Demi Moore’s “The Substance Is Bright” – pop body horror

A bright, striking, didactic and generally well-reviewed body horror film about women, aging and the hypersexualization of the female body. The substance is the second feature film by French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat (Revenge), which has been riding a wave of critical acclaim and showbiz hype since the film's premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May. And I appreciated her film's attempts at humor and its bold formal flourishes, like the stunning color scheme and the way it shows Los Angeles as a strangely empty city, a kind of blank canvas with nothing on it except the giant, blown-up images of the film's main characters, who are pathologically obsessed with them. But when a female filmmaker illustrates in great, literal detail that there are uncomfortable cultural attitudes toward aging women, all I get is a weary “No shit, Sherlock” response.

“Body horror can be a really powerful expressive weapon for female directors,” says Fargeat, who used the filmmaking process to channel her own fear of turning 40.

At any age, we can find something about ourselves that is wrong and makes us feel like a monster. … Your image defines you and your self-worth. But I thought if I could create something meaningful around these issues, it could also serve as a form of release.

The substance is about a famous aerobics instructor named Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) who stars in her own long-running television fitness show. On her fiftieth birthday, she is fired by her grotesque boss, television producer Harvey (Dennis Quaid). Desperate to hold on to her old life, she turns to a mysterious black market drug called “The Substance,” which gives her a new and improved – which is to say, much younger – self named Sue (Margaret Qualley). Sue immediately auditions to become Elisabeth Sparkle's successor on the fitness show and is hired by the submissive, perverted Harvey, whose name is clearly meant to evoke Harvey Weinstein.

After that, Sue and Elizabeth live alternate weeks in accordance with the strict instructions that accompany anonymous shipments of the “substance.” While Elizabeth's paralyzed body is stored and kept alive by intravenous nutrients, Sue leads the exciting public life of an aspiring celebrity. While Sue is stored, Elizabeth leads a depressing twilight life in the huge apartment, whose wall decoration is a giant glamour photo of herself. She watches television and eats increasingly lavish meals to compensate for what she is missing.

Soon the two are rivals for what the androids in Blade Runner longingly call “more life”. Sue begins to “borrow” additional time in her body, which has serious physical consequences for Elisabeth in the form of even faster aging. But since there is no way to reverse the consequences of her participation, Elisabeth cannot bring herself to end the experiment, which continues through even more gruesome developments until the monstrous, blood-soaked finale.

Much is made of how Demi Moore's performance as Elisabeth enacts aspects of her own showbiz experience. At 61, Moore looks as extraordinarily young and fit as ever, with a toned body, a tight, sculpted face and jet-black hair that reaches past her waist. It's hard to avoid cynical thoughts about how she must live in the gym, with occasional trips to the hairdresser to hide her roots and have her extensions maintained, plus regular visits to the plastic surgeon to keep her jawline so incredibly tight.

Over the decades, however, Moore has been one of those stars who has always (somewhat annoyingly) insisted on maintaining her appearance solely through fitness training and a controlled diet, and denied major cosmetic surgery: “You know what? Maybe one day I'll go under the knife. It just annoys me that people keep saying how much I've spent on cosmetic surgery.”

At the same time, her career was characterized by regular self-promotional presentations of her naked, seemingly timeless and indestructible body. Her most famous appearance was in 1991 Vanity Fair cover while she was well into her pregnancy. But the “look how incredible I look now” extravaganzas continue to be a reliable part of her fame, incorporated into films like striptease (1996) and GI Jane (1997) and Charlie's Angels – Full Throttle (2003), in which she played a small but central role that was meant to amaze audiences. The scene that caused a minor sensation took place on a beach, where Moore passed by Cameron Diaz. Both were wearing bikinis, leaving the audience gasping as they saw that Moore somehow looked impossibly thinner and more toned than the highly athletic ex-model Diaz, who is ten years her junior.

In promoting The substanceMoore has given interviews about the constant pressure to show off her aggressively sculpted body in order to pursue her career. Her 2019 memoir, Everything is upside downalso dealt with her problematic body image, which over the years manifested itself in eating disorders, compulsive exercise, and drug and alcohol abuse.

As I wrote in my book, I had been told in several movies to lose weight before I even had children. These were humiliating experiences too, but the real violence was what I did to myself: the way I tortured myself, doing extremely crazy exercises, weighing and measuring my food, because I invested all the values ​​I had in my body and its appearance, giving more weight to the opinion of others than to myself.

