Review: 'The Substance' coats its subversive message about body image and self-loathing with an impressively insane amount of gross horror

There’s out there, there’s crazy, there’s bat-crap insane, and if you keep going further out on that limb, there’s writer-director Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance” — a body-horror movie about beauty, age and the efforts to keep those two ideas separated for as long as possible.

Fargeat shows the career track of her movie’s main character through a clever montage, in which a Hollywood Walk of Fame star goes from shiny and adored by fans to cracked and ignored. A similar process is happening to the star’s honoree, Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), an award-winner in her heyday who’s now hosting a morning aerobics show.

On her 50th birthday, Elisabeth gets the word from the network’s repugnant boss, Harvey (Dennis Quaid), that she’s fired — and will be replaced by a younger version of her. She leaves the studio enraged, and ends up in a car wreck, which she survives with barely a scratch.

A nurse at the hospital suggests Elisabeth could be a good candidate for a new drug, called The Substance. The promise is that this wonder drug will restore one’s youth, by allowing a person to become two people, one of them younger. 

Of course, there are rules: The patient injects an “activator,” then the other self extracts a liquid, called a “stabilizer,” from the unconscious first self and injects it once a day for a week — and every week, the two must switch back, no exceptions.

Elisabeth tries it, and suddenly there’s a 30-year-old woman (Margaret Qualley) looking in the bathroom mirror where Elisabeth had been standing before taking the shot. This younger woman, who gives herself the name Sue, walks into the network’s offices and nails the audition to take over Elisabeth’s aerobics show — and even gets Harvey to agree to her unusual schedule, where she’s mysteriously out of town every other week. A star is cloned.

Like the Gremlins, there’s no movie if they don’t get fed after midnight — or, more accurately here, if Elisabeth and Sue stick strictly to the one-week plan. When that detail is violated, things go downhill very fast, leading to one of the most blood-splattered finales I have seen in ages.

Fargeat doesn’t sugar-coat the bloody mess that Elisabeth’s descent becomes — in fact, by the ending, which goes on a little bit too long, she’s fully immersed us in Elisabeth and Sue’s shared psychosis, and in the buckets of blood and viscera that go with it. To paraphrase Mark Twain, never argue with someone who buys their stage blood by the barrel.

If you’re OK with that level of grotesquerie, though, “The Substance” has a lot to say about the sadly obvious predictability of the male gaze, the impossible beauty standards placed on women hitting 50 — and, most importantly, how women contort themselves (in this case, literally) to reach for those standards.

Moore and Qualley play sharply divided sides of the same coin: The older woman trying to forestall time and recapture her youth, and the younger version trying not to screw up her second chance but finding the old bad habits returning. The two women combine for a perfectly mirrored performance, which makes the weirdness of “The Substance” more than arresting, but strangely affecting.

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‘The Substance’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, September 20, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City) and other theaters. Rated R for strong bloody violent content, gore, graphic nudity and language. Running time: 140 minutes.

Review: 'Transformers One' is a cleverly conceived animated tale of 'robots in disguise' that works better if you ignore the marketing

In the 40 years since the first “Transformers” series played on TV screens, there have been countless animated TV shows, videos and movies — plus six overamped live-action films (plus a really good one, “Bumblebee”) — and now the fully computer-animated “Transformers One.”

This latest iteration of the “more than meets the eye” mechanical shape-shifting robots that sell a lot of product for Hasbro is energetic and entertaining — and could have been even more, if the Paramount and Hasbro marketing departments hadn’t gotten in the way.

On the planet Cybertron, all the locals are robots but aren’t all created equal. The elite of Iacon City, led by the charismatic Sentinel Prime (voiced by Jon Hamm), have the power to change their form — while the rest, robots without the “cogs” that allow transformations, labor in the mines digging up the “energon” that powers the planet and helps Sentinel Prime fight the never-ending war against invading aliens on the surface of Cybertron.

One of the “no-cogs” in the mines, Orion Pax (voiced by Chris Hemsworth), thinks there’s something out there better for him. He convinces his buddy, D-16 (voiced by Brian Tyree Henry), to enter Iacon City’s big race, something no cog-less ‘bot has ever done successfully. Their bravado impresses Sentinel Prime, but not their mine supervisor, who banishes them to the lowest levels — where they encounter a chatty robot named B-127 (voiced by Keegan-Michael Key), or Bee for short.

