Against Transformation: Thoughts on the Films of 2024

Making a movie is a complicated, time-consuming endeavor. Releasing a movie—especially with an eye towards the major film festivals and awards circuits—is arguably even more so. The game we critics like to play, therefore, in which we grab at several movies released around the same time and try to identify a common theme, is more often the product of marketing decisions and pure chance than a true reflection of prevailing cultural trends. Nevertheless, as I watched the closing credits of Aaron Schimberg's A Different Man, I found myself comparing it to The Substance (dir. Coralie Fargeat) and Emilia Pérez (dir. Jacques Audiard) and asking an uncomfortable question: why is it that 2024 seems to have delivered not one, not two, but three different movies all riffing on the idea that transformation is bad, impossible, and that if you nevertheless do attempt it, you will probably die?

The Substance and Emilia Pérez are among last year's most lauded movies. When the Oscar nominations are announced later this month, it is anticipated that both will garner substantial nods, especially for their lead actresses, Demi Moore and Karla Sofía Gascón. A Different Man has flown a little lower, showing up on the honors lists of regional film critic societies and in the lower tiers of various publications' best films of the year lists, though star Sebastian Stan was recently awarded the Golden Globe for his performance. Within that rarefied sphere, they seem like very different movies: a hyper-stylized horror-comedy about the cost of Hollywood's obsession with youth and beauty; a crime drama slash musical about a cartel boss who longs to transition and live as her true self; a low-key, quasi-mumblecore disability drama.

Watching A Different Man, however, I was repeatedly struck by how much it mirrors the other two movies. Like The Substance's heroine, fading actress turned exercise guru Elisabeth Sparkle (Moore), A Different Man's hero, Edward (Stan), an aspiring actor whose neurofibromatosis has caused disfiguring tumors to grow all over his face, agrees to undergo a shady, under-explained procedure which promises to deliver "a whole new you". Like Emilia Pérez's titular heroine (Gascón), he feels so strongly that his outer form doesn't match his true self that when this treatment succeeds, his response is to fake his own death and start a new life. Also like her, he then tries to reinsert himself, in a new guise, into the lives of the people he left behind—Emilia's wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) and their children; Edward's former neighbor and crush Ingrid (Renate Reinsve). Like Elisabeth, who spawns a younger version of herself, Sue (Margaret Qualley), with whom she inevitably ends up in a fight to the death, Edward finds himself in conflict with an alternate self, when Ingrid writes a play about her relationship with him and casts Oswald (Adam Pearson, who has neurofibromatosis in real life) in a role that Edward feels he was destined to play. In all three movies, the heroes discover that their desired transformation has not delivered the happiness they hoped for, and end up devolving into an intermediate, and thus monstrous, form: Elisabeth and Sue destroy each other and merge into Monstro Elisasue, a grotesque amalgamation of limbs and body parts; when Jessi threatens to take their children away from her, an enraged Emilia regresses into explicitly masculine-coded violent behavior; as Oswald begins living the life Edward wanted, enjoying success in his career and embarking on a romantic relationship with Ingrid, Edward begins wearing a mask of his old face. All three films end in an orgy of violence that leave their heroes' lives shattered, a tragic cautionary tale about wanting the wrong thing, in the wrong way.

The idea that runs through all three stories is most cogently expressed in an early scene in Emilia Pérez, in which the surgeon who will eventually perform her gender-confirmation surgery (Mark Ivanir) explains to her lawyer Rita (Zoe Saldana) that while Emilia can change her body, she can't change her soul. This is, broadly speaking, an acceptable and even positive message—it's notable, for example, that Emilia, who experiences a moment of honesty with Jessi at her story's end and acknowledges (some of) the harm she's done to others, also gets the closest thing to a happy ending in any of the three movies (she still dies, but she's remembered with love and admiration by the friends she made and the people she helped). But there's something almost oppressive about hearing it repeated again and again, especially in relation to people—women, trans people, disabled people—who are constantly told that they are not enough. I found myself thinking about societal attitudes towards fat people, who are derided for being fat, and then further derided when they try to lose weight. One wonders, in fact, whether the genesis of both The Substance and A Different Man's stories isn't rooted in the recent ubiquity of weight loss injections, which has occasioned much public fluttering about losing weight "the wrong way".

