I once joked to a friend that no one in Hollywood has the guts or gumption to do a 360 degree whip-pan around the room when a character answers a telephone like Bollywood/Tollywood does. There’s an undisciplined surety in that kind of style that includes flourishes and unusual points of view that I appreciate when the narrative supports it, because no matter what anyone tells you, less isn’t more – more is more. It’s that kind of audacious directing that Coralie Fargeat brought to the table in Revenge (2018), and what she develops even further here in The Substance.
Everything you’ve heard about Fargeat’s new project – delirious, bewildering, perverted, blood-soaked – is true. I usually have one or two screenings at every TIFF that leaves me stunned and reeling as the credits roll, and The Substance is definitely one of them, even putting aside the fact that it was one of my most anticipated films of the year. A film that builds and builds on it’s insane concept until it careens into pure over-the-top madness in the year’s best climax, it’s far and away one of the best body horror films I’ve ever seen.
Demi Moore plays Elisabeth Sparkle, a Jane Fonda-esque workout queen so popular that she adorns billboards across LA, and has her own star on the Walk of Fame. But her almost-literal pig of a boss, network executive Harvey (Dennis Quaid) is eager to push her out for a younger model at the moment of the star’s 50th birthday. As Sparkle gets wind of an open audition for her replacement, she begins to spiral before being handed a mysterious flash drive with an ad for the eponymous Substance, a home procedure that, through a series of injections, unleashes one’s DNA to create an ‘other’ self – prettier, smoother, younger – with whom you switch places every seven days without exception. There are other rules, too. The ‘original’ self is the matrix, and is ostensibly in control of the experience. Food must be intravenously administered to the inactive body over the seven days, and the other self must ‘stabilize’ with spinal fluid from the matrix each day. Finally, and perhaps most critically, the user must always remember that both the matrix and the other are not separate, but one.
And so, desperate, Sparkle finds herself traversing a dingy alley and obtaining a series of boxes from a lockbox, without ever engaging with a real person outside of a few brief, frankly rude interactions over the phone. In a scene that – like much of The Substance – could be read as titillating until it takes a sharp turn towards the grotesque, Elisabeth undertakes the procedure and ‘births’ Sue (Margaret Qualley). And at first, things go fine. Sue is immediately (perhaps too easily) given Elisabeth’s show, and brings it to new heights to the delight of Harvey.
The Substance is not for those who are seeking a subtle, restrained, or minimal film experience. This is maximalist filmmaking, the Everything Everywhere All At Once approach to body horror with ostentatious prosthetics, absolute gallons of blood, and so many needles. In terms of it’s Cannes award for Best Screenplay, it is certainly worthy of that. More than that, though, it is body horror projected (like Revenge did) through the most toxic of toxic male gazes. It weaponizes and makes a goopy meal of the mediocre man that can seemingly only fail upwards. Similarly, it brutally indicts the male gaze as the root cause of women’s insecurities, all but forcing them to resort to more and more extreme measures in the name of beauty. The way that Fargeat does this in The Substance is masterful. Fetishizing every inch, every fold of skin in an uncomfortable level of detail, Fargeat uses extreme closeups to, well, the extreme to cultivate lust, and then quickly turning the dial to disgust.
For Qualley and especially Moore, it’s hard to think of a role in either’s past or future that will be more demanding, and which asks both actors to literally lay themselves bare to the world like The Substance does. Moore’s ability to explicate her character’s compounding loneliness with a mere stare into a mirror or at Sue’s enormous billboard right outside her apartment’s window is remarkable, and provides a wonderful counterpoint to the aggressively in-your-face camera and script work going on elsewhere. Qualley plays the part of the young ingenue to the letter, and when her innocence gives way to an aggressive ambition, pushing the limits of her time ‘on’ (while Elisabeth lies motionless in a prison of Sue’s design), she becomes one of the most compelling villains of 2024. Quaid portrays Harvey as the grossest, leering, sleaziest huckster to ever huck, and you’ll come close to cursing Fargeat’s inclination toward extreme closeups in a scene where Harvey devours a mountain of shrimp.
Some may take issue with the last 20 minutes of The Substance, as I have heard and can understand the instinct to write them off as extraneous. But it’s not an instinct I share, because it brings an already over-the-top film even further, and I could not imagine a universe where I would want a shorter or leaner cut. Fargeat shows, with The Substance, that her maximalist proclivities hinted at in her debut feature Revenge very much work, perhaps even better, in a film set and produced in Hollywood, and that her keen eye for subversion is very…Substantial.
The Substance was an official selection of the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival and received the prestigious Midnight Madness Audience Award, voted on by attendees of the festival. It will be released in theatres on September 20 from MUBI.