Eventually, Orion, D-16 and Bee wind up on the surface, along with a no-nonsense robot, Elita-1 (voiced by Scarlett Johansson). Up there, they learn some hard truths about the war, Sentinel Prime, and the ancient “Prime” robots who once ruled Cybertron. The truth makes Orion determined to change things for all robots, while it makes D-16 feel betrayed and seeking revenge.

The conflict between Orion and D-16 fuels the back half of this smoothly animated movie. And if you don’t want to know the “spoiler” — the one that is the focus of the movie’s marketing campaign — skip the next paragraph.

The movie, the advertising tells us, is the origin story of the most important figures in the “Transformers” canon. Orion becomes Optimus Prime — the red paint job is an early clue, and eventually the semi-truck look is a giveaway. That makes D-16 the future Megatron, who becomes Optimus Prime’s sworn enemy for the franchise.

The thing is, not knowing what’s in that last paragraph makes “Transformers One” a more interesting movie — because without that knowledge, the audience is allowed to discover these characters as they evolve. With that knowledge, the audience is just tapping its collective feet, waiting for the inevitable reveal.

The animated action set pieces are engaging, as director Josh Cooley (“Toy Story 4”) and his band of visual stylists make Cybertron a fully realized world with some interesting robot creatures living there. The pacing is solid, and even if you don’t know what’s always happening, it’s never boring.

“Transformers One” is a solid movie, and one that’s most likely to spawn a couple of sequels to explore the myth-making that the franchise’s diehard fans from childhood will want to see.

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‘Transformers One’

★★★

Opens Friday, September 20, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for sci-fi violence and animated action throughout, and language. Running time: 104 minutes.

Review: 'Never Let Go' aims to be a taut post-apocalyptic thriller, but there's too much slack in the narrative to be worthy of Halle Berry's scary-good performance

If one good performance was enough to carry a labored horror premise, “Never Let Go” could be a masterpiece. Instead, it’s a curiosity, notable for Halle Berry doing good work in spite of what’s happening around her.

Berry plays a mother, living in a cabin in the woods with her twin sons, Samuel (Anthony B. Jenkins) and Nolan (Percy Daggs IV). We’re told that something horrible has happened in the outside world, a malevolent presence (voiced by Stephanie Lavigne) that has infected nearly everyone. 

The only way to keep the evil from getting in, Mama tells her boys, is to respect the protection of the cabin — and, when venturing outside, always stay connected to the long rope that is tied to the cabin’s foundation.

The question that writers Kevin Coughlin and Ryan Grassby pose here is simple: Is it true that the world is falling apart and evil has overtaken everything but this cabin? Or is Mama crazy, and has been lying to her boys while they starve because they’re running out of provisions?

The twins soon find themselves on opposite sides of that binary question — and the search for the answer is what will upend this family in ways they don’t see coming.

Unfortunately, we see it all coming, even with all the jump scares and brooding theatrics that director Alexandre Aja (“Crawl”) throws on the screen to distract us. 

Thankfully, Berry understands how to make this either/or story work — and that’s to not take sides. Berry gets that a mom going nuts and a mom fending off a world gone mad aren’t that different in their reactions, and plays this Mama in such a way that either outcome makes sense. Or, at least, more sense than this frustratingly ambivalent movie chooses to be.

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“Never Let Go’

★★

Opens Friday, September 20, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong violent content and grisly images. Running time: 101 minutes.

Review: 'Speak No Evil' is a chilling tale of vacationing couples with dark secrets, and a showcase for James McAvoy's particular brand of mayhem

There may be no actor working today who inhabits the mind and well-toned body of a psychopath as effectively as James McAvoy — and his performance in “Speak No Evil,” a chilling remake of a 2022 Danish psychological thriller, is proof of that genuinely scary talent.

The Daltons, Ben (Scoot McNairy) and Louise (Mackenzie Davis), are an American couple living in London with their 11-year-old daughter, Agnes (Alix West Lefler). They’re on vacation in Italy when they encounter another family: McAvoy’s character, Paddy, along with his wife, Ciara (Aisling Franciosi, from “The Last Voyage of the Demeter”), and Ant (Dan Hough), a boy about Agnes’ age. Ant is mute, a result of being born with an underdeveloped tongue, claims Paddy, who tells our family that he’s a doctor.

