troy-boulton

A thriller for the modern era, this film slides across genres with literacy and a degree of craft that lends it texture beyond the prettiness of its cast and well-spent special effects budget. Thwaites and Cooke make a mostly unforced go of a believable high school couple on a journey of transitional divergence. Their uneven chemistry manages to hold the film together through its rough and tumble surrealist journey of signal hide-and-seek, across a chunky landscape of modern techno-cosmic-horror anxieties. Fishburne plays a less-enigmatic-than-intended hazmat-suited nemesis, projecting his character from the backlots of a forgotten Matrix movie set. His performance at least doesn't get in the way. Knapp's performance is a febrile knot of constipated dysentery, but thankfully we don't see him in too many scenes where that is at odds with the script. The film requires the viewer to take some leaps of faith, and a couple of times asks them to forgive some impossible physics (it could have been so easy to not go there; but I guess the effects budget was itching to be used on some otherwise well-executed slow-mo bangy bangy). For the most part, the film is enjoyable, and its pace and genre shifts coherent. The final act is a bit of a jarring tangent, but that is clearly by design. Maybe a different choice of sound track and visual design might have made it a more fitting end to an otherwise reasonably well executed low-budget film that punches above its weight (and in contravention of the laws of physics).

This feature is criminally underexposed, and I am not talking about the murky visual timbre of the film's cinematography. This arthouse piece has the DNA of many earlier films now considered to be subversive masterpieces, and the dark stylings and minor star power that should have helped carry it to loftier and better remembered heights.

It manages to maintain a spacious claustrophobia around a plot that ducks and weaves its way through an iterative course marked by milestones of oddness and parallel-world paranoia that simmers below a skin of asymmetrical drudgery.

It feels like the illegitimate child of Fight Club and The Naked Lunch, had their tryst born fruit on the Dark City set, under the flickering glow of Videodrome played from a mouldering VHS tape on a CRT with vertical hold challenges.

I'd not be surprised if this unsung masterclass in slippery genre meta-détournement inspired the creators of modern subversive sensations like The Substance and Severance.

Gratuitous and craftily, unapologetically derivative, Coralie Fargeat's brilliant social comedy channels Cronenberg and a good dose of Carpenter and even early Peter Jackson, with nods to Kubrick and Oscar Wilde thrown in for good measure. Quite the melange, but it never feels forced - except for when Fargeat skilfully intends it to be. A film like this can't avoid ironic levels of hypocrisy, and this director knows how and when to lay it on thick.

But don't mistake "The Substance" for a simplistic feminist boot to the groin of the Youth Industrial Complex, or only a commentary on Hollywood and its shallow beauty standards. It is a piece that is as conceptually nuanced as it is graphically unrestrained. It speaks out not only against the cult of youth, but eviscerates our very relationships with ourselves as we age in a culture that worships cosmetic and physical perfection.

Blaring 80s semiotics in a homage to Kubic's visual style, the film manages to capture our moment in times's obsession with liminality and nostalgia for the late 20th century aesthetic, and shape it into a commentary about a culture that is consuming itself. As wryly amusing as it is equal parts visually striking and disgusting, this isn't one to miss, nor to underestimate.