The Substance, the sophomore feature by French provocateuse Coralie Fargeat, is many horrors in one. It’s Jekyll and Hyde, splitting as it does its protagonist’s psyche into two warring individuals; it’s Dorian Gray, the way each of them serves as the other’s slowly diminishing portrait. It’s a body snatcher movie of a sort, or perhaps even a vampire story– though it’s not always clear who’s feeding off of whom. Like any film which bears the descriptor “body horror” it owes an unmistakable debt to David Cronenberg, but it’s also run through with the wry satire of John Carpenter and the grisly, tongue-in-cheek thrills of Sam Raimi.
The Substance is all of this and more, but it is, at its heart, horror of a more down-to-earth sort: an old-fashioned Hollywood rise-and-fall story, albeit run through an outrageous splatter-comedy filter. Think All About Evil Dead 2, and you’ll be in the right ballpark.
Demi Moore stars as Elisabeth Sparkle, an actress who’s long since traded her career as an Oscar-winner for a Jane Fonda-esque morning workout show– only to be shown the door the second she hits fifty. Just as she hits her lowest moment, Elisabeth catches wind of a mysterious treatment. For a presumably hefty fee and periodic trips down a seedy alley, she can generate a younger version of herself: “Sue,” played with typically feral charisma by Margaret Qualley, who is free to reclaim Elisabeth’s life of glamor and luxury unencumbered by the ravages of age. The catch– because of course there’s a catch– is that Elisabeth’s old body continues to survive; the two women (or are they one?) must tap out for strict seven-day shifts, and each day must “maintain” by injecting a quick shot of the other’s essence. Of course, horror movie rules were made to be broken, and as the treatment begins to go inevitably awry Elisabeth begins to wonder if renewable youth is all it’s cracked up to be.
I won’t beat around the bush: The Substance will probably gross you out. Bodies squish and contort and clamber in and out of each other’s spinal columns; bodily fluids of all sorts, some of which I’m fairly certain do not actually exist in nature, are excreted and extracted and spilled all over the floor; hell, even a scene in which a man eats a plate of shrimp is shot and mixed in such a way as to be as disgusting as anything in Cronenberg’s bag of icks. But The Substance is, first and foremost, a satire, and it aims to make you bark with laughter as much as recoil with revulsion. By the end, the effects on display– many of them rendered practically, in loving homage to Rob Bottin and Screaming Mad George– are so gleefully outrageous that I found my delight far outweighed my disgust. It’s the sort of film one can imagine Peter Jackson making today if he’d continued down the road of his first three movies rather than messing around with all those damn hobbits.
The timing of The Substance feels fortuitous, coming as it does at the end of a summer defined by brash, sassy records from pop stars like Chappell Roan and Charli XCX. Like those records, The Substance is bright, snotty, and unapologetically female. The scenes following Sue are all shot in sharp, porny focus, backed by a thumping dance score from the British DJ and producer Raffertie. It plays like an Instagram reel from some twisted parallel universe, with Qualley absolutely slaying as she extracts pineal fluid from a distended orifice on the comatose form of her host body. It’s grotesque and unsettling, yet strangely infectious. It is, as the youths say, brat.
Elisabeth’s scenes, meanwhile, play more like a gothic horror story, as she lurches around the shadows of her darkened penthouse, cursing at her younger alter-ego on TV and preparing disgustingly elaborate dishes like “Christmas turkey stuffed with foie gras.” The word “brave” always feels a little patronizing when it comes to this sort of role, but it nevertheless requires a certain level of daring for an actress of Moore’s status to lay such waste to Hollywood’s treatment of older actresses. This is, of course, the most transgressive material Moore has had the opportunity to play with since her backside graced the poster for I Spit on Your Grave (true story), and she tears into it with gusto.
The world these women (woman?) inhabit is, of course, a man’s one. Elisabeth has long since internalized that her physical beauty is her prime commodity, and it’s telling that, rather than try to reclaim her earlier glory as a serious actress, Sue immediately auditions for her post on the workout show. This power imbalance is emphasized by the fact that the men of The Substance are, without exception, absolute dolts– unctuous cretins who mug and leer (and, it must be said, broadly comic in a way that highlights Fargeat’s most French sensibilities). Chief among them is the morning show’s smarmy producer, unsubtly named Harvey, played to the rafters by an against-type Dennis Quaid. Harvey is a typically boorish, handsy buffoon, vapid even by Hollywood executive standards; he doesn’t need to excel to float to the top, but simply flash a toothy grin and spout a few slick, empty platitudes. Come to think of it, perhaps Quaid’s role here is less of a departure from his previous performance than I’d initially anticipated.
Demi Moore’s career, like so many others, has followed a similar trajectory to Elisabeth Sparkle’s; once a serious and in-demand actress, her roles seemingly evaporated as she progressed into her 40s. Her last major role as a headliner was arguably 1997’s G.I. Jane, which most recently made headlines as a joke about a different actress’s alopecia. Moore’s consciousness of this, and Fargeat’s outrage on behalf of her and the countless others like her, animates every frame of this film. The Substance is an outrageous and bloody good time at the movies, and if you see it with an audience (which I strongly recommend) the hoots and hollers will almost certainly be deafening. Yet, without this central passion, it might be just another tossed-off Troma wannabe. The Substance is as punk as movies come, loud and crude and funny and furious– blisteringly, righteously furious. If you’ve got the stomach for it, it just might steal your heart.
The Substance
2024
dir. Coralie Fargeat
140 min.
Opens Friday, 9/20 @ Coolidge Corner Theatre, Kendall Square Cinema, and theaters everywhere