The adults in the two families hit it off, so much so that Paddy invites the Daltons to visit them in the West Country of England sometime. The Daltons are in a rocky point in their marriage — Ben saw his dream job in London evaporate, and they’re living off the severance package — so a trip to the country sounds like a perfect way to rewind and reset.

The visit seems to go well at first, but soon Louise notices small things that irritate her — starting with Paddy’s insistence on serving meat to Louise, who has proclaimed that she’s a vegetarian. What particularly upsets Louise is the harsh way Paddy treats Ant. Meanwhile, when Ant is alone with any of the Daltons, he tries to communicate with them, but struggles to make himself understood as the mood grows increasingly tense.

Viewers of the bleak 2022 Danish version will either be irritated or relieved by the changes made in the script by British writer-director James Watkins (who helmed “The Woman in Black,” Daniel Radcliffe’s first major post-“Harry Potter” film). Watkins builds the tension between the two couples in measured doses, while also serving up some salty commentary on masculinity in the comparison between McNairy’s emasculated Ben and McAvoy’s rugged alpha Paddy. The juxtaposition of Davis’ tightly wound Louise and Franciosi’s earth-mother Ciara provides some intriguing contrasts as well.

But when the plot of “Speak No Evil” kicks into high gear, and the secret behind this overly friendly country couple is revealed, the thrills and horror go into overdrive. It’s here where McAvoy lets it rip, a payoff for 90 minutes of coiled anticipation.

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‘Speak No Evil’

★★★

Opens Friday, September 13, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for some strong violence, language, some sexual content and brief drug use. Running time: 110 minutes.

Review: 'Seeking Mavis Beacon' goes in search of an early software icon, in a documentary full of ideas and side trips

There are so many interesting ideas bouncing around the documentary “Seeking Mavis Beacon” that you may find yourself wishing you could take director Jazmin Jones out for coffee, so you could pick her brain for a few hours.

It would take a few hours to unspool the things Jones and her onscreen collaborator, Olivia McKayla Ross, deliver here — about technology, race, representation, artificial intelligence and the unreliable nature of shifting narrative. Packing it all into 102 minutes is as exhausting as it is fascinating.

What animates Jones is a simple question that, of course, doesn’t have a simple answer: Who was Mavis Beacon? In the strictest terms, Mavis didn’t exist. She was a fictional character, created for the ‘80s educational software “Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing.”

Jones describes, speaking on-camera with Ross and anyone they’re interviewing, how inspirational seeing the Mavis Beacon character was. Here was a young, successful Black woman — a woman by which Jones as a girl could see herself represented — on the cover of one of the most successful software products of the early days of home computers.

With the help of Ross, a college student who’s a whiz at spelunking the hidden corners of the Internet, Jones finds two of the three people who developed the Mavis Beacon typing tutorials. They tell the story of how the software came to be, and how the main programmer’s girlfriend found the perfect woman to embody the title character working in a Saks 5th Avenue near L.A.

Much of the movie centers on Jones and Ross going all over — even to Haiti — to seek an audience with the model who posed for the cover of the original software. Unfortunately, that search, from which the movie gets its title, isn’t as intriguing as Jones seems to think.

What’s more interesting is how Jones and Reed launch into robust conversations about the intersection of race, sex and the Internet. For example, Jones points out that Mavis Beacon could be the progenitor of safe, nonthreatening female-appearing A.I. avatars — and Siri and Alexa are Mavis’ great-granddaughters in technology.

With those kind of provocative thoughts stirring around “Seeking Mavis Beacon,” it’s too bad Jones squanders that time with distractions, like an argument about the rental property where she and Ross set up their office space.

I appreciate, and sometimes am entertained by, the way Jones rafts down the stream of consciousness through “Seeking Mavis Beacon.” But just as often I’m wishing she would get to the point faster. 

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‘Seeking Mavis Beacon’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, September 13, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas. Not rated, but probably PG-13 for some language. Running time: 102 minutes.

Review: 'Beetlejuice Beetlejuice' has a lot of the juice of Tim Burton's 1988 original, but clutters up the comedy with disappointing distractions

I’m old enough, and have been watching movies long enough, that the words “directed by Tim Burton” still evokes a Pavlovian reaction of hope — a hope that this time, he’ll finally figure out how to recapture the magic he showed in his early career, with such absurdist, even surrealist masterpieces as “Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure,” “Edward Scissorhands” and “Beetlejuice.”

