Heather Wixson has a fantastic essay on The Substance (2024). “And look, at this point, there has been so much said already about how and why The Substance is such a powerful movie. There have been plenty of great thinkpieces that have discussed how Fargeat’s second film explores society’s brutally absurd standards for female beauty and how insidious the destructive power of celebrity is. And I’ve seen a few writers who handle the genre beat lauding the fact that while The Substance delivers one of the best-crafted social commentaries in decades, it also happens to be an audacious grotesquerie of body horror in equal measure, earning its reputation as a “must-see” event (“Screaming” Mad George must have been positively giddy watching the final theater sequence).

But there is one scene in particular that I did want to write about as it hasn’t left my mind since I first saw it.”

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