Body horror with blunt objects is bloodily cathartic

The substance is not a subtle film. The cinematography is aggressive. The metaphor is a blunt object. The music is loud and blaring and the color palette is so bright it tears you out of the film. The film is animated by a white-hot rage that escalates throughout its epic 140 minutes, leading to a breathtakingly audacious climax in which a firehose of blood is sprayed onto the audience. It is mad and absurd in the best sense.

Writer-director Coralie Fargeat brought a similar all-or-nothing mentality to her 2018 debut. Revenge, a film that would never consider a tasteful medium shot when an extreme fisheye close-up was possible. Fargeat directs damn well in The substance It also uses dramatic camera angles to give even trivial moments a sense of hyper-stylized delirium. A character throws something in a trash can? She puts the camera on the floor. The same character walks down a hallway? She holds her lens low to the ground, distorting the perspective and making an ordinary place seem confusing and strange.

Then comes the body horror. Stars Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley both spent hours in the makeup chair preparing scenes in this film, and the practical latex prosthetics are perverse and surreal in the style of Screaming Mad George, the effects artist behind Company And Freaky. Combined with an aesthetic of syringes and latex gloves that can best be described as “medspa chic,” reminiscent of “miracle drugs” like Ozempic and Botox, it encourages people (let’s face it, mostly women) to pump themselves full of barely regulated substances whose side effects won’t be clear for a few decades, so that they can make themselves more palatable to patriarchal beauty ideals.

None of that will stop the shitty, bumbling men who run the world from throwing you away when you stop giving them boners, as Elisabeth Sparkle (Moore) learns early in the film. Elisabeth is extremely famous – billboard famous, Walk of Fame famous – and has been for decades. You'd think that would give her even the slightest advantage when it comes to renegotiating her contract as host of the aerobics show that broadcasts her toned body and beaming smile to millions of American homes every week. You'd be wrong.

In a scene that only hints at the disgust to come, the lascivious-looking TV executive Harvey (Dennis Quad) has his mouth full of shrimp when he tells Elisabeth that she is being sidelined. The themes in The substance are expressed largely visually, and the casting of the film's male characters is itself a vicious commentary: this film is populated by mediocre-looking men judging women who are, frankly, far superior to them. Quaid gets this joke very well, playing Harvey like a cartoon wolf; later in the film, he brings a horde of white-haired white men in suits to gawk at Elizabeth's eventual replacement, and they prance around like Elmer Fudd chasing rabbits.

What they don't know is that Elisabeth's successor is also Elisabeth, who has been reborn as a younger, smoother version of herself and calls herself Sue (Qualley). She manages this with the help of the eponymous Substance, which she injects into her veins without hesitation after receiving a tip from a suspiciously smooth-faced doctor's assistant. The substance is associated with a number of rules: first, you can only activate the process once. Second, you must stabilize your “other self” every day. And third, you must give each of your selves the same amount of time – seven days for each, once your ideal self has emerged from your current body. No exceptions.

However, Sue is getting so much positive attention that it feels too good to go back to her old body for a whole week. And so she begins to exceed the limits of the arrangement, and Elisabeth will suffer for it. These side effects are what make Sue The substance into the realm of “hagsploitation,” a horror subgenre that treats the aging female body as an object of fear and disgust. The difference here is that these feelings are not forced upon the characters, but arise within them: Elisabeth projects her self-loathing outward when she freaks out after waking up with sagging skin or varicose veins. (These changes quickly progress far beyond anything that could be considered “normal aging,” but again, this is not a subtle film.)

The complexities of making a living off of your looks and the emptiness left when that life is no longer possible provide rich text for Moore, whose “It Girl” days in the mid-'80s also led to a long career as a famous movie star. But Moore is 62 and certainly aware of her changed status within the industry. Fargeat gives her the opportunity to go through the stages of mourning her old self on screen – anger in particular – and to play with cultural stereotypes of older women. One can only hope that performing was cathartic for her. It is certainly cathartic to watch.

Sue, on the other hand, enjoys every second of superficial admiration laced with resentment that she receives in her young, sexy form. Pretty girls smile, and Sue's cheeks ache from showing her pert, pink gums. As a character, she is an empty vessel, both in content and in practice: Fargeat frequently films Qualley's body in close-ups, breaking her down into a collection of perfectly symmetrical parts. But although both stars display a considerable amount of nudity in “The 4000,” The substancethe camera's gaze is not sexual; instead, we are invited to judge and examine her waist, butt, and upper arms with the unbiased eye of a mathematician (or a butcher).

Here the metaphor can be a bit confusing, because The substance indulges in objectification in the name of criticism. But the film's feminist intentions are unmistakable. In Fargeat's eyes, portraying femininity is a grotesque, masochistic act. It's a game you can't win, no matter how good you are at it. And the only way out is to buy into it and become the monster society already thinks you are. That's easy: you just have to stop shaving your legs, wearing makeup, or punishing yourself for enjoying your food. And by the looks of things, being a monster is a lot more fun.

Director: Coralie Fargeat
Writer: Coralie Fargeat
With: Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, Dennis Quaid
Release date: 20 September 2024