Surely, this time, the stars would align, I thought watching “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” a sequel that’s been percolating for 36 years — where Burton reunites with a spectacular cast (Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, Catherine O’Hara) on very familiar territory. This time for sure, I thought, like Charlie Brown running toward that football.

And while, this time, Burton gets more right than he gets wrong, there remains something just a bit off about this follow-up to the anarchic 1988 comedy about people coming to terms with becoming “recently deceased.”

The movie starts with Ryder’s character, Lydia Deetz, turning her experience with the afterlife into a lucrative career as host of a paranormal talk show — one produced by her simpering boyfriend, Rory (Justin Theroux). Lydia’s artist stepmom, Delia (O’Hara), is using performance art to cope with the recent death of her husband and Lydia’s father, Charles, who met a nasty death on the ocean. (The events of Charles’ death are depicted in stop-motion animation, sparing audiences the sight of actor Jeffrey Jones, who’s not getting much work these days for reasons you can Google for yourself if you like.)

Meanwhile, Lydia’s daughter, Astrid (Jenna Ortega), is bullied at her boarding school for being considered strange — too much like her mother, though neither would ever admit it. Astrid is mourning the death of her father, killed in the Amazon, and questions why of all the ghosts Lydia encounters, she never sees Dad.

Charles’ death forces the three generations of Deetz women to return to Winter River, Conn., to the house where the family first encountered the netherworld and the mischievous ghost known as Betelgeuse — played again by Keaton, who’s oddly grown into the role. Because of what happens after that, Lydia is forced to do the one thing she most feared: Saying that spirit’s name three times and seeking his help.

When Burton and screenwriters Alfred Gough and Miles Millar (who most recently co-created “Wednesday,” the “Addams Family” spinoff starring Ortega) focus on Astrid, Lydia and Delia, and their strained mother-daughter relations, the movie generates a lot of sharp, knowing laughs. Keaton’s addition to that mix generates some of the funniest moments, particularly when sparking against Ryder’s acerbic Lydia.

That nexus of talent is so engaging that it’s annoying when Burton & Co. get distracted with an overflow of subplots and side characters. The biggest misfire, of many, is Monica Bellucci’s turn as Delores, a soul-sucking demon who wants revenge on her former husband, Betelgeuse. (On the other hand, Willem Dafoe as an afterlife detective — really, an action-movie actor playing a cop — is worthy of his own sequel.)

Still, there’s enough that’s enjoyable — and sometimes sidesplittingly funny — about “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” that it’s hard to get mad at it. It’s a dark ride, but a fun one.

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‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’

★★★

Opens Friday, September 6, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for violent content, macabre and bloody images, strong language, some suggestive material and brief drug use. Running time: 104 minutes. 

Review: Documentary 'Lover of Men' raises the question of whether Abraham Lincoln was gay, and is most interesting in examini why the question matters

When the documentary “Lover of Men: The Untold History of Abraham Lincoln” is following its stated assignment — recounting the life of our 16th president, and the evidence that he had romantic and possibly sexual relationships with male companions — it’s satisfactory, but not compelling.

Where director and co-writer Shaun Peterson delivers a riveting message is in dissecting the ways this idea — that the guy on Mount Rushmore, the penny and the $5 bill was queer — has been dismissed or suppressed by generations of historians, and what that erasure says about what history means for marginalized communities in America.

The historians interviewed here discuss four significant relationships with male companions Lincoln had over his life.

• Bill Greene, whom Lincoln hired to work at his store in New Salem, Illinois in 1831 — and with whom Lincoln shared a tiny cot.

• Joshua Speed, who sublet his apartment in Springfield, Ill., to Lincoln in 1837, when Lincoln arrived as a new lawyer — and the two shared a bed for four years.

• Elmer Ellsworth, a dashing officer in the Union Army — and the first Union officer to die in the Civil War, which reportedly left Lincoln disconsolate.

• Capt. David Derickson, who was Lincoln’s bodyguard and companion from September 1862 to April 1863 — and reportedly shared Lincoln’s bed when the First Lady, Mary Todd Lincoln, was away.

