‘Repulsive’ might not be the first word you’d think of to open a five star review of a movie, but there isn’t a better single way to sum up Coralie Fargeat’s genuinely manic The Substance. A body-horror thriller that starts as satire and ends up much closer to Evil Dead II, The Substance takes a rusty, serrated knife to misogyny and ageism in Hollywood that, even if it’s not saying anything that new or novel, chucks so much dizzyingly disgusting stuff at you that you’re left with a spinning head and a queasy stomach.
Demi Moore, in her highest profile role in at least 20 years, makes for a perfect lead here. Having herself written about the torture she had to put her body through to look ‘perfect’ on screen and then been largely forgotten by the brutally ageist industry once she hit 40, she completely owns the role of Elisabeth Sparkle, an actor and fitness video instructor whose 50th birthday is celebrated by her being dumped by her producers and agents. They want someone newer, hotter, younger – someone that, as it turns out, Elisabeth can become through the use of the eponymous ‘Substance’. A strange green fluid, one injection of the stuff splits the user’s cells, creating a fresh and ‘perfect’ new being, with the original body and the new being existing as separate but connected entities that each get one week of consciousness at a time.
There’s a lot of exposition to get through, but Fargeat does so with style, creating an immensely hostile world through abrasive soundscapes, an aggressively thumping score, and deeply unflattering close-ups even before the Substance gets unleashed. After a ‘birthing’ sequence of such intense violence that it’d make a xenomorph blush, we meet Elisabeth’s double – the impossibly sexy Sue (Margaret Qualley), who immediately replaces Elisabeth as the studio’s go-to girl, but soon gets ideas above her station as the double.
What follows is, basically, a descent into a hell of blood and viscera and leering ass shots as Elisabeth and Sue fight for control over their one technically shared life – the 140 minute runtime might look a bit long for a gory horror from the outside, but Fargeat uses it to just keep *escalating*. Whenever you think you’ve maxed out on the insanity, Fargeat steps it up again, in ways both supremely gross and thrillingly unpredictable – by the end, the audience I was with was gasping and laughing en masse at the sheer madness of it all.
As is inevitable for any film tackling this sort of subject matter, The Substance has already become a figure of debate for how feminist or otherwise it might be. For my part, even with a female writer-director, I wouldn’t give it that title – it’s far too mean-spirited and obsessed with Qualley’s arse to qualify for any intellectual distinctions – but I really don’t think it matters. It raises a few questions, sure, but it is mostly just using its central societal issue to push a series of gruesome horror concepts as far as they will go to make its audience squirm and retch and, by those measures, it succeeds magnificently.
Moore is superb here. What’s being asked of her – not just in terms of nudity and, later, grotesque prosthetics, but by a script packed with scenes of writhing, screaming, and all manner of bestial humiliations – could easily overmatch any actor, but she rises to the challenge with real movie star gusto. Also really fantastic is Dennis Quaid as the revolting exec in charge of the studio, pointedly named Harvey, and if Qualley has just a bit less to do than them for a lot of the runtime, she makes up for it with her truly bonkers final scenes.
It’s all kept in tonal balance by Fargeat’s surreal worldbuilding. Her vision of LA has one foot in the present but the other still in the ‘80s, with bright primary colours, old-school corded landline phones, and the fact that fitness video instructors are world famous, so when things get really bizarre, it all feels of a piece with the world around it. Even in the moments where it’s not entirely in-your-face visceral, The Substance is constantly disconcerting – just like for Elisabeth and Sue, the powers that be in this world are beyond your grasp.
It’s here that The Substance finds its most cogent point – that even in trying to find control in a beauty-obsessed world by contorting their bodies to fit impossible standards, women are still ultimately beholden to the whims of men who still wish they were younger, thinner, more smiley. How intelligently or empathetically that point is made is certainly up for debate, but the ridiculous force that Fargeat puts behind the idea is undeniable. A blood-drenched slice of insanity, The Substance is never an easy watch but, in a decent crowd and on a big screen, it’s a captivating one.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 