It’s only mid-September, with a full quarter of 2024 left to go, but a bunch of movies from the past week are ready for the renewal, resolution, and workout routines of early January. A Different Man , The Substance , and Netflix’s Uglies are all movies about making fundamental, seemingly permanent changes to the body, in pursuit of a long-desired perfection. Call it New Year, New You cinema.
The Substance even climaxes on New Year’s Eve. Not all of this accidental body-modification trilogy is undertaken for pure vanity. A Different Man , an A24 release, starts off seeming perfectly reasonable: Edward (Sebastian Stan) is a man with neurofibromatosis, a condition that gives him benign but noticeable tumors all over his face.
(Cinephiles may recognize it from the man with the facial differences in Under the Skin , about which more in a moment.) Edward feels understandably uncomfortable in his own skin, and when he’s given the opportunity for an experimental new surgery that may eliminate his tumors, he jumps at it – perhaps too high. After the procedure proves successful, Edward impulsively does a hard reset on his life, using his complete lack of resemblance to his past self – he now looks like, well, Sebastian Stan – to get a new job, a new apartment, and a new identity, which includes re-introducing himself to his former neighbor Ingrid (Renate Reinsve).
Ingrid happens to have written a play based on her (somewhat ridiculous) impressions of Edward, and he gets himself cast in the role without her knowing he’s actually the basis of her character. This is also how he meets Oswald, played by Adam Pearson – the actor from Under the Skin , who really does have neurofibromatosis. Oswald seems utterly comfortable with himself despite his condition, living with a joyousness that only emphasizes Edward’s non-physical shortcomings: his awkwardness, his secret neediness, his amateurish acting.
(The movie also implies, through a bit of throwaway dialogue about presidential assassins, that Edward may even be a bit dim.) Gradually, the new Edward starts to come undone – if he was ever done to begin with. For much of the movie, even with his more traditionally handsome features, he continues to look stricken.
A Different Man often plays more like a parable than a fully realized character study; even Pearson’s genuine warmth is used toward the fairly clinical ends of picking apart Edward’s insecurities. He’s rudely confronted with the idea that maybe it wasn’t his condition holding him back in the first place – that maybe underneath his unusual surface is kind of a callow, toolish guy without much to offer beyond his surprise handsomeness. In other words, you can change your face, but you can’t escape yourself.
If that’s maybe not the richest idea to sustain a full feature, writer-director Aaron Schimberg wrings some novelty from the idea of a male makeover, something so rarely treated with a critical eye in the movie world (if at all). In that sense, The Substance is more traditional, only because it goes after Hollywood beauty standards and how they affect women. In a Different Man finds waking-nightmare horror in the realization that the “new” man at its center is basically the same with a different face, The Substance inverts this problem: When middle-aged celebrity Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) takes a mysterious drug in order to unlock her ideal self, it turns out she doesn’t get to participate in that self, not really.
Instead, she gorily births a double, dubbed Sue (Margaret Qualley), and splits her time with her: Seven days as her original famous self, seven days in a kind of coma while Sue roams around in her place, alternating indefinitely. The two halves depend on each other for stability, but don’t share anything else – which means that Elisabeth doesn’t actually get to participate in the youthful revitalization she has given herself. There are a number of possible reads on this pitched-broad (and very bloody) horror satire (not the least of which involve Moore’s own career); one is that injectable treatments can’t truly work when they alter your appearance beyond recognition (and probably won’t work on your psychology if they don’t).
The most-seen of these three movies will likely be Uglies , the young-adult novel adaptation that’s been lodged at the top of the Netflix charts for the past week, capitalizing on the streaming service’s long-term relationship with star Joey King. King plays a supposedly plain-looking young woman, supposedly in possession of (among other flaws) “squinty” eyes so prominent that her best friend nicknames her “Squints” when they meet. Eagle-eyed viewers may notice that King does not have especially squinty eyes.
Maybe this could be generously chalked up as intentional irony; Uglies is set in a futuristic society that has decided the best path to equality is appearance-altering surgery undertaken at the age of 16, making everyone equal through looking like YouTube thumbnails of C-list supermodels. Maybe the point is that Squints doesn’t really squint. It’s hard to discern points from Uglies , because it’s rock stupid.
Superficially speaking, it’s also the worst-looking of the bunch, in a walk, yet probably also cost the most. Is director McG doing his own penance for the garish, shameless beauty of his Charlie’s Angels movies? It’s too bad, because there’s even something provocative about the chintzy visual scheme of the movie, implying that these mandatory surgeries (which of course have nefarious secret purposes for the ruling government) essentially turn people and environments into real-life Instagram filters. But the movie gets tangled up in another set of metaphors entirely.
Normal, surgery-track citizens live in the city, while the obligatory anti-surgery rebels live out in the supposed ruins of nature, and the movie winds up conflating urban life with fascist conformity, right down to the idea that these city children aren’t raised directly by their parents, unlike the simple, family-values folks who live in the rural areas. Though the source material predates his career, it plays like YA written by J.D.
Vance, a cautionary tale about the evils of daycare. (Weirder still for the movie’s optics – and, again, impossible to discern if the irony is intentional – the main baddie of the story is played by Laverne Cox, a Black trans woman.) I’m not sure if this stuff is intentional; it could just be the blinkered result of a movie that, despite its attempt at dismantling beauty standards, wants very badly to belong to that young-adult-thriller clique.
That means getting prettied up (even if the movie’s actual aesthetics are garbage). Regardless, the vivid self-loathing of the other two movies never really materializes here, even in a kid-friendly form. Indeed, stories about the perils of beauty standards are often aimed at younger audiences, so it might be jarring to watch movies as explicit and unforgiving as The Substance or A Different Man .
But why make a movie about changing your entire face and body, framing it as menacing, while also refusing to engage with anything truly difficult about the process, instead making up some other reason that total plastic surgery might be harmful? Movies like Uglies , where near-universally cute actors are cast as characters on either side of a physical-beauty line, are partially why movies like The Substance and A Different Man exist in the first place – reminding us that if we’re all capable of beauty on the inside, it’s keeping company with some pretty ugly thoughts, too. Jesse Hassenger ( @rockmarooned ) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.
V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.
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