Hacker Cinema
The Substance
2024 · Film · 141 min
Directed by Coralie Fargeat
A fading celebrity decides to use a black market drug, a cell-replicating substance that temporarily creates a younger, better version of herself.
10 positive1 negative1 mixed2 neutralfrom 14 commenters
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14 comments on Hacker News
This has generally been my experience with most highly acclaimed movies over the past 10 years. Most recently had this w/ Marty Supreme... last year had this w/ The Brutalist and The Substance.
The first half has me thinking instant classic, my hope is sky high. But then toward the end I find myself looking at my watch and realize it's simply not going to the stick the landing.
OTOH, many acclaimed streaming series have generally done this well. My take is that as long-form storytelling has evolved, movies have transitioned into this post-modernist phase as directors/writers don't feel they have the runway to tell something truly cohesive that doesn't end up being trite. It's much more about saying 'something' or imbuing a feeling than telling a fully fleshed 3 act story.
Yes I remember those days! I joined a startup whose first product was a Facebook app in 2007. We were right around the corner from Facebook HQ on Forest and High, and we were alpha partners for the launch of Pages. We created a feature film streaming app (the learning was: no one watches 100-minute videos on Facebook). While we never intended to be a Facebook-app company, technically it was the first thing we launched.
Fast forward 18 years, and the company is going strong with millions of subscribers and distributing Oscar winning films such as Demi Moore’s The Substance.
I've seen many good films this decade too ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
There Is No Evil (شیطان وجود ندارد) 2020
Drive My Car (ドライブ・マイ・カー) 2021
The two Dune films
Alcarràs 2022
Suzume (すずめの戸締まり) 2022
Monster (怪物) 2023
Fallen Leaves (Kuolleet lehdet) 2023
The Holdovers 2023
Perfect Days 2023
The Substance 2024
Bugonia 2025 (even though it's a remake)
Side note: You folks should watch the movie “the substance”
agree with you on The Substance. another movie Serpell lazily categorized as new literalism. like your sibling comment i think the bar for lowest common denominator for me is lower than for you
last year i thought Hundreds of Beavers was a lowest common denominator movie but it turns out to be cult and im 0/5 on any of my family members liking it at all. a few movie nerd friends love it like i do. after that i decided normys must only like watching families hug on screen. i guess EEAAO has that, i just see the Swiss Army Man inside of EEAAO and think of the whole thing differently
most likely i have no grasp on what normys like
> "Everything Everywhere All at Once are not lowest common denominator movies"
Is too. It's a stroppy teenage girl who is lol so random[1] and has discovered teenage nihilism because her mom doesn't understand her. It's written to be relatable to the stressed mom, the middle/highschool kid, the immigrant fighting government bureaucracy, and the "I wish my life was exciting" Waymond. It's sci-fi but not good quality deep sci-fi. It's a comedy but not full of jokes or skilled physical humor, mostly 'random' silliness. It's a drama but the characters are shallow 2D people with one attribute each, all done in a Disneyfied "bagel with everything!" style.
In the way that Bella in Twilight is a placeholder for the everywoman reader[2]. Compare The Substance which is beating you over the head with "Society treats ageing women badly" but is not a movie for everyone - the topic is of interest to fewer people, the nudity and the physical body horror and gore will turn away a large section of potential audience. There's not much action or chase scenes like Everything Everywhere tries to throw in, and there's no happy ending like EEAAO either.
[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/im-so-random-lol-so-random-so-random
[2] https://theoatmeal.com/story/twilight
> Buzzy films from “Anora” to “The Substance” are undone by a relentless signposting of meaning and intent.
Can’t read the article because of paywall, but citing The Substance here from all possible movies is… weird? I agree with the title, and although there’s some literalism in The Substance, there’s also tons of subtext in it, so that’s a pretty terrible example. I’m guessing the rest of the article is extremely elitist, and no movie is good enough for the author except for obscure Eastern Europe movies from the 60s?
Perhaps you can share some examples of the films you are referring as "mindless banter in between sex and explosions". I'm not sure that description really fits most of the films coming out recently. If you said, "Dumb comic book films", I would maybe agree with you, but there isn't typically any sex in those so I assume you are not referring to them.
