The scenarios similar to Overlook Hotel, therefore to Kubrick, show a distorted and nightmarish reality for the protagonist Elizabeth Sparkle, the star system and Hollywood are dominated by the male chauvinist mentality, with advancing age women are forgotten and they are replaced and the same thing happens to Elizabeth.
Time is vital for the protagonist, the film begins on her birthday, her advancing age, but time also takes on a concept of waiting that devours Elizabeth in as after using the substance she has to wait a week to be able to take on the appearance of the other younger one, Sue.
So the obsession for beauty, for acclaim, Elizabeth fully lives the model of the star system managed by men mostly shown in a grotesque way, almost always framed with a wide angle to distort and therefore dilate their physiognomies by focusing on satire and caricatural moments.
The lenses of the cameras of the television studio where Elizabeth/Sue works point to perpetually obtain sexy shots, director Fargeat accentuates Sue's forms shown in the foreground through prosthetics and through editing and soundtrack obtains the effect of sensorial alteration, men dote on Sue while they now consider Elizabeth outdated.
Elizabeth often crosses long corridors that through the wide angle seem infinite, everything is distorted, everything is a nightmare, she hates herself and no longer accepts her body.
Demi Moore's interpretation is masterful, the sequence where the now former actress (in the film Elizabeth was a successful actress) would like to go out to spend an evening but every time she looks at Sue's body and her portrait she is unable to accept herself ending up in oblivion it is handled very well and shows great skill of the actress.
The staging is excellent, the photography changes, the wide angle, the camera movements, when we move on to tighter editing everything has its meaning and purpose, Fargeat's technique is high.
The film also goes into body horror, the ending is grandiose, the bloodbath, the obsession with beauty and perennial success which creates a total distortion with the aforementioned quote, not an end in itself , to Society by Yuzna.
The subjective view via hand-held camera of Elizabeth is very interesting when, after using the substance, she looks in the mirror and sees Sue but with a tilted shot that recalls a sense of danger, the same subjective view takes place in the third act with a monstrous and well-executed directorial result.
The idea of centering everything almost entirely between Elizabeth's apartment and the television studio is functional for the question of oblivion and mental imprisonment, the details of Elizabeth covering herself, lifting her coat when she goes out so as not to be recognised, so as not to show herself because she is ashamed of herself are excellent and denote the character's psyche.
A film that through the excellent management of Fargeat strikes in several places, the satire and the grotesque for the chauvinism of show business, the obsession and oblivion of Elizabeth, the flamboyant pop and the sensorial alteration that Sue causes and obviously also the body horror.