Sometimes, by strange coincidence, two movies open the same week that don’t just have a thing or two in common; they’re so locked into the same themes and concepts that it’s as if they’re having a conversation with each other. If you have five or so hours to spare and a reasonably strong stomach, I’d recommend a double bill of The Substance and A Different Man. They’re both boldly conceived, darkly funny cautionary tales about what you might call the horrors of extreme self-improvement.
In The Substance, Demi Moore plays Elisabeth Sparkle, who’s just been let go from her longtime job hosting a TV fitness show. She’s the latest victim of Hollywood ageism and sexism, embodied here by a grotesque Dennis Quaid as her former boss. But Elisabeth has no intention of fading silently from view. Not long into her forced retirement, she learns about a chance to reinvent herself by way of something called The Substance, as laid out in a cryptic video commercial.
Elisabeth orders herself a Substance starter kit, the use of which has to be seen to be believed: Let’s just say it involves a lot of fluids, syringes and stitches, and by the end of it, Elisabeth finds herself in the body of a 20-something.
Now played by Margaret Qualley, she soon becomes the talk of the town and even lands her old TV-host job. But there’s a big catch: Elisabeth must return to her original body at regular intervals so that her new body can rest. She’s one person juggling two codependent bodies — a balance that ultimately cannot be sustained.
The French writer-director Coralie Fargeat draws inspiration from The Picture of Dorian Gray, and also from double-trouble thrillers like Black Swan. As a satire of L.A. fitness-and-makeover regimens, The Substance is mordantly funny. As an exercise in body horror, it’s memorably gruesome — especially the spectacular third act, which demands to be seen in a packed house.
For all its visceral impact, however, The Substance proves less effective as a feminist provocation; it’s gripping in the moment, but conceptually, it doesn’t entirely hold together. The best reason to see it is Moore, who’s weathered plenty of Hollywood misogyny herself over the years, and who hasn’t had a major role in some time. Here’s hoping this forceful yet poignant performance will be one of more to come.
Although radically distinct from The Substance in style and tone, A Different Man also features an extreme transformation and a subsequent crisis of identity. It follows a mild-mannered New Yorker, Edward, whose face is covered by tumors caused by the genetic condition known as neurofibromatosis.
Edward's unusual appearance draws rude stares in public, and he leads a pretty low-key, isolated existence. But then, two things happen. First, Edward falls in love with his next-door neighbor, Ingrid — that’s Renate Reinsve — an aspiring playwright who seems to take a creative interest in his condition. Second, Edward undergoes an experimental drug treatment that proves miraculously successful; his tumors fall away, revealing the taut skin and chiseled features of the actor Sebastian Stan.
If you question the decision to have a movie star wear prosthetics, the writer-director Aaron Schimberg questions it, too. He has structured A Different Man as a kind of thought experiment that rigorously interrogates its own premise. As Edward adopts a new identity, enjoying for the first time what it’s like to be successful and popular, the movie itself keeps shifting tones and genres; it plays like a mad-scientist thriller one minute and a vintage Woody Allen comedy the next.
And then Schimberg unleashes his masterstroke, ushering in a new character played by the British actor Adam Pearson, who has neurofibromatosis himself. The less said about what happens the better; suffice to say that Pearson gives a witty, effusively charming performance that sends the movie in a thrilling new direction. He makes a fine foil for the terrific Stan, who’s quietly implosive as a guy who realizes the dangers of getting what he wished for.
All this only scratches the surface, so to speak, of what A Different Man is up to. Schimberg has made an unclassifiable, almost impossibly ambitious movie about beauty, disability, self-invention and the challenge of representing people authentically through art. And in the end, he brings all these different, often wildly contradictory ideas together with a mastery that can only be described as beautiful.
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