A Fresh Take on Nostalgia in Modern Cinema

The narrative of The Substance is very literally a struggle between the old and the young, but as film critic Taylor J Williams notes, this struggle leaks into the film’s style as well.

The film has many direct references and homages to filmmakers, from David Cronenberg to Hitchcock, to Brian Yuzna and most obviously Stanley Kubrick (as a pretentious snoop, I thought the red and white bathrooms were a reference to Greenaway’s “The Cook, the thief, his wife and her lover”, but them being a reference to the equally great “The Shining” makes more sense) ,but it mixes those old images with very modern kinetic editing, and a shiny glassy look.

Compared to other female directors who recently took inspiration from Cronenberg but made something that is more in line with modern, post-Ari Aster horror films (Like “Titane” and “I saw the TV glow”) “The Substance” feels deliciously more old school.

And to look at the bigger pictures, in a time that Hollywood Studios are accused of milking nostalgia and giving us more of the same old stuff (with the recent “Deadpool and Wolverine” being to some the logical endpoint and the most egregious example of that Nostalgia chasing, I liked it a lot myself) ,Many of the this year’s most interesting films also look at the past in interesting ways, from “The Substance” to the silent movie sensibilities of the brilliant “Hundreds of Beavers”, The interrogation of nostalgia of “I saw The TV Glow” ,The 70s late night aesthetics of “Late Night with the Devil”, The interrogation of Psycho’s Anthony Perkins legacy by his son Osgood Perkins in “Longlegs”.

For an even bigger picture, look for how long has it been since Martin Scorsese or Steven Spielberg made a film that takes place in contemporary settings, or the increasing retro-ness of Wes Anderson’s films.

Everyone is offering us the same old stuff, our Hollywood executes are just repacking it, while our Auteurs are trying to give it an injection of the Substance drug, to make something new come out of its spine.