The Substance review
Director: Coralie Fargeat
Writer: Coralie Fargeat
Stars: Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, and Dennis Quaid
Running Time: 141 minutes
Please note there may be spoilers below
Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance is the type of viewing experience you need to recover from. It’s a ruthless, intense, pummelling journey into the body-fluid ridden depths of image based beauty standards and their effect on women. It’s a raw, gooey combination of horror and satire, combined to make you uncomfortable with the world around you, one of chewing mouths, skin injections, body dysphoria, and over-sexualized entertainment. It’s a combative watch, a movie willing to show you the gore of looking younger and the consequences of discarding the reality of real, aging skin.
The word I keep coming back to is anxiety. From on the onset, Fargeat is tightening the screws around 50 year-old Academy Award winning actress Elisabeth Sparkle, played by a fearless and courageous Demi Moore. Sparkle is the host of an aerobics TV show but is fired for being too old by Harvey (certainly an allusion to Weinstein). To give you a taste of what’s in store, Dennis Quaid plays Harvey with a monstrousness that’s more than words. It’s physical revulsion. We get close ups of his mouth squeezing on prawns, fish-eye angles of his face as he urinates and spits out the need for younger, sexier women on TV. This is the type of representation you’re in for – a film unapologetic for showing you the depravity as text rather than sub-text.
Maybe that’s the best way of describing The Substance – it’s a movie you feel physically. It’s not a subtle experience, but the importance and relatability of it’s satirical themes makes it horrifically relevant to our own lives. Fired actress Sparkle is provided an opportunity by a clandestine business known as ‘The Substance,’ which sells an injectable chemical that creates a younger, ‘sexier’ variation of the client, one that comes suitably at great cost (nothing this perfect is free). Soon Cronenbergian body horror takes centre stage. Skin splits, eyes roll, and gore spills out of her. It’s Fargeat’s goal to show you the cost of youth is destruction.
It would all be unbearably confronting (and it is) but there’s also a wicked satirical humour. So often I laughed in shock at the level of visual bravery. We are carefully explained the rules of The Substance, what medical advice you must follow in order for the duopoly of being 2 people to be viable. Elisabeth Sparkle’s younger doppelganger calls herself Sue (Margaret Qualley) and she lives her life in youthful ways – sleeping with men, binge drinking - but crucially each variation can only exist for 1 week at a time, before needing to be swapped back over. As the older Elisabeth wakes up and spends a week out of her youthful form, she lives the life of a depressed hermit, gluttonously eating fried food (more close ups of chewing) and intimately living without self-worth compared to her magazine-cover ready alter-ego.
There’s one scene that gets to me, that screams genius. As Elisabeth wallows in her depression, marking the calendar for when she can be young again, she unexpectedly takes an opportunity and says yes to a date with an older ex-school friend, someone who genuinely sees her 50 year-old self as beautiful. This is the first scene of the movie that she acknowledges she is worth something, that maybe she can find happiness outside of an industry that endlessly objectifies her. She gets ready, puts on a striking red dress, and stares at herself in the bathroom mirror. In a movie about the horror of objectification, the bathroom is the most terrifying room in the home.
She applies make up, lipstick, and shows a glimmer of pride in the result – a very attractive 50-year old woman (Demi is 61). But just as she is about to leave her high rise apartment, she catches sight of a billboard showing Sue, her alter-ego, her photo-enhanced tiny body and perfect skin. Elisabeth returns to the bathroom and studies herself again, adding more foundation, covering more of her face, but now it’s clear – her self-esteem is dropping rapidly. With another sight of the billboard, she returns to the bathroom, but this time in a state of self-loathing and self-destruction. She rubs her face raw until her makeup is soiled and her skin inflamed. She sits alone, standing-up her only opportunity to accept herself because the reflection in the mirror is too old, too weathered for her to be loved. It’s incredible sequence of escalation that gets to the cruelty of living lives that are over-saturated with unrealistic images of digital beauty – none of us can possibly compete, not even Demi Moore.
There’s something of Lars Von Trier here too. As the consequences of injecting chemicals continue to mount, Fargeat is heedless towards our anxiety and remains steadfast in escalating the film to the point of absurdity, a body horror eruption that Brian Yuzna would be proud of. If the ending is not quite a catharsis, it’s comes close, unleashing the consequences of beauty standards onto those who consume and create them. Yet the climax is also a strange montage-mush of blood and facial expressions. I yearned for something less dreamlike and more concrete. It feels like the only misstep for Fargeat is loosing a sense of groundedness and embracing an ending more abstract by the final TV broadcast. It’s still a delicious experience, abundantly layered in commentary that feels like essential viewing for those individuals that support a Harvey Weinstein or promote sexualisation above substance. Yet the message is clear – the biggest consequences are for those of us that hold ourselves to these standards.
