Double Feature: Strange Darling // The Substance
Of this week's two big hyped up horror releases, only one seemed to live up to expectations.
This weekend was big for UK horror/thriller releases, with both Strange Darling and The Substance dropping in theatres on September 20th, and of course I wanted to snap at them while they were still fresh.
I walked out of both screens with a nasty feeling in my stomach, and very strong feelings. For one this was an overwhelmingly positive thing, and absolutely the intent of the director. For the other, however, this was coupled with extreme anger, and maybe even some slight disappointment in the people I’ve seen praise it so heavily.
If you’ve seen both, you can probably guess which is which.
I’m frankly shocked how few people I’ve seen call out the strange undercurrents which sit just beneath the shallow ‘expirimental’ presentation of J.T. Mollner’s Strange Darling.
This film covers a grisly string of serial murders which follow a very strange one night stand. This story is told nonlinearaly, in 6 chapters, and shot in 35mm, all of which the film uses text to tell you at the very beginning rather than trusting its audience.
From the jump Strange Darling’s structure is confused and jumbled, and this isn’t something which manages to read as an intentional componant of the nonlinear story structure.
There are three different cold opens/prologues before the film actually begins, one of which (the third one) is an unecessary rolling epigraph letting us know that what we are about to see is a fictional re-enactment based on real life events, pieced together from accounts of witnesses and survivors.
Though this frame would be interesting if the film actually played off of it effectively, what follows is a straightforward depiction of events which, though attempting ‘twisty’ through non-linear storytelling, can’t ever really seem to manage even the impression of complexity. It is made clear to the audience that there is a true version of events, that this is the version of events we have been given, and that there are very few further questions.
The ending chapter is actually part of my main problem with Strange Darling. There is absolutely no way that I am alone in feeling that it is deliberately pushing some really strange misogynistic ideas about victims of sexual violence.1
You may think that I am exaggerating, or reading too much into it, but I barely had to squint to notice how often it pandered to conservative ideals.
There is a scene in the 6th chapter of the film where, spoilers, the Lady has been handcuffed to a chest freezer by the Demon, who she then kills, not realizing he has already called the police.2 When she hears police cars approaching she lays down on the ground, hikes down her pants and underwear, and starts crying and screaming for help on the floor, staging a rape scene in which she has killed the man in self defense.
The cops on the scene are a woman, who immediately goes to the Lady and begins assisting her under the assumption that she has, as the scene suggests, been assaulted. The other cop, an older man, stands as the contrarian, insisting that they should ‘ask questions’ and ‘leave the scene as is’ rather than moving to immediately help her.
They then proceed to have an argument which could not be more on the nose, because this conversation is written in a way which is directly addressing the broader ‘issue’ rather than the circumstance of the plot. It is saying to the audience, in eseence, ‘do not believe victims’, and circumstantially makes the implication that women crying wolf about sexual violence is some sort of massive issue.
The circumstances that Mollner has set up are almost politically mastebatory. It is the worst case scenario, a woman who is a murderous serial killer, who is interested in deviant sexual behavior and does drugs, trying to escape punishment by blaming an innocent man. She gets away with it, because she is believed and helped by a woman who probably feels deeply for her circumstances, and goes on to kill said woman so that the man cop who didn’t believe she had been a victim could say ‘see, told you so.’3
There is also a very strange attraction to the idea of the ‘good guy with a gun’ argument for personal firearm ownership. I am not at all against the ownership of personal firearms (with regulation, of course)4, but this was subliminal gun propaganda on the same level as Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving.5
The entire resolution of the film actually hinges on a ‘good guy with a gun’, once again, in the most masterbatory scenario for someone with the implied political leaning. After the Lady escapes the police, she attempts to hitchike, and is picked up by a woman. When the Lady threatens her with a stolen gun, the woman pulls out one of her own, shoots her non-fatally, then immediately calls the police. Aka, the ideal scenario for someone arguing that people should be able to carry a gun ‘just in case’.
This is not even mentioning the two hippies who, when asked if they have a gun in the home, explcitly say they only keep mace for bears. They are later killed, making the subconsious point that, if they weren’t stupid gun hating hippies, they may have survived.6
I won’t even start on the decision to make the Demon a cop7, or the fact that his adultery is never really mentioned besides offhand comment and the fact he is wearing a ring, or that his drug use is presented as a coerced crime and then a necessity. His personality, his real one outside of their pre-negotiated scenes, is literally just being a mild hero stereotype with no real flaws.
This is not to say that you cannot present these ideas or play with them in film. There’s been plenty of movies about warping the truth, about people who use guns to solve problems, about good cops8.There’s that age old statement about art ‘comforting the disturbed and disturbing the comfortable’ or whatever, my preferred version being that art is supposed to be a catalyst for discussion, but what discussion does this actually start?
I guess there’s a half baked angle about male victims, but so much of the movie is structured around victim blaming that breaking that down wouldn’t take very long, and would probably be pretty unsatisfying.
There is no real opening for the audience to interpret something else, besides its inevitable categorization as ‘good for her’ or ‘unhinged girl’ movie despite the fact it is so blatantly misogynistic.
Strange Darling’s strength, if I had to ascribe it one, is in its visual appeal. The set design is eclectic, cluttered, and amazing at conveying the dark and dirty rural of the film's setting in just a single screencap. The lighting is also beautiful, and there is a lot of really amazing shot composition.