That impression is only intensified when you consider how strikingly empty Elisabeth, Emilia, and Edward are. Despite being clearly modeled on Jane Fonda, who has lived a famously rich and varied life, Elisabeth appears to have no existence outside her exercise show, no friends or family or interests. When Sue takes over the show, she stays at home watching TV and cooking grotesque meals. Edward is an actor, a profession that demands at least some degree of self-knowledge—understanding what you project with mannerisms, voice, and physicality—but seems thoroughly incapable of expressing himself on any level. He also has no friends or family, and surprisingly, no community with other people who share his disease. As a former violent criminal, it's perhaps understandable that Emilia wouldn't be prone to self-reflection, but nevertheless, the scene in which she and Rita found a charity to help locate victims of Mexico's cartel violence, with no indication that Emilia grasps her own role in this tragedy, is eyebrow-raising.

The presence of Oswald in A Gifted Man makes for an additional wrinkle. Oswald is everything that Edward is not—confident, outgoing, full of interests and opinions, generous with his time and attention. If Edward is empty, Oswald is full to the bursting, and people around him—especially Ingrid—are drawn to that. It's strongly implied that this is who Edward is "supposed" to be; that instead of trying to fix his condition with medical intervention, he should have sought to fix his attitude. Oswald reaping all the rewards that to Edward seemed unimaginable—stardom and plaudits for his performance in the play, a relationship with Ingrid—is a rebuke to Edward's belief that he can only have those things by looking like Sebastian Stan.

Oswald, however, is also the sort of character we tend to encounter in disability stories, someone with a lot of personality who both gives us permission to notice his disability, and refuses to be summed up by it. It's very possible that developing this sort of persona is an essential coping strategy for someone who literally can't walk out of the house without drawing outsized attention, but where does that leave people who are introverted, or shy, or just can't be bothered? Late in the film, after Oswald has effectively taken his old self and life, Edward tries to do the same to him. Wearing a mask of his old face, he capers manically in loud clothes, imitating Oswald's English accent, trying desperately to fake his charm and bonhomie. It all falls horribly flat, of course, destroying Edward's new life. But is this the film acknowledging that a person like Edward or Oswald can never simply be, that they must always have a persona to allay others' anxieties about them? Or is it castigating Edward for being so devoid of self that he has to steal someone else's personality? Are we, once again, blaming a person who has been repeatedly told that they are wrong for taking steps to address that wrongness?

What's really frustrating about the experience of watching these three movies is that I actually liked all of them quite a lot. The Substance is visually stunning and full of audacious set-pieces. Emilia Pérez is thrilling as both a crime story and a musical. A Different Man makes a virtue of its tiny budget, foregrounding Stan's unglamorous performance, and intercutting its naturalistic style with moments of horror or unreality that give it a wonderfully disorienting vibe. I'd like to think that it is those qualities—as well as a somewhat surface-level nod to inclusiveness (after all, actors like Pearson and Gascón tend to struggle to get roles, and Moore has suffered from the same ageism as her character)—that accounts for the laurels they've all received. But it feels telling—though of what, I'm not entirely sure—that three of the most lauded films of the last year are ostensibly about castigating social ills, and yet all three end up criticizing the way the people who suffer from those ills respond to them.

I was going to end this post on this rather depressing note, but then I watched another 2024 movie, Marielle Heller's Nightbitch. Based on the novel by the same name by Rachel Yoder, it tells the story of an artist turned stay at home mom (Amy Adams) who begins transforming into a dog. It hasn't received the kind of awards attention that the other movies I've discussed here have, and frankly that's pretty fair. Stylistically uninteresting, and with a script that leaps too quickly from complication to resolution, its appeal rests mainly on Adams's performance, which is warm and humor-filled even when she's growing extra nipples or mauling the family cat. What it is, however—and what made it such a relief after spending a day thinking about everything I've discussed above—is joyful. Adams starts the movie run down and depressed, worried that devoting herself to motherhood—which she genuinely loves and enjoys—has atrophied her intellect, her creativity, her very humanity. Becoming an animal, paradoxically, allows her to rediscover those things, and she ends the film in a happy equilibrium between humanity and animality, motherhood and self-fulfillment. There's not much more to it than that—the film doesn't explore its fantastical conceit to any great depth, and it handwaves away the economic and social forces that pressure women into a choice between motherhood and a career. But the idea that it is possible to change, to make your life better, without that decision making you a horrible person and dooming you to suffering, was a genuine relief to discover.