The worst thing that can happen to a woman is a wrinkle.

The worst thing that can happen to a woman is a roll at her waist, a softening chin, a pendulating breast.

The worst thing that can happen to a woman is an arthritic knuckle: stiff, swollen, twisted. A back that crests like a wave to point her face at the floor. A gait that moves in fits and starts, a mouth that shapes language slow and thick, a silhouette that draws stares of anger and disgust on the street: How dare she leave the house like that?

This is what women are supposed to be afraid of. Or, it’s what is meant to make everyone afraid, when they witness a woman experiencing it. The desired response is something like this: It’s terrible that our culture trains us to fear these things—but wouldn’t it be so much more terrible to have to live like that? I can’t stand to look at her.

It only works if the woman is white. And cis, able-bodied, presumably neurotypical, wealthy. As close to assimilated and acceptable as any woman can possibly be, in a misogyny-sodden culture. And she is! She’s even beautiful; for all that the camera lingers on the fine lines around her eyes and the softened edges of her buttocks, it’s ridiculous to think of describing her as anything other than extremely conventionally attractive. Her attractiveness is, in fact, the point: So sad! She’s internalized the culture so much that she has no idea she’s beautiful. There’s even a piquant touch of resonance with the real world: the actual (famous and famously beautiful) woman who plays said doomed and be-monstered woman is, at age sixty-one, using this film as her comeback vehicle.

Why, if the whole problem is that she can’t appreciate her own clearly evident beauty, are there so many harsh angles in the shots that swallow up this woman’s body? Why do we spend so much time looking over her shoulder as she looks in the mirror, watching her lip curl in disgust as the camera itemizes every stamp that age has marked her with? Why, when her transformation begins, are these among the first elements heightened to grotesqueries? This is a horror film, after all, and the camera locates that horror—the full weight of the audience’s dismay—squarely in the woman’s abjected body. It’s certainly not the culture that makes us squirm, whisper oh fuck no, cover our eyes and turn our faces from the screen. Those hints of it that we do receive, embodied in a sleazy, sun-mottled producer who oozes shrimp grease onto his glorious suits and doesn’t wash his hands after pissing, are not framed as culture at all, but as his individual failings. (Perhaps, the film tentatively suggests, those failings are enabled by a permissive societal framework? But I had to read between the lines so hard to reach that point that the metaphorical page vanished and I saw only the spaces lacing among its atoms.)

The defender’s line here, as it so often is: But it’s satire! The movie isn’t saying that she’s bad, it’s critiquing the forces that brought her to this point! And it’s true that satire, even when executed at its peak, is rarely tasteful—it’s a blunt instrument, a steel mirror that mercilessly demonstrates our own failures back to us. My objections to this movie have nothing to do with taste, with propriety, with squeamishness. (There are viewers, I’m sure, who object on principle to the level of gore and splatter oozing around this movie; I’m not one of them.)

The problem: satire cannot partake of—cannot benefit from—the same elements it attempts to skewer. An example: there’s a scene, about halfway through, in which a haglike version of the woman watches her uncannily sexy and much younger double give an interview on a late-night television show. The young version mocks the old version’s work in an acid display of self-loathing, while the old version looks on and, her hair gray and frizzed like a storybook witch’s, ragefully prepares an enormous turkey stuffed with foie gras. The camera cuts rapidly between the raw meat and the young, nearly naked body; knifed animal muscle to bouncing ass and back again, over and over until I wanted to scream we fucking get it! she’s a piece of meat! but if that’s really so bad, shouldn’t this be less conventionally hot? I lost count of how many shots, throughout the film, tracked slowly over the young woman’s chest and butt and thighs in various stages of exposure. This sexualization is so pervasive, so sincere, that it cannot function as satire; instead, it becomes precisely the thing that it claims to subvert.

This movie makes Barbie (2023) look, by comparison, like a gender-studies textbook.

This movie made me want to watch The Thing (1982) as a palate cleanser. I have seen more than one review compare this movie to the works of John Carpenter, which is an insult to John Carpenter.

Here are some other things that I want, as revenge for having witnessed this movie. I want to cook the most difficult dish in a book of French cuisine, just like the old woman does. I want to make an unholy mess of things. When, partway through dicing an onion, I inevitably slip and cut myself, I want to paint my face with my own blood, wear the ensuing red-black crust as a mask, scare the townspeople. The joke’s on them—I’m even scarier without it.

During the brief period of my life when I taught creative writing (remotely, of course! no university would hire a squid as an in-person instructor!), I told my students on more than one occasion that you should not treat a real experience as a metaphor, for purposes of speculation or horror or shock value, if it is not your experience. (Or, I suppose, if you have not conducted extensive research, typically involving conversations with those whose experience it is. This is one of the reasons why novelists often hire sensitivity readers.) That strategy—loosely described as imagine if something awful, which would normally only happen to another group of people, happened to you with all your privilege—is lazily insensitive at best, and outright offensive at worst.

