Demi Moore might get nominated for her first Oscar, four decades into her career, for a gonzo 140-minute body-horror satire that features literally gallons of fake blood. Even if she doesn’t make it to Oscar’s final five, the fact that The Substance has become a major awards player comes as a delightful surprise.
That is to say, awards season isn’t always a stultifying march through predictable traditionalism. But it’s also difficult to avoid the routines that set in once it becomes clear that, say, Kieran Culkin is going to win best supporting actor for A Real Pain. And look, he deserves it. (Well, apart from the question of whether the just-barely-second lead in what often plays like a two-hander is really a “supporting” role.) But surely he didn’t give the only worthwhile performance in his category for the entirety of 2024?
No, of course he didn’t, because every year brings dozens of terrific performances, only a few of which typically get selected to receive a bunch of awards, over and over. So in the spirit of discovery and rediscovery that informs The Substance, here are a dozen-plus performances, some from relative newcomers and many from familiar faces, that haven’t been honored by major awards bodies or critics’ groups, but deserve to be in the conversation about the best performances of the year as Oscar voting kicks off. They almost certainly won’t be among those nominees when they’re announced on 17 January. But if some more voters really took a closer look at these performances, maybe they would be.
Of course, even awards voters can only do so much if a movie isn’t made eligible by its distributors. Technically, we can’t tell Academy voters to cast their ballots for Aaron Pierre in Rebel Ridge, because Netflix didn’t bother to give it an awards-qualifying theatrical release. But that doesn’t excuse Pierre’s absence from the many awards bodies with less stringent theatrical-release rules.
Joan Chen, Didi
A clear case of awards buzz disappearing simply because the movie in question wasn’t a bigger hit, Joan Chen does wonderful (and in terms of screen time, truly supporting) work in Sean Wang’s Didi, a bittersweet coming-of-age dramedy about a 13-year-old (Izaac Wang) growing up in California. Chen play his de facto single mom Chungsing, whose husband has moved back to Taiwan to help support the family, and whose potential as an artist may have been thwarted by her familial responsibilities. Chen, who has been relatively scarce in American features since she did a run of them in the 90s, gives a perfectly judged performance here, clearly suggesting Chungsing’s personhood beyond the purview of her son’s adolescent strife while painting her as neither saint nor strict enforcer.
Juliette Gariépy, Red Rooms
What is Kelly-Anne looking for? She arrives at the trial of a man accused of heinous crimes and quietly observes him. She eventually chats with Clémentine (Laurie Babin), a fellow observer, who believes the killer is innocent. Kelly-Anne doesn’t betray the same level of certainty, and Red Rooms evokes a similar ambivalence as the audience starts to puzzle out what she’s up to: disturbing, yet impossible to tear your eyes away. Gariépy is a major reason this strategy is so effective, playing the character’s obsessions close to the vest with an unwavering, unnerving dedication that eventually stands in for our own digital-world fixations and the mental toll they can take even when we think we’re in control. Red Rooms is a horror movie that comes on with the precision of a procedural, and Gariépy’s chilling performance eventually inhabits both genres at once.
Chris Hemsworth, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
Chris Hemsworth has both played and sent up his role as a Marvel-sized action hero, sometimes within the same Thor film. But he’s never been better at serving those two sides of his persona than he is in George Miller’s epic-scale Fury Road prequel, playing Dementus, a feckless warlord who’s also clearly the superheroic lead in his own delusional story. That story puts him on collision course with Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy), seeking revenge for the death of her mother, and in the movie’s western-influenced final confrontation, Hemsworth gets to play a stunning number of notes: comic bravado, desperation, sorrow, even a hard-won form of cynical, post-apocalyptic wisdom. Before this stunner of a scene, Hemsworth has a self-evident blast, pasting on a false nose and riding around the desert in a smudged-red cape. But he’s the rare cartoonishly preening villain who becomes more fascinating even as his righteous enemy demystifies him.
Josh Hartnett, Trap
The late 90s and early 00s were lousy with youthquake next big things that didn’t pan out, and after a decade-plus of toiling in relative obscurity, it seemed like Josh Hartnett was just another extremely handsome bro who didn’t quite have leading-man chops. It’s almost poetic, then, that he solidified his 2020s comeback by playing a dorky, well-meaning dad – at least on the outside. Hartnett’s Cooper looks like he’s just taking his daughter to a sought-after pop concert as a reward for her sterling report card; he’s actually a serial killer realizing that the arena is a sting operation, set to close in on him at the end of the show.
The rest of M Night Shymalan’s movie takes Hitchcock-style wrong-man identification to an extreme, as we’re invited to wriggle alongside Cooper, with the uncomfortable twist that he is absolutely the right man. Hartnett’s zig-zags from dad jokes to earnest parental protectiveness to panicked conniving to genuinely fearsome monster are endlessly entertaining and weirdly convincing, a grand stunt concealed by his initial affability, just like his character. Cooper has nearly as many facets as James McAvoy’s justly acclaimed performance in Shyamalan’s Split, only without the gimmickry fueling the shifts. It’s bravura work from Hartnett, who turns out to be quite the capable (and wonderfully non-traditional) leading man, after all.
