the substance

The first thing one needs to grasp about Coralie Fargeat is that her glaring lack of subtlety isn’t really a bug, but a feature. The French filmmaker tackles deeply loaded topics, but the point isn’t so much to generate fresh commentary as it is to probe their contours through a deliberately extremist form of cinematic language. That was certainly true of her debut feature Revenge - a straightforward take on toxic masculinity filtered through a modern exploitation lens - and it feels doubly applicable to her polarizing, Cannes-approved follow-up The Substance, a body horror parable which takes on aging and female beauty standards with all the delicacy of fishing with pipe bombs. You don’t have to like the end result, but you do have to acknowledge the particular game that Fargeat is playing.

Demi Moore stars as Elisabeth Sparkle, an Oscar-winning actress grappling with her faded stardom as she nears her 50th birthday. As the film opens, we see Elisabeth’s coral-pink star freshly laid on the Hollywood Walk of Fame… but the passage of time renders it cracked and weathered as indifferent pedestrians tread across it, spilling food and grinding out cigarettes on its terrazzo surface. As visual metaphors go, it’s so on-the-nose the screen might as well be halfway up your nostril, but the imagery proves boldly and thrillingly impactful all the same. Elisabeth has been reduced to hosting a cheesy morning aerobics show, but even that gets wrenched from her grasp as odious TV exec Harvey (Dennis Quaid - shot in ghoulish, funhouse mirror close-ups) informs her bluntly that the network needs to “go younger.” Eventually getting wind of a mysterious, black market drug known as “The Substance” that promises a “younger, more beautiful, more perfect” version of oneself, Elisabeth injects herself with the activator serum (which looks like radioactive Mountain Dew) and proceeds to literally (and graphically) birth a “younger, more beautiful, more perfect” version of herself (played by Margaret Qualley) from her backside directly onto the cold bathroom tile.

This new version dubs herself “Sue” and quickly lands Elisabeth’s former aerobics gig with her impossibly perky bod (it feels like meta commentary that even an actress as attractive as Qualley can’t live up to the plot’s requirements - she openly admits she was fitted with a flawless set of prosthetic breasts), quickly rocketing to fame and fortune. But part of The Substance’s Faustian bargain is that Elisabeth and Sue have to trade-off every seven days (the inactive body just lies there like a nude meat sack, receiving intravenous nourishment). While the supplier’s disembodied voice insists that they “are one” and share a single consciousness, it isn’t long before Elisabeth and Sue have splintered into separate personas, each increasingly resentful of the other as they start to jockey for control. Both actresses are stellar - Qualley has solidified herself as a genuinely captivating, risk-taking talent - but Demi Moore is the true revelation. Even at the apex of her 90s stardom, Moore tended to feel like a passenger in hugely successful movies (Ghost, Indecent Proposal, A Few Good Men). Slightly bolder choices (such as GI Jane, The Scarlet Letter, and Striptease) largely backfired, eroding her bankability. There was no reason to think she possessed a performance of this caliber (or fury, or commitment) anywhere in her locker - let alone at age 60. Even the film’s detractors tend to concede that the sequence in which Elisabeth arranges a date with a dweebish former classmate, purely out of some desperate craving for validation - only to succumb to vicious self-loathing and self-doubt before she can even walk out the door - is a humdinger. Moore leaves everything she has on-screen, as if making a ferocious, final bid for immortality. It’s certainly no stretch to call it the defining performance of her career. 

“Media literacy” has become a lazy, catch-all criticism for modern cultural discourse, but in the case of The Substance, there’s been a gnawing, frustrating refusal - or inability - to engage with the film on its own terms (a similar issue dogged Shyamalan’s Trap, with viewers more intent on outsmarting the plot than simply enjoying the ride). What a tedious way to approach art, if you can’t fathom a frame of reference beyond the confines of your own reality! Fargeat’s film is too blunt to be considered allegorical, but it clearly isn’t concerned with tethering itself to real world logic (would a random aerobics program really instigate this level of carnal frenzy over Sue, to the point that she’s gazing upon herself on monolithic billboards erected outside her penthouse window? Unlikely, but then it ably serves Fargeat’s overarching purpose of maximizing Sue’s delectable flesh in all its taut, youthful glory). As the tenuous balance between the two lead characters starts to fray and Sue looks to stretch her time beyond the allotted seven days (which is paid back in accelerated aging to Elizabeth’s own body), the movie starts taking increasingly brazen swings, Fargeat’s fearlessness perhaps adopting a tinge of recklessness. ​

Up to this point, The Substance feels like rapturously twisted entertainment… the result of an audacious director in full command of her craft, both on page and screen… but as the third act escalates, the film’s carefully calibrated fun-to-ick ratio begins to wobble. Sue is slated to host the network’s New Year’s Eve extravaganza, but as her own body starts to systematically break down, she makes the ill-fated decision to re-inject herself with the activator serum and, well… all hell breaks loose (and then some). Fargeat pushes the body horror to levels that would make even Cronenberg blush and the climax grows so resolutely bonkers (the screen literally becoming drenched in bodily fluids and viscera), it’s hard to know whether to howl with incredulous laughter or to simply wilt with antsy embarrassment. The film becomes a bit of an ordeal, frankly… and yet it’s hard to argue that Fargeat missteps. For better or for worse, she sees her vision through to its logical conclusion. Whether that makes The Substance a great (or even particularly good) film is open to debate… but it’s impossible to deny that Fargeat has produced the year’s most uncompromising and unapologetic work of horror. Like Elisabeth Sparkle herself, it’s rendered immortal.