At the Movies

I don’t know about any of you, but my moviegoing habits have changed completely since the pandemic. Out of the fortysomething movies I’ve watched this year, maybe four or five were in a movie theater, and this weekend I had what was probably my last theatrical experience of 2024 (Wicked Part 1; it’s OK). As a result, I’ve found myself writing about movies a lot less, because the sense of immediacy, of everyone talking about the same thing at the same time, has largely disappeared. In the last few weeks, however, I’ve watched several movies that seem to demand a wider conversation—and some of them are even still in theaters! What really ties these movies together, however, is the gap between their messy parts and their overall vibes. Which doesn’t always result in a good movie—I discuss what is probably the worst movie of the year further down. But it does at least give you something interesting to talk about.

The Substance – Coralie Fargeat’s buzzy horror-comedy, winner of the best screenplay award at this year’s Cannes festival, wastes little time in establishing its conceit. Former Hollywood star turned fitness guru Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) is informed, by her odious, smarmy employer (Dennis Quaid), that her looming fiftieth birthday spells the end of her attractiveness, and thus, of her career. Desperate, Elisabeth signs up for a mysterious treatment that promises to provide her with a better version of herself. When she injects herself with the titular substance, Elisabeth spawns a second, younger body (Margaret Qualley), who dubs herself Sue. According to the instructions Elisabeth receives, she and Sue must trade places every seven days without fail, one of them living in the world while the other lies comatose. But as Sue’s career blossoms, taking over Elisabeth’s exercise show and becoming a media darling, she inevitably begins nipping away at Elisabeth’s time, which causes Elisabeth’s body to deteriorate in gruesome ways, leading to a conflict between the two women.

Having established its core concern—the unrealistic, physically and psychologically scarring beauty standards enforced on women in Hollywood—The Substance finds itself with very little to say on the subject. If anything, the film seems eager to indulge in the very behavior it claims to castigate, at various points either ogling Sue’s plump derriere, or recoiling in horror from the varicose veins, yellowed fingernails, and discolored, dangling skin that Elisabeth develops. For an extremely long movie, which stretches what should have been a 90-minute horror thriller into a 140-minute bid for prestige, it rarely even tries to explore its two heroines, to ask simple questions about their choices (why does Elisabeth, who is clearly modeled on Jane Fonda, have such an empty life outside of her exercise show? why does Sue immediately opt to return to that show instead of pursuing an acting career?) or convey to us their thoughts and feelings about their unique situation. It seems telling that the people I’ve spoken to about the movie seem divided on whether Elisabeth and Sue are the same mind swapping between two bodies, or two separate people who share a life force. I think the film intends the former reading, but the fact that this remains unclear—that there is no discernible sense, for example, of Elisabeth and Sue drifting away from the same baseline as the realities of embodiment take their toll—is a point against the movie (and a reminder of how often screenplay awards are a way of rewarding films for being a bit weird, rather than a recognition of actual excellence in screenwriting).

That The Substance is nevertheless such a rollicking watch comes down to the sheer audacious energy of Fargeat’s filmmaking, which mostly papers over the film’s conceptual and storytelling gaps. Like a less good-natured Wes Anderson, Fargeat litters the movie with hyper-realistic sets and props: the bold, almost brutalist product design of the packages Elisabeth receives, containing single-word instructions and warnings for the Substance’s use; her enormous, barren, white-tiled bathroom, where she and Sue examine and manipulate their own and each other’s bodies; the seemingly endless corridors (red in her workplace, blue and winding in her non-euclidean apartment) down which she marches and runs; even the bright yellow coat she dons like armor when venturing out into the world, with the camera following over her shoulder. For all the film’s by-now-famed body horror—the lingering close-ups on penetrating needles, suppurating flesh, and disintegrating bodies—the emotion The Substance most often seems to be trying to evoke isn’t disgust but a kind of stunned glee, a laughing disbelief at both the film’s visual excesses and the characters’ poor choices. That reaction is supercharged in the film’s final act, in which Elisabeth and Sue’s bad decisions reach their deranged conclusion in an orgy of blood and hairspray. The Substance may not have very much to say, but it does have style and verve to spare—sometimes, I guess, looks are what matters.

Megalopolis – Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), chief planner in the city of New Rome (a New York City stuck—aesthetically and, in certain, cherry-picked ways, politically—in the 1970s), has discovered a new, magical substance called Megalon from which he plans to build the city of the future. It probably tells you everything you need to know about Francis Ford Coppola’s decades-in-the-making dream project that when the citizens and bureaucrats of the city ask some perfectly reasonable follow-up questions—-such as “how safe is this material?” or “where do you plan to put the people whose houses you just demolished?” or “can we see some plans, please?”—the response, by both Cesar and the film around him, is to behave as if he has been subject to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. To boil it down to its essentials, Megalopolis is a litany of these insults and abuses, all hurled in Cesar’s path as he attempts to save the city from itself. He is falsely accused of statutory rape. The city’s mayor (Giancarlo Esposito), a former prosecutor, continues to hound him over the death of his wife. His former lover (Aubrey Plaza) marries his uncle and plots to impoverish him. His cousin (Shia LeBeouf) becomes a rabble-rousing politician who runs on a platform of stopping Cesar’s project, culminating in an assassination attempt. It’s all very much in the familiar vein of libertarian fantasies about persecuted visionaries, from The Fountainhead to Tomorrowland—perhaps nowhere more so than in the one ray of light in Cesar’s life, the angelic, endlessly supportive woman (Nathalie Emmanuel) who dedicates her life to his genius.

