French writer-director Coralie Fargeat deals in hyperbole: already a standout at Cannes for her feminist revenge plots, her sophomore feature, The Substance, elevates her boldface brand of body horror to new extremes.
Fargeat follows Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), once a Hollywood star, now a TV aerobics instructor, as she plunges into a career crisis. Fired on her fiftieth birthday for losing “it”—some sort of “star quality” that fades with age—it takes little persuasion for her to experiment with the titular “Substance,” a body-enhancement drug that promises a second youth.
Several injections of the neon-yellow “Substance” in question knock Elisabeth unconscious, and a gash in her back (yes, the drug literally rips her open) opens up to reveal Sue (Margaret Qualley), Elisabeth’s younger, hotter alter ego, who immediately lands Elisabeth’s old TV job. The catch? Every week, Elisabeth must trade places with Sue, or risk rapid aging. Fargeat’s nods to Faust and Dorian Gray, though far from subtle, take on an organic twist: addiction to youth—and a definition of desirability more constricting than the leotard Sue dances in—eats away at the body Elisabeth yearns to escape.
Fargeat puts her outrage, and her fascination with flesh, on full display: her near-pornographic preference for close-ups and wide-angle shots carries over from her first feature (2017’s Revenge), and yet again, she succeeds in maximizing discomfort. Her claustrophobic camera technique—not to mention her sickening sound design—embeds an invasive gaze into the film’s visual aesthetic, leaving not a single body intact (even the chicken Elisabeth eviscerates performs nude, to say nothing of Moore’s and Qualley’s own nudity throughout the film).
For all her excess, Fargeat prefers minimalist dialogue, “cutting the fat” in a literary sense; she compensates with enough gore and nudity to retire Cronenberg. In her exaggeration, however, Fargeat risks fetishizing the female form she claims to elevate—whether or not she intends this as part of her satirical project seems ambiguous. Perhaps Moore’s performance alone, vengeful in its voyeurism, keeps the film from drowning in its own fake blood: by the film’s near-operatic finale, only her heartache keeps the film from numbing its own message. That Moore—herself a victim of the body-shaming culture The Substance satirizes—plays Elisabeth adds to the film’s biting, more subtle irony.
The Substance ends with the gurgling remains of Monstro Elisasue (a monstrous Cubist reconstruction of both Elisabeth and her alter ego) struggling towards her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. We recoil, but oddly enough, it allows for a moment of sympathy, maybe even peace. When the chaos settles, when the blood dries, we encounter the film’s central horror: solitude. Even as Monstro Elisasue, Moore conveys this with frightening clarity: at last, we witness her hurt, naked and writhing on the concrete.