Adam Pearson, A Different Man
Sebastian Stan has received plenty of credit for the shapeshifting necessary to star in a pair of movies released weeks apart, featuring disparate leading roles: a deformed man with a void at his center, and also a guy suffering from neurofibromatosis. Adam Pearson, meanwhile, has neurofibromatosis in real life, and is far too genuinely charming to appear in The Apprentice within any distance of Stan’s Donald Trump. Instead, he steals scenes in A Different Man, playing Oswald, a man utterly comfortable in his own skin, further vexing and haunting Stan’s Edward, who undergoes an experimental treatment to get rid of the tumors that used to cover his face, only to find that maybe his self-loathing goes beyond physical appearances.
By all accounts, Pearson is similarly gregarious in real life, so it might seem like he’s playing himself here – but his good cheer takes on just the right amount of ambiguous menace, with a presence that allows the audience to see both his warmth, and the threat that nags at Edward’s insecurities.
Aaron Pierre, Rebel Ridge
It takes Aaron Pierre all of about five minutes, and relatively few lines, to convey the determination and anger that coil together beneath the skin of Terry Richmond, a Marine vet bedeviled by Louisiana police in Rebel Ridge. In the film’s opening, Terry is assaulted, detained and robbed by a pair of cops, all under the auspice of routine, and writer-director Jeremy Saulnier needs only to aim his camera at Pierre’s face to capture the urgent range of emotions of this situation (which are even more complicated than the blatant injustice of the acts themselves). In other words, his physical performance begins well before he starts kicking ass – which he does, in this non-lethal variation on the first Rambo movie. In fact, Pierre makes a terrific action hero: swift, graceful, powerful, enormous fun to watch. But it’s especially gratifying because even as Terry unleashes his fighter’s prowess, Pierre makes sure that there’s a living, breathing, conflicted human beneath that righteous fury. It’s the perfect fusion of movie-star charisma and masterfully detailed characterization.
Aubrey Plaza, Megalopolis and Margaret Qualley, Drive-Away Dolls
When does affectation become transcendent? Maybe there’s a scientific answer involving the speed of a screwball and the precisely skewed angle of an iconoclastic film-maker, but better, perhaps, to leave it as an ineffable product of movie-star magic – something Aubrey Plaza possesses in spades, despite frequently taking oddball character parts such as Wow Platinum, the celebrity reporter slinking her way through the crumbling futurescape of Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis. Her outré rat-a-tat rhythms, half 60s sex kitten and half brassy 40s dame, are indicative of Coppola’s vast and eccentric film-history touchstones, and she helps steer Megalopolis toward a daffy rollercoaster ride, and away from the cliff of self-seriousness.
There’s no danger of self-seriousness in Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke’s Drive-Away Dolls, an intentionally cheapo riff/goof on exploitation movies; the trick of Margaret Qualley’s loquacious and outlandishly accented performance as a perpetually horny young lesbian is how well she matches the Coen sensibility, even when filtered through a 1999 setting. She got more attention as the unholy ingenue created by The Substance, but Dolls allows her the cracked dignity of being funny yet sincerely sexy.
Tilda Swinton, Problemista
The sometimes-outlandish Swinton co-starring in a movie whose first-time director has extensive sketch-comedy experience sounds like a recipe for high camp – or, worse, aspiring camp. Instead, Swinton’s Elizabeth, the marginal art-world figure attempting to preserve and showcase her late husband’s work with the help of her new assistant Alejandro (Julio Torres, who also wrote and directed), is chillingly recognizable: an impatient, mood-swinging, erratic force of constant, seemingly unnecessary interrogation. The catch is the way the movie comes around, at least partially, to her demanding but sometimes effective way of moving through the world. Swinton is both subtle and unsparing enough to navigate Elizabeth’s journey from comic to villainous to tragicomic to, finally, a strangely familiar kind of grandeur – without ever changing the essence of her deeply difficult personality.
And a Whole Bunch of Scream Queens
If Demi Moore and/or Margaret Qualley are recognized for The Substance, it will be a major outlier in part because horror has had a notoriously difficult time cracking into the awards scene, save for the occasional prestige blockbuster such as The Silence of the Lambs or The Exorcist (exceptions that prove the rule, more or less). But even if Moore and/or Qualley do make it, let’s look a gift horse in the mouth and ask for more, because this was a sensational year for women in horror. These ranged from veteran scream queens such as Mia Goth, completing her sex-and-death X trilogy with surprisingly understated but still ultra-charismatic portrayal of an adult film actor hell-bent on stardom in MaXXXine, and Maika Monroe, making the transition from plucky young woman to haunted adult in the creepy-as-hell Longlegs; to relative newcomers like Nell Tiger Free, playing a terrorized nun in the shockingly good prequel The First Omen, and Hunter Schafer mixing slapstick and grief in the otherwise muddled Cuckoo.
These women aren’t all just screaming their lungs out, either. Lupita Nyong’o transformed A Quiet Place: Day One from a franchise extension to a moving and unexpected mediation on death and control with her careful, heartbreaking underplaying. Sometimes the 2024 scream queens even showed great range across multiple types of horror movies: witness Kathryn Newton stealing scenes in the vampire-centric Abigail and providing the wounded misfit heart of the horror-comedy Lisa Frankenstein. It’s fitting that a strong year for horror acting ended with Lily-Rose Depp giving a performance of full-bodied, possession-like desire, one that Robert Eggers was clear to note did not involve digital augmentation of her movements. (Well, she does levitate in one scene but still, point taken.) You could fill out an entire nomination ballot drawing only from this scary-good lineup.
