Opiniões dos críticos

Moore is amazing, absolutely fearless in her portrayal of a woman forced into the position of risking everything to just hang on.

This is bold, bloody film-making delivered with ample chutzpah, featuring an eye-popping palette and a taste for the grotesque.

The Substance is not a decades-later sequel to the cult masterpiece The Stuff. The film, written and directed by Coralie Fargeat, is a bit more like if Passion Of Mind was directed by David Cronenberg and written by Julia Ducournau.

After making waves in 2017 with her debut feature Revenge, the French horror maestro returns for her sophomore feature The Substance, a slick, cynical entry in the world of feminist horror and an instant genre classic.

Deep within all the oozing spinal fluids and pustulant growths here, there’s a kernel of credibility: The Substance plunges us into the deranged, disorienting emotional carnage of menopause in a way that few other films have managed.

There’s not a subtle bone in this movie’s cracking, oozing body. It advertises its themes at great length, high volume, and billboard scale. But maybe there’s no such thing as too broad when you’re tackling the shallowness of the entertainment industry. No depiction of its ugliness could go far enough.

Excoriating, stomach-churning, and utterly brilliant... Fargeat is an incredible film historian. She doesn’t simply emulate extreme body horror like Tetsuo and Tokyo Gore Police but uses them as guides to show exactly how far she can go – and then inches past them... [The Apprentice] is a treat for mind and body.

"The Substance" is a dark modern fable that starts out blaming men for reducing women to sex objects and then cuts deeper... For all it's shocking shifts into R-rated gore, "The Substance" is never less than a gripping takedown of the drug of youth obsession.

The Substance feels less like a sharp critique and more like a solemn embodiment of the very flaws it aims to expose. Despite its intention to tackle Hollywood’s toxic beauty standards, it feels like everyone involved is complicit in the very ideals they claim to challenge.

The Substance’s hyper-real action is at once dreamy and gnarly, not to mention obvious; Fargeat plays every note big, bold, and unambiguous... Fortunately, Moore and Qualley are exceptional as two halves of the same narcissistic and fame-hungry whole, exuding imperious and overwhelming eroticism that’s laced with foul desperation and insanity.

The inspirations are clear, but The Substance emerges as a wholly original modern-day parable. Darkly funny, intense, and extremely graphic, this is a shocking assault on the senses, in a good way - on second thoughts, in a masterful way.

“The Substance” is shrewdly made — Fargeat showcases immense talent and vision lacing her film with aural and visual cues, but she eventually goes off the rails with the outrageousness, diluting the potent feminist messages about the dangers of body modification, and the consequences of messing with science.