This is a book of fiction that performs the service for which fiction is uniquely suited — detailing the contours of consciousness — while performing a rather unusual bracketing in a context of higher truth. It comes amid a wider renaissance in horror cinema and literature, with some of the best work often described as “post-horror.” Beginning in the mid-2010s, artists have taken up the genre as a means for exploring the irrational and ineffable dimensions of human life — or to poseideas that, stated overtly, would be seen as tactless or impolitic. This, even as they break its conventions or, as in Lee’s case, blend them with other forms. 

A “prisoner’s cinema,” as we learn in the title story — its longest and best — is the series of hallucinations a person’s mind will produce after he is kept for a prolonged time in complete darkness. In this story, a child rapist waiting on death row engages in a series of verbal jousts with the demon who encouraged him in his crime, and who continues to mock him as he waits out his last days. The moral lines seem clear here, yet the unconventional structure of this long story confounds the reader’s expectations, offering no easy resolution, and a twist toward the end adds a sci-fi element to horror that was previously mostly psychological or ontological. The result is terrifying: the suggestion that the human mind is the most fearsome demon of all.

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As the line from G. K. Chesterton goes: “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.” The rational mind unbalanced, overheated, and off its tether is the true protagonist of these stories. Characters reason and use logic; they follow a flow of linked theses and fateful decision trees; they rationalize, or they victimize where they have been victimized. The result, far from making sense, is the most fetid tangle of human flesh this side of Hannibal Lecter’s pantry.  

In “Gods and Spiders,” a hypnotist returns a young man to the primal scene of his mother’s violent death at the hands of the Bosnian paramilitary. In “Lovecraft,” a philosophizing butcher allows a tenant who lives below him to tenderize some very suspicious meat as a form of stress relief. In “Lightning in a Cloudless Sky,” a disgruntled son of two newly dead parents bashes in the head of an intruding hoodlum. But the real brutality for this young man, Lee suggests, is internal: an animus between the protagonist and his brother that simply can’t be fixed. 

Lee’s compendium of gore is accomplished with subtlety and literary grace. “Never Find Us Here,” a story about a narcissistic young man who decides to volunteer for a day at the Salvation Army, keeps us on tenterhooks by sliding seamlessly between surrealism and psychology. And, as in the most crafty of short stories, an anticlimax serves as the perfect ending. Lee also has a knack for a good metaphor. He writes, for instance, of “the dark lips of ditches”: precisely the right word for the little mounds that might circumscribe a hole one has dug, turning it into a yawning black mouth. And the virtuoso vitriol that opens “Lightning in a Cloudless Sky,” — “They always have sallow skin, these whores, these meth-heads, wasted high-school beauties, soma-addled slack bodies, all with the same seeping sallow skin carrying Christ-knows-what proud strains of plague in their milky sebum . . .” — is mellifluous bile indeed.

But it is the moral stakes that set Lee’s writing apart. Literary fiction is a genre on the wane — like contemporary art and independent cinema. We suffer from a glut of writers and a dearth of readers, from a surfeit of publicity and a paucity of art. It is no coincidence that the successes over the past few decades have been the products of writers such as Michel Houellebecq, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and Elena Ferrante, who are earnestly grappling with the morality of how one ought to live in a society that offers fewer answers by the day. 

In this sense, the contemporary writer of fiction is no different from the pundit on X (formerly Twitter), but whereas the online pundit is incentivized to provide extreme approbation or condemnation, the novelist may take a longer view. Today the craft of the novelist may not be as remunerative as the pundit’s — a few mega-writers excepted. But by making abstract problems concrete and by playing both sides, so to speak, the novelist offers wisdom no pundit can match.

One can, for example, argue all one likes about what it means for society that some men rob, rape, or kill. But Lee, an editor at the religious journal First Things, has done something much more difficult and important: he has, through imaginative exercises, made such actions concrete. He has told us their tastes and smells. Only a moralist would bother to tease out the thread of immorality with such care. Who else would bother with the mental anguish of such people? Lee thus does the reader the service of taking him somewhere he never wanted to go. Complacency, that most common 21st-century sin, is not an option once you’ve entered Lee’s fictional world.

None of it is easy to read, and Lee has written of an author’s struggle with his subject, in the form of dialogues with the demon “Paul” in three linked stories that make up the series “A Briefer Epic.” In these stories, the demon taunts the author, sophomorically questioning his sexuality, or suggesting that his preoccupation with the dark constitutes evil in itself. The back-and-forth is often amusing, but the scaffolding feels unnecessary, since many of the issues come through in the stories. Moreover, a writer allowing a clever demon to argue against his project may tempt a few too many readers to side with the devil and put down the book. 

