The Substance (2024)
dir. Coralie Fargeat
Rated: R
image: ©2024 Mubi
David Cronenberg ain’t got nothin’ on Coralie Fargeat. Cronenberg, the body-horror director who has been called the “King of Venereal Horror” and the “Baron of Blood,” has been namechecked by French director Fargeat – along with David Lynch, John Carpenter, and Michael Haneke – as influencing her work. With her latest picture, the giddily gory The Substance, Fargeat makes a convincing case that she’s ready to join, as a peer, the ranks of those she admires. Her film is as nasty as any Cronenberg, as bonkers as any Lynch, and is so horrifically hilarious that I often found myself laughing as I was wincing and looking away from the screen. The Substance is also a razor-sharp feminist satire about youth and beauty and how both are weaponized against women in our society.
Fargeat launches us into her demented reality by way of two short films. The first lasts mere seconds. We see an unidentified pair of hands carefully insert a needle into an egg yolk to inject a liquid into it. We then see that yolk expel a second yolk from itself. This second yolk looks firmer and more pristine than the one it came out of.
The second short film could be called The Life Cycle of a Movie Star. We again see unidentified hands, this time doing the work of making and installing a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. We see the star created with expert precision, installed into the Hollywood sidewalk, and celebrated with fanfare and ceremony.
Then, as time passes, we see the star begin to fade. When the career of Elisabeth Sparkle – the Oscar-winning actress whose star this is – declines, we see the star age, tread on by people who were initially excited to spot a favorite celebrity, then ignored as the culture moved on. Cracks appear in the star before the final indignity: some dude drops his boxed lunch on Elisabeth’s star, making a mess of this once treasured achievement.
Her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame might be faded and crumbling, but Elisabeth Sparkle feels anything but. She might not be headlining Oscar bait any longer, but Elisabeth is a hit star of morning network TV as an aerobics instructor of a popular fitness show. Her image is everywhere at the TV network’s offices, an entire hallway lined with promotional images from her show. (You can see Fargeat’s wicked satire beginning to take shape with Elisabeth’s career path. In her film, Hollywood starlets are allowed to hold on to fame and fortune as long as they transition to a career focused solely on keeping that body tight.)
But to the head of the network – a character pointedly named Harvey (I hope it’s sunk into the character’s namesake that his abhorrent, disgusting behavior will be the only thing he’s ever remembered for) – it’s time to get younger at that position. On Elisabeth’s 50th birthday, Harvey unceremoniously fires her from the show over lunch. “It all stops at 50,” Harvey tells her. “What stops?” Elisabeth asks. As he chomps away at a plate of shrimp – Fargeat makes the character’s devouring of his food as disgusting as possible – Harvey never answers her.
Even if she hadn’t overheard a phone conversation between Harvey and another network big wig about her impending unemployment before the lunch, she would still know what stops at fifty. Elisabeth is no longer fuckable, so, as far as Harvey is concerned, she’s useless.
After a treacherous car wreck – the most effective and gut-wrenching crash sequence I’ve seen since 2014’s Whiplash – Elisabeth learns of a service that promises to give her a new lease on life as a younger, better version of herself. The pitch is delivered via a USB thumb drive and Elisabeth is hesitant but ultimately decides to try it. After injecting a one-use activator, her back splits open and out comes Sue, looking like a 20-year-old version of Elisabeth.
The two women must share a life between their two bodies. They must switch every seven days (NO EXCEPTIONS!), and the body not in use lies dormant and unconscious. Sue extracts a stabilizing substance from Elisabeth’s spine that she must inject into herself every day she is active in order to stay young and beautiful. Things take a turn (to put it mildly) when Sue begins to take more than her fair share of time in the spotlight.
One of the inspirations for Fargeat that she listed in the press materials for The Substance was the fact that, “I don’t know a single woman who doesn’t have a troubled relationship with her body.” Blending that reality with some of the goriest body-horror this side of Cronenberg’s The Fly makes for biting satire about what (and, more importantly, who) is behind this epidemic of harmful ideas about women’s body image.
The casting for The Substance imbues the film with a meta layer of critique about our youth-obsessed celebrity culture. Demi Moore, an “it girl” of the 1980s and ‘90s, embodies Elisabeth with a bitter edge and a quiet, seething anger. There is no doubt that in her preparation for playing Elisabeth, Moore drew upon her own experiences with fame and celebrity before being tossed aside for younger models. It’s an incredibly vulnerable performance.
Moore allows her 61-year-old body to be filmed naked from almost every conceivable angle, which, considering the industry, must have been a harrowing prospect. (There’s been a reaction on the internet bemoaning the fact that it’s ridiculous that we’re supposed to feel bad for Moore’s character for being past her prime, considering Moore’s body is still practically at its peak. I get it. If my body looked as ship-shape as Moore’s – and I’m only 44! – I would probably occasionally go to the grocery store naked, just to show off a little bit. While that might be the case, what Moore has done here is still brave in my book.)
