"The Substance" review — Hollywood's new flesh is an exercise in the grotesque
“Remember: you are one.”
Age can be a real killer in this industry, no matter how much of a legend you might be. The story always ends the same way. No matter the screams and cheers, no matter the star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the destiny for so many is inevitable rejection from the limelight and a slow fade into obscurity. Elizabeth Sparkle, a woman with a name destined for fame, knows this all too well. She’s an Academy Award-winning actress and the host of a decades-running dance fitness TV program who committed the cardinal sin: she turned fifty. On the day of her birthday, as she hit the dreaded five-oh, she is unceremoniously let go from her job at the network and sent into the great unknown of her later years with only the memories of past successes to keep her company. That is until a small, suspiciously marked vile of some sort of toxic green-coloured . . . substance arrives at her door with the promise to make her beautiful again. You just have to respect the balance.
Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance is a riotous and profoundly unsubtle body horror affair. Mastering a very specific type of viscerality that burrows into the nervous system, the film makes the viewer feel uncomfortable with their own corporeal form. Your bones won’t feel quite like they belong in your body by the end. The Substance is only writer/director Fargeat’s second feature, following up on 2017’s Revenge, her French-language debut. The film opened at nearly 2000 screens in the US and Canada during its opening weekend, a new record for distributor MUBI, showing great hope for the film’s appeal. And it is hope well placed. The year’s Best Screenplay-winner at the Cannes Film Festival revels in its originality. Led by three terrific performances from Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, and Dennis Quaid, the film is an overwhelming experience. It’s full of garish, maximalist production design, inventive, furious editing, and some truly revolting sound design. Once the needle pierces the flesh, the disgust doesn’t let up.
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| Demi Moore in The Substance. Photo via MUBI. |
Sparkle’s drug-addled journey back to youth begins when she receives a tip from an attractive male nurse about something that might just have the power to change her life. A journey to a spray paint-marked sliding door in a poorly maintained Los Angeles alley brings Sparkle into the white-washed den of The Substance. Inside a safety deposit box, she finds a package containing a series of strange objects and vague directions. Back at home, she takes her first dose of the green drug. Moments later, she’s writhing on the ground as her body begins to duplicate each cell, eventually splitting open and pushing out a second, fully-formed person. The one thing the box forgot to mention is that the drug doesn’t make you beautiful, it simply uses your body as a matrix to birth someone who is. Margaret Qualley’s Sue, born from her hyper-activated DNA, is everything Elisabeth wanted to be. She’s young, with “everything in the right place,” as one auditioner comments. Sue, obsessed with her looks, is now off to take over Hollywood. There’s just one condition: every seven days, Sue and Elisabeth have to switch places. Without exception.
Of course, this is the sort of clause that is bound to lead to trouble for Elisabeth and Sue. And soon it does. Sue finds herself in the hands of Harvey, quickly taking on Elisabeth’s old job at the network and becoming their next it girl. The “next Elisabeth Sparkle” they call her, which clearly strikes a nerve with Sparkle when she wakes up. As Sue’s star in Hollywood grows, she starts to abuse this balance, leading to a host of nasty, body-warping side effects for the dormant Elisabeth and growing animosity between the two women. Despite spending little time on screen together, Moore and Qualley are such excellent compliments to each other. Sue and Elisabeth feel authentically cut from the same tissue sample, which serves as a testament to the honest and eccentric performances each of the actresses brings. Qualley, who’s fresh off of Ethan Coen’s Drive-Away Dolls and Yorgos Lanthimos’ Kinds of Kindness this year, brings effortless charm to her turn as Sue, always undercut with a mean streak of self-serving narcissism. Moore, herself a legend in the film industry, fits well into the skin of Sparkle, and spearheads the film’s violent energy through the chaos.
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| Margaret Qualley and Dennis Quaid in The Substance. Photo via MUBI. |
The titular, and totally unexplained, “substance” might be the primary drive of the insanity that swiftly takes over the film, but the horror pervades the opening scenes. Fargeat’s great gift with The Substance is her ability to draw a sense of unease and discomfort from even the most ordinary of sequences. In one of our earliest meetings with Dennis Quaid’s obnoxious TV producer Harvey (this is the level of subtlety you find everywhere in the film), the viewer witnesses him pulverizing a plate of shrimp at a high-end restaurant. The camera settles on his fingers tearing into the shrimp and his teeth tearing into them, while the sound mixing comes out just a little too loud to make the feeding experience an ordeal to sit through. And this expands to so many other mundane tasks: smoking, cooking, moving, and cleaning take on these torturous mutations. The whole film is an exercise in the grotesque. The Hollywood of The Substance is a place of terror at every turn. It’s full of leering men, a flakey sense of success, and an ever-judgemental mass of fans. There’s nothing subtle here as well. Fargeat takes a very specific aim at the ridiculousness of Hollywood and the city’s perverse obsession with youth.
The imagery employed by Fargeat is so ferociously memorable, in that it burns itself into the retinas of the viewers. From the splitting retinas, to the back-breaking birthing scene, to the various mutations that Elisabeth undergoes, to the insane final act (this is one of the most outrageous final acts in many years), the world of The Substance is unforgettable. Complimenting the nightmarish visuals, the sound design gives every sequence an appropriately squelchy sonic texture. Everything here is a source of horror for Fargeat’s talented team, who find a way to make every sequence as unnerving as possible, even outside of the grotesque body horror. Although simply referring to the film as “body horror” might give the impression that this is some dark, macabre film, when nothing could be further from the truth. The film is brightly lit, full of solid blocks of colour, and hyperactively edited. There’s a great deal of humour and downright comedy found here.
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| A still from The Substance. Photo via MUBI. |
Of course, Fargeat is working in good company with the themes and visual sensibilities of her film as well. It’s hard not to think of a satirical body horror movie without conjuring up images of previous filmmakers. The film’s body-ripping carnage and demented depiction of Los Angeles broadly tap into the same strain as Kubrick’s metropolitan nightmares, Carpenter’s body-as-monster energy, and Cronenberg’s love of the new flesh, but it’s not a mere child of its predecessors. Fargeat makes nods to the many who have come before her, yes (there’s one very obvious nod to The Shining’s elevator of blood towards the end of the film), but it’s hard to think of The Substance as anything other than a decidedly original film. There’s venom running in the veins of this film, creating a deeply uncomfortable, yet mezmerizing experience.
The Substance is a trying ordeal even for the genre’s most dedicated fans. A film so firmly confident in its ability to be disgusting certainly isn’t for everyone, but for those who embrace its outlandish sensibilities, the film is ready to offer so much to devour. Bursting with cruel creativity and a wicked sense of imagination, the energy of this film is utterly magnetic, making it one of this year’s strongest cinematic outings. Moore, Qualley, and Quaid are utterly electric, translating the film’s disgusting energy into three broken, compelling performances. Fargeat cements herself as a filmmaker to watch, unrestrained in her expression. The Substance is ready to tear you apart. Just respect the balance.
The Substance is now playing in theatres.
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