But this is a quibble. In an age where art veers between empty entertainment and empty formalism, it is a pleasure to find a new voice deeply interested in how we ought to live. For Lee, that question manifests as a preoccupation with what in our world is most horrific. As in the ancient tragedies, Lee offers a chance to purge ourselves by following his characters down the long path to hell, before we return to the blessed freedom of our day-to-day lives. It is a bracing and, in the end, ennobling trip. I look forward to the next time Lee will lead me to a place I don’t want to go.

The film is a remake of South Korean director Jang Joon-hwan’s 2003 release, Save the Green Planet!, which delivered a giddy masterclass in slasher comedy. The original featured a bulimic beekeeper on a mission to abduct a pharmaceutical CEO who he believes is an alien from the planet Andromeda, and thus save the world from apocalypse before a band of idiotic cops — led by a detective with a hyperactive sense of smell — can get to him. It’s the kind of wack-cinema in which the wild-eyed protagonist prepares to torture his victim by coating a white-hot, foot-long steel dildo with gobs of lube — that is, utterly off the hook. This sort of macabre just desserts for the 1% was no doubt satisfying to a South Korean audience 20 years ago, embittered by class disparity, and thirsting for some lavish, if elusive, revenge.

In Jooh-hwan’s zany bricolage of dungeons, electrodes and death by killer bees, the cardboard-cutout characters are no more than vehicles for violence against long-standing power imbalances, and to their credit, Lanthimos and Bugonia screenwriter Will Tracy were smart enough not to delve too deeply into the psyches of their revamped dramatis personae. These aren’t characters so much as caricatures, each standing for sociological mega-tropes of America’s decline and fall — the corporate CEO, the basement-dwelling extremist, and he who no longer has the capacity to process what the hell is going on. Each seeks to negotiate their way through a senseless world beset by maniacal irrationality.

It’s clear from the remake that comedy has become passé. A farce, even one drenched in buckets of blood, cannot serve as an adequate response to the plague of anxieties in today’s United States — from pharmaceutical poisons and school shootings to the National Guard knocking down doors to arrest housekeepers and hairdressers. The tragic message of the remake is inescapable: the conspiracy theorists have seized the day.

Lanthimos updates Joon-hwan’s characters by switching the gender of Green Planet’s evil CEO. Instead of a pharma bro, we get a pharma babe. Michelle Fuller, played by Emma Stone, graces the cover of Forbes. She knows Michelle Obama and spends a great deal of time perfecting the nuances of her social media feed. She is also dedicated to cardio, which means she can beat the living crap out of any incel with bad intent, even in those black Louboutins.

That doesn’t stop her from being abducted by Teddy, the scuzzy conspiracy theorist played by Jesse Plemons (aka “Meth Damon” from Breaking Bad) and his cousin and sidekick, the extraordinarily disheveled Aidan Delbis, whose real-life neurodivergence delivers striking pathos. And if there’s any doubt that Michelle is from a galaxy far, far away, our anti-hero Teddy points out her narrow feet, her cuticles, the cute overbite, and the fact that he has discerned “Andromeda code on her Instagram” — a phrase that in and of itself should garner Tracy a nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Shorn of her luxurious locks so that she cannot “be tracked” by her allies who are orbiting the earth in their spaceship, as Teddy patiently explains to Donny, Fuller languishes in chains, a gender-switched Samson awaiting the inevitable return of her powers. As Michelle schemes her escape, the losers ride their rusted bikes through the blight of exurbia. As Teddy tells Donny: “No one on earth gives a single fuck about us.” Perhaps they should.

The plot of Bugonia is virtually identical to Save the Green Planet!, which may be because the warped and damaged men of the digital dystopia are really not so different from the warped and damaged males of any age, shape or time, all of whom might relish the sadism of sticking a girlboss like Fuller with a syringe full of sedatives and locking her up in the dark. The only difference between the original and the remake is the absence of that white-hot dildo, for the boys of Bugonia have chemically castrated themselves so as not to be tempted by womanly wiles.

