2024 | rated R | starring Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, Dennis Quaid | written & directed by Coralie Fargeat | 2h 21m | 4 1/2 out of 5 stars |
Elisabeth (Demi Moore) was once a popular Hollywood celebrity who has seen her star fade in recent years. With her TV show on the rocks and a producer (Dennis Quaid) asking for a chance, she is introduced to a black market drug that will duplicate your cells and create a younger, better her (Margaret Qualley). But the rules are strict and if the two don’t swap lives back after 7 days there can be ghastly consequences.
Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance is an inventive, shocking and thrilling ride of a film. What’s so unique about it are not it’s Chronenbergian body horror grotesqueries (through give it a second, those are coming). It’s how well the movie is able to balance the obvious message it is beating into our heads with an equally clever and thoroughly inventive story. I’ve been chronicling the demerits of message movies since Avatar told us not to cut down trees, but the truth is that any good movie worth its salt is saying something, whether it’s a theme or a moral or a message. The problem is when the message overrides the story or when the story is a thinly veiled megaphone for the message. Substance satirizes the experience women have in Hollywood on both ends of the age spectrum with all the subtlety of a chainsaw to the skull and yet it’s so rare that a movie this overt, in your face and preachy is also so artful, so visually inventive, so wild and fun. It’s still a movie, committed to every piece of the storytelling and filmmaking process. It slaps us across the face and dares us to ask for another.
I love a story with a strict set of rules for its world. The Substance of The Substance (everything in this movie is generic to the point of cartoonish absurdity), is an injection series that once “activated” births a younger version of the participant from their back (a doctor tests Elizabeth for her strong spine) and then is able to live 7 days while their other self lies unconscious on the bathroom floor being fed from an IV pouch. Fargeat, the writer, sets up these rules with some simple large print instructions and then one-by-one, piece by piece shows the increasingly insane consequences of bending and then breaking them.
Fargeat disgusts early on with the repulsive way she shoots any number of things, namely food. The first warning shot is Quaid’s producer character (name Harvey) guzzling through a handful of shrimp, but the Hollywood story is just one of the film’s many themes. Demi Moore is terrific as the aging actress who doesn’t just see her job slipping away but her chances at love and life at the hand of her own insecurity. The story gives her several outs that she refuses to take because Elisabeth still craves the attention and still on some level wants to make a comeback and please these studio ogres. I don’t believe in the sociological idea that movies are shot with the male gaze (and that is a bad thing), but Fargeat sure as hell does and shoots Qualley with the most extreme, up close, shamelessly provocative, slow motion male gaze in the history of cinema. Michael Bay will be kicking himself. The movie is designed to maximize our discomfort from multiple attack points.
Much like Fargeat’s debut feature, the feminist twist on the rape revenge movie Revenge, Substance is gorgeous. It’s full of long hallways, fisheye wide-angles, bright neon colors. As Elisabeth and her younger alter-ego Sue start to battle it out, we start to get a series of hallucinations each more bizarre and graphically rendered than the last. And the movie’s world is a timeless limbo where Sue’s sexy jazzercise workout show is the biggest thing on TV, her new show is advertised simply as “new show” and the New Year’s Eve special is the biggest event of the year. A good chunk of Substance however takes place in a simple, white-tiled bathroom where our heroes inspect their bodies in front of the mirror or in the shower or laying on its cold floor. The film’s abundant, unblinking frontal nudity in these scenes is so personal, such a literal display of vulnerability that it recontextualizes what it means to see nudity on screen.
As Elisabeth and Sue start to destroy each other for celebrity supremacy, the New Year’s special that looms over the last half of the film like a tense ticking clock. As the stories threaten to collide Fareat sets up the question: horrible thing is going to happen for these two in front of a massive audience? What Fargeat has in store is something that goes far beyond where most Descent into Madness movies go by about 9 or 10 steps. We are used to these movies also being art pieces, that dip into delusion and body horror just enough before snapping back to reality. Natalie Portman pulls a feather out her body in Black Swan. Morfydd Clark levitates in Saint Maud. Robert Pattinson sees Lovecraftian tentacles in The Lighthouse. The Substance thankfully doesn’t know such restraint. It hits the gas and doesn’t let up, reaching point after point where the viewer has to wonder if the movie has hit its peak of craziness only to top itself again and again and again. A 2 and a half hour freefall of increasing insanity. In other words, one of the best movies of the year.