Oscar: If you are afraid to watch “the substance”, read this

“The substance” is definitely not a movie for the sensitive. The grotesque fairy tale is one of few horror films to be recognized by the Oscar in categories besides makeup (although it was deservedly indicated there too).

The excess of gore, much of which occurs while its actresses are naked, may have determined some viewers of watching the movie that could yield to rookie Demi Moore an Oscar for best actress.

The blood in “the substance” is caricature and exaggerated. But their most grotesque scenes do not record the same impact as a brutal death on a typical horror movie because violence here is so high – and has something to say, awaits director Coralie Fargeat.

There are hills of physical and psychic violence inflicted on women in this movie. They commit physical damage against each other, but it is the emotional damage caused by a stage and misogynistic society that leads our protagonist to harm themselves, Fargeat said.

“The movie is about female bodies, and for me, I couldn’t find a better way than the body horror to show the violence we can do to ourselves,” Fargeat told an interview with Indiewire.

The penetrating hatred that protagonist Elisabeth Sparkle, played by Moore, feels throughout the film was inspired by Fargeat’s own harmful internal dialogue while aged.

“The level of violence that I need to express on the screen expresses the inner violence that all these issues have created within me,” Fargeat told Indiewire. “They are my tool to approach them and say something about it, and do something with that I hope you reach the minds of people.”

A guide to the blood of “the substance”

Moore plays Elisabeth Sparkle, a decline star who, on her 50th anniversary, is devoid of her old work as a host of a series of exercise -inspired physical exercises. Discouraged and dominated by autodesprezoo, it takes the substance, a mysterious injection that promises to create a “younger and more beautiful” version of itself.

Elisabeth does not know that the substance will open a huge slit on her back from which a naked and slippery margaret emerges. The pair have to share their time being “awake” – a “active” week for Elisabeth, another for “Sue”, name that the character of Queley chooses to herself when “born”. They are remembered by an ominous voice on the phone to “respect balance.” This quickly goes wrong – and it gets sticky.

For those who want to be warned (or at least know when to look away), here is a sample of most of the gore that appears in the first two thirds of the film (starting with the disgusting producer Harvey, played by Dennis Quaid, devouring shrimp cocktail and spitting his heads and the bowels of Elisabeth’s face):

A car overturns several times in a terrible accident.

Longerly long needles are inserted and removed from the veins several times. The naked back of a woman open.

An adult and viscous person emerges from the back injury mentioned earlier.

The viscous person, the size of an adult, sews the hole from which he came out.

Loose organs fall from the back of an open jumpsuit.

An entire chicken thigh is pushed up from a buttock and outside a belly button.

Fragile bones are broken and placed back in place.

A wound at the base of a woman’s column becomes increasingly infected and purulent.

Much of the gore is mixed with prolonged frontal nudity, taken in slow motion of the olead back from which or moore crying in the shower. Fargeat said these scenes are comments on how women’s bodies are seen and examined (although some critics argue that these scenes adopt the sexualized male look that the film intends to criticize).

“It’s a way of showing our vulnerability to our own bodies, and how the way we look at meat can be so different when you’re alone in your bathroom, or you are Sue in front of the camera and everyone is looking at your ass,” Fargeat told Vogue last year.

The movie keeps the bloody scene for the end

The gor resistance piece reaches the last third of the movie, when the extra forbidden time of Sue aged Elisabeth turning her into a stereotypical witch, complete with an extreme hum, hook nose and wrinkled skin. Elisabeth prepares to kill Sue for the irreversible damage that her youngest duo has done to her older body, but can’t finish the work. Then Sue wakes up, and both sides of Elisabeth Sparkle face each other in a bloody battle until Sue beats her older version to death.

Without Elisabeth’s genetic material, Sue’s body begins quickly to dispose: she slowly tears her teeth from the gums. Your ear drops. Your nail breaks and comes off. To protect her work as a presenter of her station’s coveted New Year’s party, Sue injects in herself the “unique” activator of Elisabeth’s original kit. The result is disastrous.

From the Sue column emerges a creature with various breasts, gums without tooth and perhaps a single strand of dark hair. Your presentation card introduces us to the elisue monster, and this is where the movie really develops.

Monster Elisasue appears for live recording and horrifying the audience, who turns against her after she coughs a loose bosom from one of her many holes. One of his twisted arms is severed by a furious member of the audience and turns into a source of blood. (Oh, and Elisabeth’s original face, without the substance, is grafted on the back of your Monster, shouting.) If you can’t stand blood, this may be the most challenging sequence of the movie.

However, there is something adorable about Monster Elisasue, which Fargeat described to Vulture as “a picassed way with everything in the wrong place.” She is trusted reliable when she takes the stage, which makes even more devastating when the audience rejects her for her appearance – a new experience for Sue.

“The monster for me represents who we are real, all our humanity with their weaknesses, their truths and their imperfections,” Fargeat told Vulture.

Eventually, elisue monster collapses in a pile of blood and viscera, and crawls from it Elisabeth’s original face. She drags on to her faded star on Hollywood’s fame and smiles, hallucinating praise and fan worship – finally “free from her body and human appearance,” Fargeat told Entertainment Weekly. Then she dissolves in Gosma, erasing every living features of Elisabeth Sparkle.

In a movie that is mainly an exaggerated caricature of Hollywood sexism, there is a scene that leaves all the device. Halfway through the movie, Elisabeth rubs her skin until she gets in alive while she applies, removes and reapplying her makeup while preparing and eventually canceling a date. There is no oursma, no prostheses: it is just Moore looking in the mirror through the eyes of the TV executives who discarded it, the audience that got tired of it, and the sue version of itself that despises it.

It’s a silently devastating moment in a movie that is almost always pumping on 100. If you can go through the rest of the bombing, you can even get emotional.

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This content was originally published in Oscar: If you are afraid to watch “The Substance”, read this on CNN Brazil.

Source: CNN Brasil