And yet, despite a two-decade-old plot that leans into every horror cliché in the book, Bugonia is very much a film for our time. The popular motif of alien invasion has taken on a new profile since the release of Save the Green Planet!, as the comic contrail-counters have matured into power players. “Doing the research” has transformed into US public policy, with the tin-foil-clad brigade now holding Cabinet-level positions in the Trump administration, advocating against Tylenol and seriously considering whether or not there is any gold at Fort Knox.

Then there is the dialog that lacks the essential give and take of, well, dialog. Even a power-pill plutocrat like Michelle, supremely confident in her ability to sway opinion with endless streams of public relations sophistry, can make no headway against Teddy in the bizarre dinner-table discussion that serves as the intellectual core of film (while Donny squirms in his seat, complaining that he has to pee). Here, it becomes clear that Michelle’s corporate doublespeak and Teddy’s “resistance” gibberish are two sides of the same irrational coin. There is no middle ground, no solution.

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It therefore comes as no surprise that when a handcuffed and bloody Emma Stone eventually inquires, “Can we have a dialog?”, the answer is a straightforward no. Michelle may inform Teddy that his theories have no basis for his truth, that he has lost himself in an internet echo chamber, but it’s all in vain. He simply takes an axe to her knee.

The implications of all this are so unsettling that the film has left the critics desperately trying to evade articulating — or perhaps even contemplating — the obvious point. In their reviews, they earnestly discuss whether the film is about corporate duplicity and greed, or perhaps an allegory of Covid, or a musty rehearsal of Antifa versus tech. That is, anything but America’s descent into irrationality and violence.

Lanthimos has said that before he begins shooting a new film, he makes a habit of re-watching The Red and the White, a Hungarian pièce-de-résistance from 1967, directed by Miklós Jancsó. Banned for many years in the Soviet Union, it delivers a stunning condemnation of the senseless evils of war, as soldier after soldier is lined up and executed, only for the next brigade to arrive, and the shooter himself to be shot. History repeats itself: Hungary in the grips of Soviet Communism, South Korea in the shadow of Kim Jong-Un’s atomic arsenal, and now, the United States in the grips of unreason that has now threatens to undo the very foundations of this country. This is a director who understands the chaos and absurdism of our age.

Of course, it’s clear from the start of Bugonia that skeevy vapers and gamers like Teddy and Donny don’t stand a chance. But as it turns out, neither do the slick CEOs. No homo sapien can escape the mess of being human. When the cosmic joke of the film is eventually revealed, it’s a reminder that not only have Teddy and Donny and Michelle lost the thread, so has everyone else. We can’t blame it on pharmaceuticals, the economy, or the internet. As Teddy has understood, our propensities towards self-destruction are programmed into human psyches. “Your core,” he tells Michelle, “has already been infected.”

It was funny 20 years ago. Today, not so much.

Set in the fictional small town of Maybrook, Pa., Weapons opens with 17 children from the same third grade classroom running away from their homes at precisely 2:17 a.m., and vanishing into the night. The next morning, teacher Justine Gandy (Julia Garner) is startled to find only one student, Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher), in her classroom. The story then unfolds in nonlinear, overlapping vignettes, a structure Cregger patterned after Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (1999). 

The first vignette belongs to Justine. An angular, frizzy-headed woman in her early 3os, Justine has a history of professional misconduct (hugging a student—gasp), alcoholism, and promiscuity — making her an easy target for a grief-wracked community desperate for answers. The townspeople’s suspicions send her into a booze-fueled spiral of paranoia and depression. Partly because she loves her students, and partly to avoid being scapegoated, Justine sets out to unravel the mystery. 

Her persecution intensifies when an unknown harasser beats on her door at night and paints “WITCH” in red on her car. This is clever misdirection: Cregger elicits our sympathy for a wrongly maligned woman so we will prematurely discount the possibility that an actual witch is behind the children’s disappearance. The real threat emerges when Justine fixes upon Alex, the sole remaining third-grader, as the likeliest source of information. Snooping around his house, she spies Alex’s parents through a crack in the newspaper-plastered windows. They’re sitting on the couch, catatonic, the home in disarray.

Archer Graff (Josh Brolin) is on his own quest to save his son, Matthew, one of the missing children. At first, he suspects Justine (it was Archer, we learn, who vandalized her car), but circumstances compel the two to join forces, and they become the emotional heart of the story. Archer confirms Justine’s suspicions when he learns from home CCTV footage that all the children ran from their front doors in a straight line, converging on Alex’s house.

