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The bluntness of The Substance is so gratuitously forceful that it’s enough to trigger an endorphin effect. It’d have to. The struggles of a world obsessed with beauty for an actress in a sexist patriarchy need to be brutal to make an impact so grand you have to laugh. Coralie Fargeat’s latest dose of feminist horror does lean hard into that mindset, presenting a narrative that is as vicious as its grotesque moments of body horror.
Demi Moore is perfect in the role of aging aerobics instructor, Elisabeth Sparkle. She can see the writing on the wall with how the scummy producer, Harvey (Dennis Quaid), has only hired her for how well she looks in a leotard. With Elisabeth now 50, she can see the days running out, amking Harvey’s gross apetite all the more disgusting. She needs a miracle cure and there is apparently one she can get on the black market. A mysterious drug known only as The Substance allows Elisabeth to shed her old skin and become a younger woman, in this case one that looks like Margaret Qualley. The only catch is that Elisabeth can only adopt this form for seven days before a week-long recharge. Throughout this process, the mysterious supplier keeps instructing that the two bodies must be recognized as one, a foreboding reminder of how easily this experiment will go awry. It doesn’t help that Elisabeth makes her new form known as Sue and hides her true identity. Those week-long absenses can only go so far before she brakes the rules for greater fame and satisfaction.
Fargeat’s has incredible focus for zooming uncomfortably close on the most visceral components of this narrative. When Sue is filming her exercise program, the camera gets so close to her ass that it’s a few zooms shy of a colonoscopy. When Harvey eats shrimp in front of Elisabeth to showcase his disgusting nature, his loud eating is so vile that you feel like you’re being chomped in his filthy saliva. This obsession makes the centering camera so effective at communicating something disturbing when the protagonist becomes more Sue than Elisabeth. Her shirking of the rules leads to some nasty transformations of decayed fingers and teeth that fall out of her head. There’s no turning away once she starts mutating into what looks like a wicked love-child of The Elephant Man, The Thing, and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Much like the audience witnessing the nightmarish merging of Elisabeth and Sue, there’s no turning away from the terror.
There’s an admirable frankness to how the film gets directly to the point. I love how the packaging of The Substance is nothing flashy with its sterile white and bold black font. The directions are specific and Elisabeth’s phone contact is firmly explicit in his instructions without a hint of riddles or sinister intent. While there is a certain creepiness to the clinical nature of acquiring The Substance, it’s that direct nature that makes Elisabeth’s inevitable descent all the more tragic. Her desire for youth becomes her undoing, but also the only means of survival from a world that only values her a specific way. While Harvey’s obsession with women reaches Tex Avery levels of cartoonish salivation, there’s also something refreshingly hilarious about that toxic level of mysoginy being so out in the open. Where other films whisper the pains of women and their perceptions of the body, this film screams deafeningly into a bullhorn. There are several moments where Elisabeth abuses herself and shouts with rage for the box built in tandem by herself and harsh criticisms of culture.
Of course, I would be remissed if I didn’t acknowledge the amazing effects of portraying this body horror. In the same way that Elisabeth sells her figure for the camera, the effects team put in the extra effort to craft a monstrous transformation. Everything from Elisabeth’s splitting spine for her younger emergence to the multi-faced monster form that poops out breasts is an immaculate sight of the vile. Much like the satire, the brutal mutations of the human body are so exquisitely icky that you have to laugh, especially for the extra grim ending of watching the monstrous Elisabeth literally melt all over her fame.
It’s hard to ignore the skin-crawling brilliance of The Substance, whether for its haunting societal perceptions or crafting nightmarish visions of our aged flesh. While the film does linger longer on some of its blunter points, the eerie camera work and mind-blowing monster effects are first-rate in presenting societal horror that punches harder than similar pictures. In a few ways, the film has the massive weight of dumping so many existential concerns that come with aging into one goopy mess of a tragic tale. There’s catharsis and comedy in such an overload, as well as a thrilling release for all the anxieties that mount as much as the wrinkles on our faces or the gray hairs on our heads. It’s a painfully hilarious film about the finite nature of fame and humanity, and one that I won’t forget for a long time.