Moore brings the same interpretation into The substance – that it's about “the violence we do to ourselves” when we accept crazy, culturally imposed beauty standards and compete with other women to conform to them. But overall, the film is pretty insistent that it's the way the system works that creates the imposing nature portrayed primarily by the character Harvey. Often filmed with fisheye lenses to further distort his craggy, goggle-eyed face, Harvey makes a disgusting mess as he wolfs down mountains of jumbo prawns and lectures Elisabeth about how women over 50 “go nuts.”

“What is It?” Elisabeth asks, intimidated. But as disgusting as Harvey is, he doesn't want to define what exactly is lost. He probably means the loss of fertility and thus of attractiveness in the eyes of most men.

The film aims for dark comedy in many of its cruder scenes, but even in its dramatic moments it remains a detached and somewhat abstract treatment of the experience of aging for women. It's not as if it's a vulnerable, despondent woman offering her ordinary flesh up there for inspection – it's Demi Moore, whose film fame rests on a kind of Teflon quality that comes from constantly reshaping and fine-tuning the body to keep it ready for spectacular display.

Although the role seems designed to elicit praise for Moore, who raves about how “brave” she is for taking on the role, it can only highlight the poignant effects of ageing in everyday life, showing that no matter how perfectly crafted, how much time, money and the expertise of trained professionals are spent on creating a woman's appearance, it is never perfect enough.

Moore comes closest to the experiences of a normal person when her character tries to live a “normal” life again by dating a man she once knew in high school who raves that she is “still the most beautiful woman in the world.” But when it's time to leave the apartment, no matter how great Elisabeth looks in the mirror, she sees only the flaws. She changes her clothes, adds accessories, changes her makeup, and finally rubs her face vigorously, smearing the layers of cosmetics into a grotesque mask.

It takes effort to really believe the emotion behind this scene. Moore was never a particularly gifted actress, and her fame has brought her a lot of physical confidence. When she looks in the mirror, she sees the familiar, confident little jut of her chin and the confident posture of a woman who knows she looks great. We just have to believe that her character is consumed by insecurity on the inside.

In real life, Moore's reaction to showing off her flaws is less melodramatic: “When I went into it, I knew it wasn't about looking great, and actually the role was somewhat liberating because I didn't have to be perfect. It's not like there aren't shots where I think, 'Ugh, my butt looks terrible.'”

And the ass shots are a big deal in this film, as countless comparative close-ups insist on showing Margaret Qualley's wonderfully youthful, ballet-ready backside. There are so many close-ups of her gyrating, gyrating, and swiveling butt during the “pump it up!” portions of Sue's aerobics routine that the line between vile exploitation and the feminist critique of the voyeuristic “male gaze” completely breaks down.

Ultimately, Moore is thrust into portraying the character of the Witch, who is a cultural nightmare, but there's a kind of lame cosplay quality to this too, which doesn't go beyond the observation of, “Oh, hey, they really made Demi Moore look ancient and horrible.” No misogynistic bastard of a male director could portray “the old witch” more cruelly than Fargeat does here.

The substance reminiscent of the lurid old “Psycho-Biddy” or “Hagsploitation” horror films of the 1960s, such as What happened to Baby Jane? (1962), Pssst … Pssst, sweet Charlotte (1964), straitjacket (1964) and The Nanny (1965). But these films featured aging but still impressive stars of the Hollywood studio era, like Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, and Olivia de Havilland, and celebrated their outsized screen power in a campy, sly way that Demi Moore's hagsploitation couldn't pull off.

Just imagine Bette Davis as the terrifyingly delusional Baby Jane, looking like a rotting cupcake in her old child star outfit, which only accentuates her wrinkles and sagging cheeks and the dark circles under her puffy eyes. When she looks at herself in the mirror and suddenly recognizes the gargoyle she has become in her attempt to stop time, her scream of pain is so disturbing that you might think it was sprung from Davis' own personal torment.

“After I turned forty,” Davis said in one of her many candid memoirs, “I screamed every time I looked in the mirror.”

The substance is a cheerful, pop, lurid, bloody and intimidating look at women aging in public, but unfortunately it is neither particularly moving nor memorable in the long line of great feminist body horror films.