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Vignettes foregrounding other characters bring us nearer to the truth. A homeless tweaker named James (Austin Abrams), spars hilariously with Justine’s policeman ex-boyfriend Paul Morgan (Alden Ehrenreich). A plotline centered on Maybrook Elementary School’s principal, Marcus Miller (Benedict Wong), is alternately amusing and terrifying. It’s James, while burglarizing the Lilly home, who is the first to lay eyes on the children: locked in the basement, catatonic like Alex’s parents.

Finally, Alex’s vignette gives it to us in full: his gravely ill great-aunt Gladys (Amy Madigan), who had come to stay with the Lillys, presumably to die, turns out to be a witch who uses blood magic to take over her victims’ bodies and feed on their life force. When Alex’s parents prove too paltry a meal, Gladys forces him to retrieve personal items from each of his classmates. With these she performs a ritual giving her control over the children, and summons them to the Lilly home at 2:17a.m. 

Cregger’s writing is magnificent. Each successive vignette scratches our itching questions in unexpected ways, illuminating ambiguities of character and situation, the narrative pace accelerating as the gestalt comes into focus. Allusions to Stephen King tease where the plot is headed and clue us in to its meaning. Gladys appears in Justine’s and Archer’s nightmares in garish makeup reminiscent of It’s Pennywise the Dancing Clown, perhaps the most famous contemporary devourer of children. “2:17” recalls Room 217 of the Overlook Hotel, wherein young Danny is assaulted by a rotting crone who attempts to absorb his life force (Stanley Kubrick, in his movie adaptation, changed the room number to 237). Justine’s alcoholism also evokes The Shining, as does a scene when Alex’s rampaging parents poke their heads through holes in a bathroom door. 

Some viewers, primed to look for progressive undercurrents by Barbarian’s portrayal of a #MeToo abuser getting his comeuppance, will be tempted to read Weapons as a school-shooting metaphor. At first blush, this is a plausible interpretation. School shootings are the nearest real-life analog to the disappearance of a classroom of kids, and parents are as powerless against them as the parents in Maybrook. Even the kids’ body-language while running—arms outstretched like the “napalm girl”—recalls the suffering modern weapons inflict on children. During a nightmare, Archer sees a colossal AR-15 suspended like a dark beacon over his home, “2:17” glowing on its barrel like numbers on a digital clock. Is this meant to evoke the weapon favored by school shooters? 

A more nuanced reading, one that gives proper weight to Gladys’s characterization, however, shows school shooting to be a thematic red herring, overshadowed by another theme from Barbarian: the monstrous feminine.

Camille Paglia famously reads the history of Western culture through the opposition of Apollo and Dionysus. The masculine Apollonian principle, with its love of mathematical reason and lucid distinctions, seeks to tame the feminine Dionysian, the fecund undifferentiation from which all life springs and, inevitably, returns. Paglia has written: “What the West represses in its view of nature is the chthonian, which means ‘of the earth’—but earth’s bowels, not its surface.” The symbol of the Dionysian (or chthonian) is the Great Mother, a primordial figure of myth who births her children only to devour them. She recurs in myths in various forms, some emphasizing her nurturing qualities, others her role as devourer. The lamiae of Greek mythology embody the latter aspect: ancient succubi who subsist on the blood of children, often depicted as women from the waist up, serpents from the waist down.

While the unjust persecution of Justine may warn us against scapegoating women, Gladys’s demonic ministrations scream that sometimes witches are real, and women can sometimes be culpable.

Gladys, wan and grotesquely aged, rather transparently represents the monstrous feminine, and even its more particular instantiation in the lamia. She derives her magic from a potted tree covered in thorns. In a nightmare, Justine catches Gladys on her ceiling. Only her torso is visible, her legs obscured as if buried in soil—like the roots of a tree or the tail of a snake. Her legs are hidden in the same manner when she appears to James in the forest. Underneath her clownishly red wig, her real hair consists of sparse, snake-like braids. (As Paglia has written, “Medusa’s snaky hair is also the writhing vegetable growth of nature.”) Gladys’s use of archaic language (she tells Principal Miller that Alex’s parents are sick with “consumption”) alludes to her being ancient. Then there’s her lair: the front door of the Lillys’ house opens on a beckoning darkness, an orifice descending into the earth.

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Instead of serving as a reference to school shootings, the long rifle in the film is an Apollonian instrument, a symbolic phallus that kills. By contrast, Gladys kills by absorbing her victims’ life force, or by influencing others to kill on her behalf. Even the zombified state of her victims speaks to the horror of the chthonian, which, per Paglia, “we must block from consciousness to retain our Apollonian integrity as persons.”