There are, if you’ll believe it, even more charges to lay against Megalopolis, such as the subplot in which Cesar develops the ability to freeze time, which comes from nowhere and ultimately has no impact on the story. Or the fact that every woman in the movie is either a vicious harpy or a saint. Or the persistent rumors about Coppola’s abusive on-set behavior. Or really just the cosmic irony of releasing, in October 2024, a movie whose core argument is that the person who will save us from populist, wannabe-authoritarian politicians is Elon Musk. But for all of these problems—and without, to be clear, even suggesting that Megalopolis is not a bad movie—it must also be noted that it is not at all boring to watch. Partly this is simply because the cast—which also includes Laurence Fishburne, Jon Voight, and Robert De Niro—commit fully to the material no matter how absurd or nonsensical (Plaza, in particular, sinks her teeth into her rather iffy character with the zeal of a lion tearing meat off freshly-killed prey). Partly it’s that there are some beautiful images—Driver and Emmanuel balancing on steel beams among the city’s skyscrapers, building-sized statues of classical virtues collapsing in despair, human silhouettes flashing, stories tall, on the sides of buildings as a disaster strikes the city. But mostly, I think, it’s that Megalopolis is like no other movie you have seen or are likely to see, so obviously the product of a singular vision—and of that vision’s limitations, of time and age taking their toll on what was once a sharp talent—that you can’t help but appreciate it. It’s a terrible movie, but one that is terrible in its own, entirely unique way.

Emilia Pérez – Rita (Zoe Saldana), a Mexico City lawyer who caters to the guilty and corrupt, is summoned to the side of an infamous cartel leader and offered a deal. In exchange for a large sum of money, she will arrange not only for the mobster’s disappearance and a new identity, but for gender confirmation treatments. Years later, Rita encounters her client (Karla Sofía Gascón), who now goes by the name Emilia Pérez, with another request: to convince her wife Jessi (Selena Gomez), who believes her husband is dead, to bring their children to his “cousin” Emilia. As Jessi chafes under a confusing domestic arrangement, and as Emilia struggles to be honest with the people she loves, Rita finds herself in the crosshairs of an increasingly dangerous situation.

In its essence, Jacques Audiard’s movie, winner of this year’s Cannes jury prize, is a familiar crime story. A criminal tries to go straight, only for their past to catch up to them, forcing them to prove—to themselves, as much as to anyone else—that they have truly changed. Grafting this tale onto a transition drama has a compelling weight of symbolism, but eventually it creates troubling interference patterns. When the doctor Rita engages to perform Emilia’s gender confirmation surgery (Mark Ivanir) warns that Emilia can change her body, but not her soul, he is making the film’s thesis statement. In context, however, his behavior reads like medical gatekeeping. Later in the movie, when Emilia and Jessi fight, Emilia drops her voice as the violent tendencies of her old life come to the fore—a deeply transphobic device that conveys, not that Emilia hasn’t gotten rid of the violence in her soul, but that that soul is inescapably male. For all its nods to trans acceptance, Emilia Pérez ultimately views transness as a metaphor, not a thing that exists in its own right.

Another intersection of genres arrives early in the film’s runtime, when Rita, assembling a line of defense for a man who murdered his wife, begins to sing her closing arguments. Yes, this movie is a musical, practically sung through, with some thrilling sequences in which Rita, visiting a gender confirmation clinic in Korea, dances Busby Berkeley-style with doctors and nurses who yell the names of procedures at her (“mammoplasty! vaginoplasty!”), or one in which she raps at a silent, frozen crowd of politicians and dignitaries at a charity function, raving about the corruption that lies under the surface of Mexican society. The musical conceit works better than you’d expect—it helps that the songs, by French singer Camille, are mostly quite good, and that Audiard has an eye for a thrilling dance number, a pulse-pounding crowd scene, or a moving solo. For a time, they give the film a fairy tale quality that helps to paper over some of the inherent problems of trying to treat the schlocky, B-movie premise of the reformed gangster with emotional honesty, allowing us to ignore the heroines’ obvious moral bankruptcy. It’s easier to tolerate the fact that Rita has knowingly devoted her career to helping the guilty, or that Jessi attaches herself to one violent psychopath after another, when they’re singing openly about it. 

Eventually, however, the dissonances becomes impossible to ignore. When Rita and Emilia found a charity to help learn the fate and recover the bodies of the countless missing victims of Mexico’s drug wars, one wonder whether Emilia truly believes this tragedy has nothing to do with her. It begins to feel as if it is the movie itself, and not just its titular heroine, who is using transition to avoid looking head on at the ugly reality of crime and violence—an impression that is only reinforced by the film’s final twist of plot, which is at once a thrilling return to crime storytelling, and a means of holding up its heroines as blameless saints without forcing any of them to truly face up to the things she’s done or the damage she’s caused. Emilia Pérez ends like a melodrama, on a note of mingled tragedy and triumph that is designed to appeal to our love of everything soapy and overwrought. The skill of Audiard’s filmmaking, and the force of the three lead performances, also combine to make the film an enormously satisfying experience. It’s only once you walk away from the theater, and the rush of the film’s melding of genres begins to fade, that you realize how little of it actually hangs together.