Why I Will Avoid The Substance Movie

The reason I want implementation of age verification for adult content is not because I want to access such content, but precisely because I don’t ever want to access it. If a site asks me to show my papers, I will know to avoid it. I know I cannot force other people to protect their mental health, but personally I am dreaming of a clean internet and a world without war. And I’d be cool with no internet if it can’t be cleaned up. For now, the rule is, if it is safe for the smallest of little children, it is safe for me. Otherwise, it is not worth my time. So, the answer is in the intro, but I will go on.

Although I was initially looking forward to that film, I heard so many spoilers and parental advisories, that I can safely conclude without even watching the film that its unique purpose is to depict extreme violence and extreme sexualized violence against women under the pretext of consensual medical interventions. Taking two of the most watchable female actors and making something unwatchable… how can you even!

At this point, I am convinced that AI can do a better job at writing scripts because human intelligence seems to have caught an incurable misogyny virus in Hollywood. You can’t conceal misogyny just because the person who wrote this garbage is a woman. Women directors in Hollywood clearly must show unflinching hatred for their own gender to be picked up by that boomer industry.

It reminds me of my second law internship when I was asked to watch child porn to poke holes in child victims credibility and I was like “nah”, and so I don’t work in law anymore. How can I put this, I’d rather die than watch something I don’t want to watch. I also realized if I continue representing this client, I may incidentally murder him and then graphic movies would be made about me… I am about to also cancel Cannes over this film actually. It’s a point of no return. From now on, I will carefully filter anything out of Cannes before I decide whether or not it is safe for me to watch.

There definitely is a fake trend of body horror content out there (judging by the gazillion gory, true or not so true crime shows streaming right now) and it is interesting to find out why, because I did not consent to that. Maybe I am living in the wrong world, but it will continue to be a hard nope.

And by the way, I still watch hundreds of films every year (mandatory minimum of one film a day), it’s just that Hollywood fails to make the cut these days due to its obsession with war, guns, and violence against women.

Some of the official parental advisories on The Substance are the following :

  • Extensive & graphic full female nudity throughout entirety of movie.
  • Excessive body brutality exclusively to the female & nude body.
  • Fully naked females explicitly fondle their nude breasts, buttocks & bodies while the camera graphically zooms in.
  • Explicitly sexualized female imagery with close camera female body shots.
  • High impact blood and gore, injury detail and mutilation including closeups of grotesque imagery that cannot be described.
  • Confronting scenes of self-harm.
  • The most graphic detailed drug use in a film ever. Frequent close-ups of injections and highly disturbing including an instance where it is infected and still injected.

At least in movies you get parental advisories, however on the internet children can freely access any of the above gore often without even trying. Still trying to understand, why is the internet getting a carte blanche in that regard.


Prediction: this film will be nominated for an academy award. That’s how unwatchable it is. Long live AI.