It is precisely her chthonian character that makes Gladys so terrifying. Civilization is built on a swamp and might at any moment be subsumed. The Apollonian is powerless before the full force of the chthonian. The ubiquitous Ring cameras installed on Maybrook homes were parents’ attempt to keep the children safe, to control the uncontrollable; but technology cannot save us from primal forces. Archer, a construction manager who, in proper Apollonian fashion, tries to make sense of the mystery by plotting the children’s trajectories on a map, is in the end powerless before Gladys.

It is only when Alex extracts a hair from inside Gladys’s wig and harnesses her blood magic against her, that the good guys triumph. But it is a triumph not of the Apollonian, but of the chthonian against the chthonian: in a scene that recalls Pentheus’s dismemberment by the Maenads in Euripides’s The Bacchae, Gladys is torn limb from limb by the children formerly under her power.

The monstrous feminine is experiencing something of a revival lately, suggesting a rebellion against the ongoing domination of culture by feminist sensibilities. Films like The VVitch, Raw, Hereditary, Midsommar, Beau Is Afraid, Titane, Pearl, and The Substance are refreshingly reactionary, attesting that female agency has its dark side, that women are capable of astonishing violence against others, and against themselves. “The rise of rational, technological woman may demand the repression of unpleasant, archetypal realities,” Paglia wrote in Sexual Personae. The repressed, of course, has a habit of returning. In Weapons it returns with mythic, lyric eloquence.

When Stanley Kubrick needed a truly disturbing haunting for the bathroom of room 237 of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining (1980), he latched onto one of the most effective and elemental terrors imaginable: an old woman. More specifically, a nubile young woman who rises from a bathtub to seduce main character Jack Torrance, and then reveals her true form as a sore-ridden, saggy-breasted crone, cackling at her own deceit. 

It’s a scene that I suspect plays differently depending on the viewer’s sex. For a man, the horror comes from identifying with Jack. He, too, is aroused by the youth and beauty of the ghost’s first form; he, too, is appalled when he realises he has been tricked into lusting for old, degraded flesh. For a woman watching, the horror isn’t about what you want. It’s about what you are — or what you will become. You will age into monstrosity, and your only power will be the power to disgust. Every female body contains the terrible fact of its own future.

Coralie Fargeat’s new satirical body-horror The Substance contains a lot of visual nods to The Shining: corridors with sinister geometric carpet, blood pouring down walls, a bathroom decorated in an upsettingly lurid shade of red. But the most important nod of all is this: it’s a movie about the horror of female ageing, in which the ultimate nightmare is a woman’s body made grotesque by time. This time, though, it’s not a male filmmaker seeing this horror from the outside. It’s a female filmmaker seeing it from the inside. 

The film’s concept is a bit complicated and pretty clever. Elisabeth Sparkle (played by Demi Moore) is an Oscar-winning actress turned fabulously successful aerobics instructor (shades of Jane Fonda), just hitting her 50th birthday — which is the point at which “it stops”, as her repellent producer (Dennis Quaid) tells her. “People always ask for something new.” She loses her show. She loses her celebrity. She loses her purpose. 

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Enter the substance — a mysterious black-market medicine that promises to create the best version of you. When Elisabeth injects it, she gives birth to a whole second self through a gory vaginal split in her back. The new her (played by Margaret Qualley) is young, luscious and beautiful, and takes the name Sue. The only snag is that, while Elisabeth and Sue have separate bodies, their existence is shared: one of them can live for seven days while the other lies insensate. Disturb that balance, and you pay a price.

Of course, the characters (character?) can’t simply follow the rules. As Sue steps into Elisabeth’s old life and job, it becomes unbearable to sacrifice herself so the older body can live. “Just one more day,” she whispers to Elisabeth’s prone body, as she draws another dose of serum from the spine. The cost is borne by Elisabeth, who becomes more decrepit with every liberty Sue takes. Unable to coexist, they end up in a battle to survive that neither ultimately will win. Sue will end up savagely kicking a wizened, hunchbacked Elisabeth to death. 

There are more gruesome parts of the film, but for me, this moment of obliterating overkill directed at the despised figure of female age was the most horrible. Sue, of course, is ensuring her own hideous death by murdering Elisabeth. But in that moment, she cares less about her own life than she does about destroying the saggy, sunken portent of her own future. Elisabeth’s body represents everything she fears becoming, and everything that she will be, because Sue is Elisabeth and Elisabeth is Sue. 

