The Substance

Released 2024. Director: Coralie Fargeat

IT'S UNFAIR AND UNKIND, BUT THE TRUTH IS people don’t want to see old, ugly or tired on their screen. Our human nature to be attracted to the beautiful and wish to remain young is a potent mix to be exploited. The entertainment industry in particular is notorious for placing sky-high premium on youth and beauty. Perfect complexion, glowing skin and a taut body always sells.

For someone like Elisabeth Sparkle, her day in the sun is about to be eclipsed now that she has reached the frightening age of – gasp! – 50. That’s tantamount to retirement age for a woman on a morning TV show. As a celebrity aerobics guru and former movie star, Elisabeth has a body most women would be envious of. The network executive, however, wants to replace her with someone younger.

Elisabeth looks fabulous – how could she not, when she’s played by Demi Moore – but she feels insecure. When Elisabeth looks at herself naked in the mirror she sees only flaws. In the hospital after a car accident, her doctor’s young assistant introduces her to “The Substance”, enticing her with a version of herself which is “younger, more beautiful, more perfect”.

Dismissive initially, Elisabeth circles back to the irresistible promise, that slick pitch which aims straight at the heart of diminishing self-esteem, vanity and the fear of aging. She injects a mysterious drug into her body, convulses and passes out while a full-grown woman slithers out of her back, now split down the middle as if someone had unzipped her flesh.

This younger version, who calls herself Sue (played by Margaret Qualley) is not a clone. Though there are now two bodies, Elisabeth and Sue are one. Each of them exists for a week as they take turn to live and replenish.

Sue takes over from Elisabeth on the TV segment renamed Pump it Up and becomes an instant hit. Life is a party when everyone loves you and you don’t want it to end. While Sue basks in the limelight, Elisabeth avoids being seen and shies away from being recognised. Before long the two of them start to place self-interest above mutual survival. By sabotaging the other, they jeopardise themselves and the movie explodes into a wild mess of slippery, icky, howling madness.

A stinging satire of the unsubtle and gruesome variety, The Substance skewers the genders and spares no one. Leery and predatory, the men judge women with only one criterion. One of them says “ Too bad her boobs aren't in the middle of her face instead of her nose.” Dennis Quaid plays network executive known as Harvey, the name that immediately suggests everything that’s wrong with power and abuse in Hollywood. His first scene, viewed from a urinal, is a wide-angle shot that exaggerates his bluster and grossness as he bellows into his phone to kick Elisabeth off her show while relieving himself. A quick cut to the next scene and we’re confronted with close-ups of his boorish devouring of a bowl of prawns, enough to put anyone off eating for the next hour.

The pressure women face to stay young and “beautiful”, more prevalent in certain industries, is the blood that pumps through The Substance. Writer-director Coralie Fargeat is no prude when it comes to showing how women are objectified, with her cameras ogling the curves and contours of supple bodies in skin-tight leotards glistening in provocative poses in fitness routines.

On the other side of lustrous epidermis, The Substance invokes the body horror of David Cronenberg from Videodrome to Dead Ringers to The Fly. The lavishly macabre attention on body parts both internal and external in all their raw anatomical glory is simultaneously fascinating and repulsive.

Now imagine all this physical monstrosity given an injection of surrealism in the style of David Lynch. By the time the two feuding sides give birth to the hideously misshapen Monstro ElisaSue, the disaster has become so fantastical and grotesque that tragedy and comedy are now inseparably entwined.

The Substance is by turns clever, bitter, caustic and unapologetic. Fargeat maintains her visual storytelling flair throughout. The opening sequence using Elisabeth’s star on the Walk of Fame to take us from the height of Elisabeth’s celebrity status to her declining days is impressive. Bringing us back to the very same spot to finish the movie, this time in the company of a crawling, breathless face-blob, is strangely poignant.

For a movie heavy on visual outrage, it’s a quiet scene that’s the most affecting and humane when Elisabeth is gripped by insecurity at her own reflection. A chance encounter with a long-lost classmate Fred has led to a date. Elisabeth doesn’t remember Fred from the 10th grade though the man, decades later, still gushes over Elisabeth as “the most beautiful girl in the whole wide world”. And yet Elisabeth feels inadequate, old, unattractive, as she hesitates and wavers, keeps returning to adjust her appearance, until the point of utter surrender, smudging her makeup and rubbing her face raw, turning her back on a date with someone who appreciates her for who she is and how she looks. This is the heart of the movie and you only need to look at Demi Moore channelling an inner rage to see what it means for Elisabeth to carry the self-loathing and crippling doubt that plague women like her.

The Substance is bizarre and extreme. Some might snicker, but most people will recoil. Beneath its overblown and calculated shock tactics, the truth remains that body image rules visual media and that’s not going to change any time soon. Outrageous, shocking, excessive and finally absurd – that’s the whole point.

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