Covid halted the production of a lot of movies, and changed how others were made. It also shut down theaters. So, "since covid", is really talking about before and after an era. Kind of like saying, "since 9/11", in terms of the impact on culture. A lot of creativity has moved from the movie theaters to streaming services and from films to more episodic content.
However, here is a short list of films worth seeing (imo) since covid (2019).
Zone of Interest (2023) The Holdovers (2023) Parasite (2019) Dune (2021) Dune Part Two (2024) Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) 1917 (2019) The Banshees of Inisherin (2022) The Substance (2024) Palm Springs (2020) Oppenheimer (2023) The Lighthouse (2019) Hundreds of Beavers (2022) Barbarian (2022) Flow (2024)
They’re trying to create content solely to get people to sign up for and maintain an Amazon subscription, which means they have to fire as many arrows as possible into as many genres as possible. As with any DND weapon or spell, a spreadshot modifier reduces accuracy, impact, and/or to-hit percentage. So instead of producing content that they think deserves the light of day, they produce content to fill gaps in their spreadshot. That will automatically be less inspired, no matter how much they spend — and the more they spend, the less taxes they have to pay on their revenue. Thus a hundred million dollar adaptation that hits all the buttons with the same drab arrow that their spreadshot fires at every genre.
This leads to their unwillingness to risk alienating anyone by making good creative decisions. Endless cycles of focus groups and executive committee notes will ensure that the finished produce has maximized appeal at the cost of being polished and professional, because all of those reworks leave little time to get it right, and anything good has to be done in secret without execs realizing it and fucking it up. Disney, their elder, is quite familiar with this problem:
https://www.vulture.com/article/oral-history-of-lilo-and-stitch-a-hand-drawn-miracle.html
https://www.vulture.com/article/an-oral-history-of-disney-the-emperors-new-groove.html
If you watch, for example, The Substance (2024) or Amélie (2001) or Hackers (1995), and then watch any modern generic Amazon/Netflix streaming movie, you can usually see the difference immediately. One is laser-focused on being the work of art it chooses to be, with no regard whatsoever for whether it attracts or repels any single person, and in fact will make decisions that drive away some percentage of viewers for some reason other than genre mismatch. The other is more often like a child trying to play all the keys on the piano at once, in order to make the loudest noise possible in a room full of other children doing the same. (For contrast, consider Hulu’s exclusive movies; they somehow made a best-in-category time loop movie?!)
If your product isn’t driving some people away for being a poor fit for their needs, then your product is probably too generic. In a field where nearly everything is generic, that may seem like it’s fine; but it’ll cost you customer stickiness to get away with it, as they’ll walk away from you the instant something less generic is a viable option.
Mubi has a truly fantastic art house selection along with a few more accessible films like the recent critically acclaimed horror, The Substance.
It’s worth checking out on trial, or at least browsing the catalog, but the collection was too esoteric for me to keep a subscription. If you like art house, though, and especially if you’re cool with diving into unknown titles, it’s pretty impressive.
- Ghost in the Shell (1, then 2)
- Children of Men
- Stalker
- Solaris
- Blade Runner 2049
- Devs (a brief tv show, but just one shot the whole series)
- Contact
- Under the Skin
- Paprika
- Annihilation
- Arrival
- Ex Machina
- The 5th Element
- The Substance
- Primer
- Tenet
- Upstream Color
- 12 Monkeys
- Her
Believe it or not, but there’s a lot more that goes into filmmaking beyond the premise.
Parasite, The Substance, Uncut Gems, mother!, Krisha, Tangerine, and The Lighthouse are some movies from the last decade that are novel in ways beyond their premises.
No generic prompts to an LLM could create those movies, even if it could spit out a vague 2 sentence premise that matches them.
Note that I’m not saying it could never happen, but LLMs as we have them in 2024 produce regurgitated slop, and require significant creative input from the prompter to make anything artistically interesting.
People could prompt for authenticity, adding subtle mistakes, etc. I hope that AI as a whole will help people writing better, if reading back the text. It is a bit like "The Substance" movie: a "better" version of ourselves.
https://archive.is/2024.09.19-094002/https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/19/movies/the-substance-review.html