For example: there are many real people in the terrestrial world who give themselves medically necessary injections. People inject themselves with insulin, with semaglutide, with estrogen or progesterone or testosterone, with immunosuppressants, with epinephrine. There are real people, too, who hear ‘ordinary’ sounds as being vastly and terribly magnified—people to whom the noise of someone else chewing or slurping, or of a passing truck, or of one dish in a cabinet clattering against another, or of water running from a faucet, is hell on earth. There are vast numbers of people with joints that freeze or twist or swell, people whose spines curve sideways, people who walk bent over or with one leg that drags, people whose speech is slow and blurred. Many of these people are disabled, or chronically ill, or both. The experiences of injecting oneself, of walking or speaking non-normatively, of flinching away from a seemingly innocuous noise, are indelibly linked to disability, at least within our current cultural framework.

One of the most frequent recurring images in this film—one that is always played for fear and disgust—is that of the protagonist, old and young alike, injecting herself in the thigh with fluid that she must first draw from her double’s spine. The long, thick needles, and their entrances to her flesh, appear in pornographically heightened closeness and detail. And then there are the sounds in this movie—the endless terrible grating, slurping, squelching, so resonant and overpowering that I could only conclude it’s meant to make the audience feel as if they were inside her body, hearing all that from within. The unspoken premise here is something like wouldn’t it just be dreadful if this were something that could really happen? that could really happen to you? All her bodily alterations are similarly abject, grotesque versions of real experiences that actual people have. God, how scary and awful it must be to live like that!

It is, in many ways, scary and awful. But that’s because of the systemic issues that make life harder for people who live those experiences. It’s not—and I can’t believe I actually have to spell this out, here in 2024—because there’s actually anything wrong with having a body, or a sensory experience, that differs from the conventionally understood norm. I’m not scared of the old version of the woman, or the disabled version, or the fat version. Her body is in many ways the natural conclusion of terrestrial life; it is part of the usual course of things, and as such it is value-neutral. Nobody is worth less because they’re old, or because their body is big or slow-moving or in pain, or because they cannot tolerate the sound of something being crunched between another person’s teeth. The transforming woman is not good or effective horror, because she’s real.

What we see, when we watch this film: a privileged woman, frightened at the loss of some of that privilege, makes terrible choices. As a result, she suffers greatly and eventually dies.

This setup is not inherently misogynist. What is, is the fact that we spend an hour and forty-five minutes watching a woman’s body brutalized and sexualized by rapid-fire turns, for our ostensible pleasure, and that the narrative framework encourages us to blame her for the lion’s share of that treatment. Isn’t it her fault, really? Couldn’t she, as the nameless seller of the film’s titular product repeatedly tells her over the phone, have stopped at any time? Doesn’t she deserve everything that happens to her?

Over the years that I have dwelt here on the bottom of the sea, I have consumed, and indeed I have loved, many works of art that I found to be misogynist, or ableist, or objectionable in some other serious way or combination of ways. Some of my guilty pleasures: Barry Lyndon (1975) and Dr. Strangelove (1964), both films whose women (all three of them!) are pathetic and/or sexualized caricatures. Another: Perdido Street Station (2000), a China Miéville novel full of abjecting body horror, whose twist turns on a clichéd usage of sexual assault. It’s not that I believe art should be subject to some kind of ideological pH test in order to be permitted to exist. These works offend me, yes—but they don’t pretend that they are going to do otherwise, and so I find myself able to watch and read them peaceably.

What enrages me about this movie—what has motivated me to spend several hours writing a screed that will be read by perhaps two or three people at most—is that it does all this, then wears the trappings of feminism and treats them as a selling point, attempting to deploy them for clout. You want to make a film about a woman who, through her own bad choices, comes to a painful and humiliating end for which she is solely to blame? You want it to have lots of titillating close-ups, wild prosthetics, and audio gore? Fine. If that’s your vision, make it. But don’t call it feminist, don’t sell it as empowerment or genuine social critique, and for fuck’s sake don’t pretend that it’s anything innovative.

So you’re scared to die—you’re scared that men will stop finding you desirable—you’re scared that your body will look or move differently than it has to date, and that other people will treat you badly for that reason. That's okay. Those things are, I suppose, frightening. The fact that you are so deeply afraid of them is also an indicator of your unexamined privilege, and your willingness to exploit the experiences of women who are, for a variety of reasons, less socially acceptable than you. That's white feminism to a T—and that’s the real horror story here.