of my prepubescent self. A girl who was already wearing size 9 sneakers in 4th grade, who always had the wrong hair and the wrong outfit, and who out of desperation once used a whole box of mustache bleach to lighten the hair on each of her fingers.

I needed The Substance as a reminder that it is perfectly normal to look in the mirror sometimes and wonder why your nose is asymmetrical, why you have a wiry white hair growing out of your chin, or where all your damn eyebrows went. It’s okay to feel the gentle ache of nostalgia for a less-wrinkly version of yourself, but to treat aging like some kind of nasty secret, something we should feel ashamed of, try to hide, even attempt to reverse, that’s nothing short of DEMENTED, YO.

So, yeah, I can’t wait to see this movie again. I kind of wish I could erase my brain and experience it again for the first time. I loved that my daughter came with me. I loved that we got to be the only two people in the theater and lay back in plushy recliners and freely shriek ‘WHAT THE FUCK!’ and ‘OMG!’ and shove our greasy fists into a leaking bag of popcorn and tear open candy wrappers as loudly as we wanted to. I loved walking out of the theater feeling a little bit altered, a little bit better.

I guess what I am saying is, go see it, y’all.