But much of that turned up shallow on examination too. I don’t think an attempt to break down, for example, the symbolism of the blue and red lighting9, or the drawn out scene of the two hippies making their strange breakfast, or the split-second cutaways to ‘dark’ things the audience never fully sees, or the long shot at the end where the Lady is smiling and staring straight into the camera, would provide anything satisfying. It feels like a simple imitation of things that other directors have done with genuine purpose.
Overall, I’m very suspicious of the motives behind Strange Darling, and I’m not sure its fun visual appeal is enough to save it for me. Though I went into it expecting to really love it, hoping it would scratch the same itch as Natural Born Killers, with all its promises of fucked up romance and murder and muddled accounts of the truth, I came away with the lingering whiff of a weird misogynist trapped in my nose, making me wish that his mother had taught him how to put on some damn deodorant.
The Substance, however, is everything that I wanted it to be. A nasty, breakneck body horror with electric shot design and a twisty plot that leaves you glued till the last minute. Here, my gut twisting feeling was a mark of success.
The Substance follows aging celebrity Elisabeth Sparkle, potrayed amazingly by Demi Moore. After her longrunning show is cancelled because TV execs have decided she is past her expiration date, she is offered a shady miracle cure called ‘The Substance’, which promises to give her a better, younger version of herself.
It is, in essence, The Picture of Dorian Grey from the female perspective. Offered the opportunity to stay young forever in a society which values youth, especically in women, Elisabeth jumps at the idea of getting to have that eternally, only to find that it destroys her until there is nothing left. Elisabeth is the painting, only growing older, more despised by society, while Sue is corrupted as she literally eats away at their shared lifespan.
But it’s not Elisabeth’s fault entirely. We see firsthand how differently she is treated when she’s Sue, and discarded when she is not young and beautiful and easily consumable. Everything around her is feeding her the message that she has no value in her age, only allowing her self hatred to spiral into increasingly dangerous and damaging behaviors.
I am not the first to say that the directoral style is incredibly reminisent of a music video. It is incredibly visually driven, representing concepts, plot elements, and people in vague, poppy shapes, inviting your brain to sink itself into a world where everything is nothing more than a cardboard cutout, with only breif glimpses into 3D authenticity, which Elisabeth seems keen to push away.
This sophisticated, colorful hyperreality is visually appealing to the point of being unsettling, uncanny, perhaps even madness inducing. It’s like Barbieland on coke cut with glitter. This set dressing extends to even the characters, with the female body presented as full human just as often as objectified just like the set dressing. There is a deliberate focus on reflections of the whole person simplified down into an image, or captured in two dimensions by a camera. The eyes of billboards, portraits, posters, and even reflections stare from all angles.
In contrast, the body horror is all too real. It opens up that third dimension by breaking open skin and showing us everything that’s inside, whether that be the bones of a rotisserie chicken or Elisabeth’s innards before she is stitched whole again.
This movie has some really delightfully nasty and gruesome scenes, and all of the prosthetics look amazingly real. I found myself gagging and squirming in my seat. I also could have never predicted that ending, which is always good for a horror film.
You are going to hear a lot of hype about The Substance in the next few weeks, and none of it will be overexaggerated. Yes, this is genuinely one of the best horror movies this year, if not that, it is absolutely one of the grossest and goriest, even if you have to be a bit patient for the payoff.
So, if you only have time or will for a single stomach churner in September, go for the one that’s gonna make it happen in a good way and splash out on The Substance, because it is absolutely worth it. Strange Darling, however, can remain a solid skip.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go see if I can pencil in time to see it again.
I will take care to mention here that I could not find any explictly political or anti ‘me too’ statements made by the director, though if you watch the film with this in mind… it’s pretty clear that he either believes these things, is playing devil’s advocate, or has somehow managed to bake all of these talking points into his film by accident. The latter is not likely.
Who are also his coworkers. More on the choice to make the Demon a cop later.
Just minutes earlier this woman cop tells the older cop that he is always intent on treating her like she is stupid, and that this is misogynistic. He gets to respond, like in one of those bullshit jerkoff Reddit stories, that he is not a misogynist and doing it because he is older than her. J.T. Mollner really loves to gaslight woman about their experiences of the world, be it sexual violence or workplace misogyny.
In an ideal world I would absolutely be anti-gun, but under the present contexts? Having a firearm to protect yourself particularly as a member of a minority population is absolutely sensical if the bigots and alt-right lunatics are absolutely going to have them. Once again, all in favor of regulation though.
This may sound crazy consperacy theory shit but this is the main thing I remember about Thanksgiving. They were very persistant on always managing to turn a conversation into how they could aquire a gun, and not in a typical horror movie way, trust me.
My partner also swears they saw a gun used as a prop in the set design of their house at one point as well, though we have no desire to rewatch it to see.
A role title I would usually heavily agree with for a cop, lol.
Though I would classify basically all of these as copaganda.
It may be disingenuous to list this with everything else, because it’s totally meant to symbolise how the Lady is presenting herself at any given time, but it is incredibly shallow and there is no attempt (that I noticed in my first watch) to incorperate these things in the daytime scenes.
10/10 POST
YEAHHHH GET IT JAMIE