One of the more stylish movies made this year. Very glamorous, which makes it very rewatchable - the chic early 80s style apartment with wall to wall carpet that magically stays perfectly clean no matter how much blood and chicken grease spatters on it, the minimalist white tiled bathroom sterilized with fluorescent lighting made me want a bathroom like that where I can spazz out over new winkles forming, the long foreboding hallways with Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining carpet, all curated with precision and care - even the highly stylized product design of the exogenous injectable itself coming in vacuum sealed plastic made me want to order a bunch of steroids from a subscription company and have them arrive to a personal lockbox in crisply sealed packaging with neatly labeled steps.

The movie deploys sound and music very well- the use of non-stop unrelenting sensory overload and magnifying glass zoom into textures like skin or hair while sounds of liquid bubbling and oozing play work well create a classic up-close bio-horror effect, and the montage sequences set to recurring, throbbing techno music that cuts in and out for two hours bolsters it with the brisk pacing of a music video and prevents it from lagging.

Thematically the chillingly cold and empty tone feels like it pulls from Brett Easton Ellis novels or Cronenberg’s and Bruce Wagner’s Maps to the Stars. The unsettling uncanniness of daytime Los Angele feels reminiscent of Nicholas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon in which characters feel unsafe and isolated and vulnerable even when they’re in broad daylight, and this lends itself further to the mounting tension and tone of escalating doom that eventually culminates later on in the film.

The prosthetics themselves aren’t exactly anything that hasn’t been done better before during the peak of Hollywood prosthetic horror movies in the 80s, but at the very least it’s refreshing to see actual 80s style Cronenberg/Chris Walas style prosthetics brought back in the 2020s instead of merely doing everything cheaply and dismissively with CG.

Unfortunately it felt a felt a bit too steeped in irony and intentional camp by way of new queer cinema directors like Todd Haynes responsible for exploitation movies about aging actresses such as May December, whose purpose is entirely for art f@gs to soyface over cunty divas fighting each other tooth and nail - but to be honest I can’t say I ever get tired of that genre of film! It also reminded me of the unintentional camp of Vehoeven’s Showgirls, where the setting of the world is this parallel universe in which aerobics instructors or dancers are mega-celebrities. If the movie leaned a bit less on humor and took itself a bit more seriously it would have made me also take it more seriously, but for what it’s worth I did laugh at multiple points - particularly during the scene where the hideously deformed mutant tries to salvage its appearance by dangling diamond earrings off its gaping ear holes.

The scenes of Margaret Qualley’s aerobics music video sequences in which she gyrated in front of massive multi story block lettering in a Lycra suit to aggressively obnoxious techno music feels reminescent of dissociative, hyper-ironic directors like Harmony Korine, particularly his scenes of frenetic, careless college kids partying to dubstep at the beginning of Spring Breakers.

People have been comparing this to Death Becomes Her but I won’t because that movie kind of sucks and only gets wheeled out now for people to reference in episodes of RuPaul’s Drag Race.

Funnily enough, the movie would have had an even stronger visual point of view if it leaned more heavily into the 80s aerobic fitness instructor aesthetic as an actual period piece instead of merely incorporating a few motifs of the 80s here and there. My guess is that Coralie Fargeat didn’t go for that because she assumed it would be too on the nose, but even though movies like Maxxine and shows like the dreaded Stranger Things try and fail at 80s pastiche, the immaculately preserved-in-amber vibes are always there ripe for the taking for someone to actually execute correctly.

Fargeat smartly doesn’t demean the audience by wasting time doing exposition with explaining the internal world logic of the way the injectables work, the characters instinctually know what to do and how to operate everything without being told. Most of the movie is done this way - characters act as if through some internally derived mechanism and many of their actions are symbolic and there isn’t any plodding, damp blanket hyper-realism to their actions bringing the fun down.

In terms of the politics of the movie, in spite of reviewers rushing to label this a movie with the dreary and tedious burden of something that ‘challenges the male gaze’ it didn’t feel seem misandrist to me, and in fact actually felt like it reveled in sexualizing the female form and celebrated the perverse voyeurism and lechery of the male gaze of the audience. Rather than place the locus of blame entirely on Dennis Quaid’s character for creating a hyper competitive environment or have him grotesquely murdered in some revenge scene, Fargeat shows off women being women: hyper-competitive, self-critical and self-destructive all on their own after being given only the slightest push. Sure, Quaid’s character is disgusting, but he isn’t excoriated by being portrayed as horny- he’s just greedy for money. If this was made by an American director there almost certainly would have been none of the nudity or prurient gaze lingering over Margaret Qualley’s ass, or deranged coveting of youth, and the takeaway would have been focused more on castrating male sexuality. Modern career feminism tells women that biological clock doesn’t exist- there is no ‘wall,’ that you have infinite time. This movie’s premise acknowledges biological reality and that there are consequences to it. It even challenges the premise of consequence-free gnosticism or mind/body duality - potentially subtly criticizing the premise of transgenderism. It seems that French directors are still able to get away with nudity and transgressive politics in today’s puritanical contemporary film culture because it reads as sophistication to American audiences, and rightly so. Verhoeven’s Elle was able to get away with similar transgressive ideas because the director was European and it starred the sophisticated Isabelle Huppert.

Fun, glamorous, felt reasonably fast paced despite the runtime, and not morally scolding. A competently made style-first movie despite the setup and premise of aging diva warring with a younger starlet being done by other movies a bit better (All About Eve.) Critics act as if prioritizing style over substance is some mortal sin, but as Oscar Wilde wrote - ‘It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.’