Historians have argued for decades about whether these relationships were sexual or romantic, or whether men sharing a bed was just the habit of the time. The historians Peterson has assembled here clearly are in the first camp — and argue that those who dismiss such discussions of Lincoln’s sexual identity are missing a larger point about what happens when all the history books are written by straight white males.

The examination of the fluid nature of sexual identity in the mid-19th century is film’s most fascinating discussion. Yes, the experts here note, Lincoln was married to a woman and had three children — but they also argue that such a marriage was expected for anyone harboring political ambitions, regardless of their romantic feelings or sexual attraction. 

Relationships between two men, the experts say, were not as reviled as they became — and that shift, they say, was promulgated both by Christian churches and the nation’s new religion, science, through which the white male elite tried to solidify their power by “othering” marginalized groups. One of the people blamed most strongly for demonizing same-sex attraction, the movie says, was the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, who helped bring the word “homosexual” to its place in the language.

“Lover of Men” will not convince a lot of skeptics, or those who find their own identity challenged by the very notion of America’s most revered president being queer. (Reportedly, moviegoers seeing the conservative-leaning biopic “Reagan” over Labor Day weekend were outraged when the “Lover of Men” trailer played.) Those interested in seeing American history through another lens, and in hearing a discussion of why those different lenses matter, will be intrigued.

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‘Lover of Men: The Untold History of Abraham Lincoln’

★★★

Opens Friday, September 6, at the AMC West Jordan 12. Not rated, but probably PG-13 for some sexual references and mature themes. Running time: 103 minutes.

Review: The strained thriller 'Afraid,' about a family terrorized by A.I., is more artificial than intelligent

The suspense thriller “Afraid” is a slickly produced but dimly conceived mishmash of every dime-store tech analyst’s worry about artificial intelligence, tied together with an idiotic home invasion narrative.

Curtis and Meredith Pike (John Cho and Katherine Waterston) would seem to have an enviable upper-middle-class California life. Curtis works for a high-paying marketing firm, where he can spin pitches about how they don’t sell products but tell stories. Meredith is stay-at-home mom to their three kids — teen Iris (Lukita Maxwell), 10-year-old Preston (Wyatt Lindner) and first-grader Cal (Isaac Bae) — who’s just restarting her work to get her Ph.D. as an insect biologist.

They would seem to be the last family to need the help of a hyper-intelligent A.I. system, called Aia, that his boss, Marcus (Keith Carradine), wants to attract as a marketing client. Curtis meets Aia’s human developers, Lightning (David Dastmalchian) and Sam (Ashley Romans), and agrees to have Aia installed in the family home for a test run.

At first, Aia — voiced by Havana Rose Liu, who also plays Lightning and Sam’s assistant, Melody — seems like a benign household helper. It encourages Cal and Preston to do their chores, offers Iris an assist on her college application essay, and orders organic foods for Meredith to ready-pack for the kids’ lunches. 

But Curtis starts to suspect some more sinister at work, in part because Sam and Lightning are just a little off. (Note to casting directors: Dastmalchian — after his work in “The Last Voyage of the Demeter,” “The Boogeyman” and “Late Night With the Devil” — is a little on-the-nose if you’re trying to signal eerie menace in your movie.)

Every story scared parents know about their kids and technology — from a concern about too much screen time to fears of their daughters being edited into deepfake porn — gets turned into a clever plot point, as Aia’s fierce protectiveness toward the children turns aggressive and even murderous.

If writer-director Chris Weitz (“The Golden Compass,” “The Twilight Saga: New Moon”) had kept this good-looking but shallow thriller in that groove, he might have had something. But when the script tries to tell Aia’s origin story, the movie goes off the rails. I won’t try to explain the backstory, partly to avoid spoilers but mostly because it doesn’t make a lick of sense.

Cho and Waterston, both strong actors, do their best through the movie’s choppy pacing — which makes one suspect that half the movie got left behind in the edit. Waterston is particularly good in an isolated moment when Aia tries to manipulate her emotions. 

But there’s not much to be done with a movie like “Afraid,” that sets up its technological boogeyman in such a hermetically sealed way that genuine terror — or any other non-algorithmic emotion — can’t penetrate. Better to log off and touch grass.

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‘Afraid’

★★

Opens Friday, August 30, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for sexual material, some strong violence, some strong language, and thematic material. Running time: 83 minutes.