Margaret Qualley continues to impress as Sue, the newer model of Elisabeth who promises to put the older woman back on top of the world. Qualley is incredibly natural on screen, something I can’t always say for her famous actor mother, Andie MacDowell. In The Substance, Qualley has to embody everything from a newborn to a cynical and ruthless industry insider, all while sharing half of the screentime with Moore.
Dennis Quaid understood the assignment perfectly in his outsized performance as Harvey. Ray Liotta was originally cast in the role of the network executive, but when he died a few months after the casting announcement, Quaid joined the project. The actor weaponizes his smarminess to maximum effect here. His comically over-the-top line reading of, “Pretty girls should always smile!” – while surrounded by the board of the network, who are all old, white men – is a deranged highlight of the movie.
The juxtaposition of Quaid’s two highest profile projects of 2024 is too delicious for words. Quaid also starred this year in the titular role of the critically derided Ronald Reagan biopic, Reagan. By most accounts, it’s a syrupy hagiography of the president who blocked progress on AIDS research in the 1980s because he believed gay people had it coming to them.
Quaid does double duty in what is probably the most conservative and reactionary film of the year in Reagan and one of 2024’s most incendiary feminist critiques of our culture in The Substance. The actor is a born-again Christian who has indorsed the fascist candidate Donald Trump – earlier this year, Quaid said of the man who is now an adjudicated rapist, “… people might call him an asshole, but he’s my asshole” – so I’m curious to know just how deep Quaid really had to dig to get into the mindset of Harvey.
Fargeat’s Faustian bargain tale, which is really a 21st-century update of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, asks Elisabeth, and us, how much it’s worth to hold on to youth and beauty. It’s telling that Elisabeth – the mysterious voice on the other end of the phone that is supplying the substance makes it abundantly clear to her that the two women are the same person, even though they have different experiences and no shared memories – doesn’t get to enjoy any of Sue’s exploits, yet is too obsessed with holding on to her younger self to care.
The Substance, through Fargeat, wears its influences on its sleeve. I almost lost count of the Stanley Kubrick references contained within the movie. The long hallway with Elisabeth’s promotional images that I mentioned earlier, as well as a very distinct looking bathroom, are direct quotes of Kubrick’s visual style in The Shining.
The initial transformation scene, when Sue is born, is evocative of the famous stargate sequence from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. And unless I’m mistaken, there is a very subtle nod in the musical score in one scene to the main theme in Hitchcock’s Vertigo. It is an absolutely deranged, nightmare mirror version of the moment when Kim Novak’s Judy becomes the woman that Jimmy Stewart’s Scottie is obsessed with in that film. In The Substance, the quoted bit of music accompanies Elisabeth trying desperately to become an idealized version of herself.
I struggled with these references, particularly the ones to The Shining, as I watched The Substance because, while they are impeccably staged and shot, I couldn’t find a deeper meaning than simply a string of cool homages. Then the moment comes when Elisabeth reaches her public nadir, and, because of Sue’s narcissism, she transforms into something akin to the horrifying woman in room 2-3-7 of The Shining. The reference itself has something to say about how we view feminine monstrousness.
The last 30 minutes or so of The Substance is gloriously bonkers. Be warned, it is not for the squeamish. But through the ocean of blood – Fargeat also visually riffs on the elevator blood scene from The Shining – Elisabeth’s desperate words to her doppelgänger, “I hate myself. You’re the only loveable part of me,” makes clear that trying to find self-worth from anywhere other than inside yourself is a fool’s errand.
Why it got 4.5 stars:
- I sat in wonder at how bonkers this thing gets, especially that last 30 or so minutes. It also has something on it’s mind other than pure body horror.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- The time period of The Substance is slippery. It looks and sounds like the present (smart phones, flat screen TVs, etc.) but Elisabeth/Sue hosting a morning aerobics show on network TV (that’s a massive hit!) feels like something out of the 1970s or ‘80s. It’s one more weird little aspect of the movie that sold me on it.
- I swooned over Fargeat’s use of insert shots. It seems like a minor thing to praise, but the way she used them put me in mind of Paul Thomas Anderson’s similar use of inserts to call specific attention to something smaller within the frame.
- The last time we see that injection site! Yikes! I haven’t seen a needle wound that graphic and disturbing since Requiem for a Dream!
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
This was another late-Friday afternoon screening at Alamo Cedars. There were, I think, seven or so other people besides me and Rae in attendance. As the credits started to roll, I did a slow clap about five or six times as the rest of the audience walked out in stunned silence. The Substance is currently available in wide theatrical release.
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The FFC’s political soapbox
Any- and everyone reading this who also lives in Texas: Early voting starts this coming Monday, October 21. Please make a plan to vote! We have to keep Trump away from the White House and we need to kick Cancun Ted Cruz to the curb. He and his challenger, Colin Allred, participated in a debate a few days ago, and Cruz tried to be cute about his support of the January 6th domestic terrorists and his attempts to help with overturning the results of a free and fair election in 2020. You can read about the exchange the two had over the topic here.