Editor’s Picks: Demi Moore Self-Destructs in ‘The Substance’

Frieze Editor’s Picks is a fortnightly column in which a frieze editor shares their recommendations for what to watch, read and listen to.

Coralie Fargeat, The Substance, 2024

The Substance may be a flawed film but seeing it in a packed cinema was the best communal viewing experience I’ve had in a long time. People gasped, groaned and swore; a few horrified movie-goers even picked up their bags and left. Demi Moore stars as aging actress Elisabeth Sparkle, who resorts to injecting herself with the titular black-market elixir to revive her looks and, therefore, her career prospects. Since its premiere at Cannes, The Substance has been positioned as a feminist body horror satirizing unrealistic beauty standards, but it proves to be more of a video nasty, in which no one – man, woman or monster – is left unscathed. There’s been a lot of handwringing in the media about The Substance’s lack of a clear message, but I quite enjoyed the fact that this (admittedly overlong) film can’t be reduced to a single moral lesson. In fact, while I’m sympathetic to the idea that it could have done more to upend the status quo apropos aging, I found The Substance oddly affirming. After watching Moore literally self-destruct in the pursuit of youth and beauty, I left the cinema feeling pretty happy with the skin I’m in.

Constanza Macras, The Hunger, 2024

I was moved to give my first ever standing ovation after watching Constanza Macras’s The Hunger at Volksbühne Berlin last month. Inspired by Argentine writer Juan José Saer’s The Witness (1990), the performance tells the story of a group of European colonisers in South America who are attacked by an indigenous tribe at the beginning of the 16th century. The massacre leaves only one young survivor, who spends the next decade with the community before being rescued. Macras recently choreographed the hilariously bizarre Emma Stone dance scene in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things (2023) – a film in which the main character has a baby’s brain implanted into her once-dead body – and the humour and strangeness of these movements are also on full display in The Hunger, which is surprisingly slapstick given its dark subject matter. The cast throws itself wholeheartedly into scenes of ritualistic orgies and cannibalism, singing, dancing and miming blowjobs with aplomb. As the piece moves from historical to present-day consumption habits via references to Mukbang social-media influencers, it does somewhat lose its focus, but the talented ensemble stays delightful throughout.

Sean Wang, Dìdi, 2024

In many ways, Dìdi is the type of coming-of-age story that is typical fare at Sundance Film Festival, where it won an Audience Award earlier this year. It features Chris – known to his family as Dìdi (‘little brother’ in Mandarin) – as he navigates friendships, crushes and the weight of parental pressure to succeed. One thing that immediately sets the film apart, however, is that Chris and most of his friends are Asian American, adding a layer of complexity to depictions of their high-school experiences. Many 13-year-old boys have to worry about bad skin or getting an erection at an inopportune moment, but not everyone has to deal with being told they are ‘pretty cute, for an Asian’ during a date, as happens in one of the film’s most painful interactions. Dìdi is semi-autobiographical, inspired by 30-year-old director Sean Wang’s own life – his Taiwanese heritage and love of skateboarding, for example, colour many scenes – but is distinct from it. ‘The container is autobiographical,’ he told the Guardian in July, ‘but everything within that container is fictional or modified.’

_{Main image: Constanza Macras, The Hunger, 2024, performance view. Courtesy: the director and the Berliner Volksbühne}