블루문 특급을 열심히 보았는데 데미 무어 출연은 전혀 생각이 안나서 링크로 들어가 보니 정말 잠깐 나왔나 봐요. 젊고 싱싱한 미모를 자랑하는 장면이지만 '서브스턴스' 맥락에서는 "엘리자베스가 수였던 시절" 느낌이라 묘하기도 합니다. 아무리 한때 젊고 아름다왔어도 우리는 다 나이들어서 그 싱싱함을 잃어버릴 운명이라는 무상함이 느껴진달까.
Despite a winning, committed performance from Demi Moore, the script withholds defining Elisabeth’s emotional paralysis with any real texture. In another context, this may not have been an issue, but the film does not quite defy the expectations of women as spectacle-objects. The finale ultimately turns the aged female body grotesque and monstrous, which, although genre tradition, strikes especially hollow here, under the cloud of all the far more memorable and, indeed, thematically richer films from which this one continually borrows. And if Fargeat hopes to condemn any institution or social framework, we, too, are denied the pleasure of seeing women as anything more than what they represent for those forces.
Horror need not be empowering or even, for that matter, progressive (in fact, the genre in its current condition may well benefit from less political fixation), but these are the terms Fargeat appears to stage or, at least, welcomes. In all those classics, buried beneath all the anxieties around sexual difference, we might locate something far more interesting than the feminine narcissistic preoccupation with her own mangled, patriarchal reflection: that is, the recognition of her threat to a vulnerable male power. Here, she remains ever under its thumb.