The writer Victoria Smith dissects this particular form of ageist misogyny in her book Hags. “From the moment we are born female,” she writes, “we are conditioned to feel ashamed, not just of our appearance, our biology and our desires, but also of other women and our connection to them.” One way to manage this entrenched internalised misogyny, argues Smith, is through “hag hate”, which “provides a means to pacify that fear and shame by directing it onto the older woman.” The enthusiastic way in which some younger women embraced terms of abuse for middle-aged women like “Karen” and “terf”? That’s hag hate. The young woman understands, correctly, that to age as a woman is to become hated; her futile defence is to hate harder than anyone else.

But the self-destruction begins with Elisabeth’s choice to take the substance rather than accept her own decline into maturity. In an interview about the film, Demi Moore has said, astutely, that “it’s not about what’s being done to us [us here being women] — it’s what we do to ourselves. It’s the violence we have against ourselves.” And having worked to Hollywood’s punishing physical standards since she was a teenager, Moore knows a few things about this violence.

Inevitably, as a young woman Moore was told that she wasn’t thin enough (“before I ever even had children”, said Moore, in a phrase which ever so slightly and heartbreakingly suggests she might have accepted some justice in it after having children). She doesn’t, however, see those comments in themselves as the most harmful thing inflicted on her: “those were humiliating experiences, but the true violence was what I was doing to myself, the way in which I tortured myself, did extreme crazy exercise, weighed and measured my food because I was putting all of my value of who I was into how my body was, how it looked, and giving other people’s opinion more power than myself.”

Yet all the while Moore felt inescapably inadequate, her body was the peak of commodifiable perfection as far as the film industry was concerned. In Indecent Proposal (1993) she played a woman so gorgeous that a man would offer a million dollars to sleep with her. For going topless in Striptease (1996) — and for appearing to be fully nude on the poster, which may have been more important for the film’s commercial prospects — she was paid an unprecedented $12.5 million. 

It would have been sensational for any woman to appear naked and pregnant on the cover of Vanity Fair. But it was Moore who did it, in a 1991 shoot by Annie Leibovitz that drew both feminist praise and moral majority ire. It was talked about by everyone for most of that summer. Moore might never have received much critical recognition for her performances, but her body has always been significant in itself. It stands for the ideal.

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Which is why it is shocking to see her naked in the early scenes of The Substance. Her breasts are a little less perky than the last time you probably saw them, her butt a little less perfectly round. In the mercilessly full-screen close ups on her face, you can see that her skin’s plumpness is fading, its texture not so refined. She looks undeniably like an older woman. She does not, however, look her age — which is 61. She doesn’t even look her character’s age of 50. She could pass easily for 40-something. 

And that is partly the point. “Part of what was interesting is that Elisabeth is being rejected, and it’s not that I look that bad,” Moore has said. But it also points to a different kind of horror taking place off-screen. Moore has denied ever having plastic surgery, despite extensive speculation that she had undergone procedures including breast implants, fat transfer and eyelid reduction. Regardless, her body speaks of relentless discipline in diet and exercise: slim, toned and exquisitely proportioned, even if some parts of her are very slightly drooping. 

Keeping the hag inside you at bay requires constant vigilance. While Moore looks 40-ish, stars who are actually in their 40s have begun to look nearer to 20. This month, Dazed declared the advent of the “Undetectable Era” of beauty — the beauty itself is detectable, but the means used to achieve it are not. “We strive for dramatic results,” explained one surgeon. “The undetectable part is that it’s done so well, so beautifully, that to the natural observer it just looks like a person who’s maintained some youth.”

This, of course, is the dream that drives Elisabeth to the substance: to be younger, more beautiful, more perfect. That possibility — of youth stretched into decades — is not dystopian anymore, or at least not dystopian if you have access to the money and expertise that Hollywood success can offer. You can look as poreless and full-lipped at 30 as you were when you were a pre-teen. A beauty that looks born, not made, is there for the purchasing.

No procedure, though, can bargain away time forever. The portrait in the attic (or in the case of The Substance, the unconscious 50-year-old body in the closet) is still there, awaiting revelation. The hag is in her bathtub, waiting to be found. The horror of female ageing is that you can’t kill the crone inside yourself. She is you, and the alternative to reconciliation with her is mutually assured destruction. The only way to live, in the end, is to accept your mortality.