Fluids On Film
In 2024, cinema gave us so much more than blood, sweat, and tears. An impressive array of weird liquids dribbled, oozed, and spurted off the screen this year, with filmmakers delighting in one of our most undersung forms of matter. Liquids got outsize roles in scripts, with major plot points depending on their consumption in Dune: Part Two and Babygirl. Cameras lingered over the way they moved across skin — sometimes slowly, sometimes with athletic velocity — in Challengers, while mics magnified all their stomach-churning noises in The Substance.
Like so many of the year’s mercurial main characters, fluids proved to be as alluring as they were controversial. They were taboo emblems of repulsion, erotica, or — as is often the case — an uncomfortable mix of both. In a year where transgression thrived onscreen, the movies of 2024 taught us that a liquid is only as sexy or disgusting as you make it. Here are our favorite substances that went “drip” in the night.
Spoilers ahead for Dune: Part Two, The Substance, Challengers, Queer, and Babygirl.
Worm Juice (Dune: Part Two)
Almost two hours into Dune: Part Two, Timothée Chalamet decides to take a big swig of some poisonous hallucinatory blue juice extracted from a smaller version of the huge worms he rides around the desert. The world of Dune calls this substance “the water of life,” which is a misleading name for something that came from the butthole-mouth of a recently drowned baby worm. Anyway, it’s kind of a big scene, because 1) the worm juice is supposed to be fatal to all men, and 2) while Timmy is tripping on the wormy blue Gatorade, he gets vivid visions of the future that inspire him to lead the nice desert tribe he’s been hanging out with into interplanetary war. Is worm juice the true villain of Dune 2? Maybe! It’s even more evil than the black goop Stellan Skarsgård hangs out in. Yuck.
Sweat (Challengers & Queer)
Whatever Charli XCX and Troye Sivan were doing onstage during their Sweat tour was nothing compared to the beads, drips, and lower-back puddles Luca Guadagnino’s special effects teams crafted this year. First they gave us Challengers, a film so soaked and salty it led Vogue to rule sweat “spring’s sexiest accessory.” Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor spent their final face-off basically reenacting Flashdance between points, performing labrador-like shakes to shed excess perspiration from their hair in slow motion. At one point, Faist leaned over to dribble sweat directly onto the camera, in a POV shot you could feasibly describe as pornographic. That’s some good fucking tennis.
there’s a shot in challengers where mike faist’s sweat is dripping onto the camera and i opened my mouth like a baby bird
— zeek ???? (@superboysbestie) April 24, 2024
happy 7 months to art and his beads of sweat in the opening shot of challengers pic.twitter.com/8WVjv2eJk9
— alee (@tashimasons) November 26, 2024
Seven months later, perhaps sensing we were spending too much time in the deodorant aisle, Guadagnino returned with Queer, a movie where you can practically see Daniel Craig’s pores opening up in real time. For all of Queer’s intimate sex scenes, bodily fluids skewed more on the “ick” end of the spectrum here — Craig’s character, William Lee, exists in a constant state of dampness that seems to kind of repulse his younger lover Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), who rarely breaks into more than a Glossier-campaign sheen. (Lee has such an abundant supply that he often fashions some of it into a sort of makeshift hair gel.) Through Queer’s lens, sweat was less a sexy byproduct of homoerotic tension and more a symptom of empty, pathetic desperation — though really, aren’t those two sides of the same soggy coin?
Green Goo (The Substance)
The Substance’s body-swap gone nauseatingly wrong starts with a little vial of chartreuse fluid and hinges on a complex system of bags, tubes, and syringes moving liquids of varying colors and viscosities between the bodies of Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley. All this goo transferring was accompanied by gruesomely exaggerated squelching and suction sounds — a major contributor the movie’s widely discussed gross-out factor. Close-ups of ooze-y, seep-y stuff abounded throughout the film — sparkly snow-globe innards, egg yolks, drippy mashed potatoes, copious fountains of blood. As sickening as it all was, you’ve got to hand it to our girl The Activator, the brat-green mother of all The Substance’s disgusting liquids. It’s the titular role!
Milk (Babygirl)
What better way to celebrate Christmas than leaving out a glass of milk for Santa— er, I mean, for your hot she-E-O boss whom you are pretty sure wants to be dominated? Harris Dickinson’s character (correctly) surmises that if he not-so-subtly sent Nicole Kidman’s character a glass of milk during a company happy hour, she was going to chug that shit down in one thirsty take, wiping away her milk-moustache with the back of her hand in front of some mildly horrified robot-company execs. At this point in the movie, Sam (Dickinson) and Romy (Kidman) have been flirting with starting up an affair but struggling to find a dynamic that will satisfy them both, and this chilled cylinder of full-fat dairy seems to really hit the sweet spot: Transgressive enough to weird out Romy and her colleagues, but not so kinky that it outright blows up her life. This is what she’s been missing! Later in the movie, Sam pours Romy a little saucer of milk and she laps it up while George Michael’s “Father Figure” plays joyously in the background. Who says you can’t have it all?
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