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Prologue
Winner winner chicken dinner
Happy New Year! As one of (too) many resolutions I’ve got brewing, I’m trying to cook more. (Read: at all.) And thus I spent days two and three of 2025 tabs-deep in the annals of beginner-cook YouTube and fingers-deep in chicken guts.
All that squirmy flesh under fingernail got me thinking about The Substance, and what a great film it’d be to dissect at a time when oh so many of us are dreaming of “a better version” of ourselves, one who’s somehow “younger, more beautiful, more perfect.”
And then Demi Moore won a Golden Globe for her performance in the film, and I was sold. It’s Moore’s first-ever major award for an acting career spanning more than four decades.
“30 years ago, I had a producer tell me that I was a popcorn actress, and at that time, I made that mean that this wasn’t something that I was allowed to have — that I could do movies that were successful, that made a lot of money, but that I couldn’t be acknowledged,” she said in her acceptance speech for the category of best female actor in a musical or comedy. “And I bought in, and I believed that, and that corroded me over time, to the point where I thought a few years ago that maybe this was it, maybe I was complete, maybe I’ve done what I was supposed to do.”
To recognition long overdue, and chicken far from underdone,
Delaney
Delaney Rebernik
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Act I
New year, new you
Editor’s note: This essay contains spoilers for the film The Substance (2024).
The Substance is a cudgel of a movie.
At a time when filmmakers are decrying the dying art of subtly amid a rising tide of ‘second-screen content’ — in which implicit visual storytelling is scrapped in favor of overt dialogue and title cards that allow viewers to keep up with the action as they scroll on their phone or laptop — director Coralie Fargeat embraces the explicit.
The Substance’s cartoonish characters, absurdist body horror, and oonst-oonst score are about as subtle as the societal messaging the film is critiquing: That people, but especially women, are worthless once their wells of youth and beauty run dry and must therefore try at all costs to replenish them.
It all works for me (and for a lot of other people).
What might in less deft hands play out as cliched commentary, here becomes the visceral fever dream — and waking nightmare — of someone who’s seeing her all-out investment in toxic beauty culture go to absolute shit.