Grotesque and horny in hilariously outrageous methods, author/director Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance is a squishy story of one girl’s warfare towards the ravages of time. Indebted to the work of David Cronenberg, Brian De Palma, and, most self-consciously of all, Stanley Kubrick, this physique horror shocker is neither delicate nor concise in the case of its themes or its phantasmagoric nastiness.
Nonetheless, like a band latching onto a tasty riff and deliriously driving it into the floor, this style jaw-dropper—premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 5 and in theaters on Sept. 20, following its win for Best Screenplay at May’s Cannes Film Festival—pushes the whole lot previous the level of moderation and decency till it turns into a riotous discourse on the private and cultural forces that drive girls to insanity in search of bodily perfection.
Spearheaded by actually and figuratively revealing performances from a improbable Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley, The Substance is a research of Elisabeth Sparkle (Moore), a TV train queen who, after spending her fiftieth birthday taping her hit program—suppose old-school Jane Fonda exercise vids through which hotties do synchronized routines in spandex—overhears her community boss Harvey (Dennis Quaid) slander her as a haggard “old b—h” and demand that she get replaced.
At a subsequent lunch, Harvey tries to let Elisabeth down by telling her that “renewal—it’s inevitable.” Rebirth is actually coveted by the fading icon. An amusing opening sequence depicts the decaying lifespan of Elisabeth’s Hollywood Walk of Fame star, and when she stares in the mirror, the look of disgust and dismay in the actress’s eyes is unmistakable.
Driving house, Elisabeth is distracted by the sight of her face being torn off a billboard and will get right into a automobile accident. At the physician’s workplace, a doctor’s assistant surreptitiously checks her out and proclaims that she’d be a “good candidate.” While exiting, she’s confronted by an previous classmate who praises her still-vibrant loveliness. Alas, she stays consumed by diminishing vanity, and is thus intrigued when she discovers that the doctor’s assistant has slipped a USB drive into the pocket of her vibrant yellow coat. This gadget is labeled “The Substance” and boasts a telephone quantity, and upon returning house, she checks out its contents, which concern a revolutionary cellular-division course of that ensures “a better version of yourself.”
Elisabeth initially balks at this nonsense however her wrinkle-related insecurities gained’t depart her be and she quickly contacts the service. This earns her a key card that grants her entry to a scary alleyway handle the place she finds a mailbox with a bundle containing directions and gear for The Substance. The first step is to inject herself with an activator. Next, she’s supposed to make use of liquid IV meals dubbed a “stabilizer” for seven straight days—as is her “other self.” Finally, at the finish of the weeklong interval, she’s imagined to “switch.”
Gazing in the mirror in the nude, Fargeat’s digital camera lingering over each saggy crease and crevasse in her face, hips, legs and ass, Elisabeth takes the leap and sticks herself with the thriller compound. She promptly hits the tile ground, her pupils doubling and her again splitting open so a brand new being can emerge from inside.
That determine is Sue (Qualley), her youthful, higher doppelganger, who’s the whole lot Elisabeth dreamed of being. “Remember you are one,” says the voice on the finish of the telephone, however Sue views herself extra as Elisabeth 2.0, and swiftly units about creating the life that her different half desired, full with a starring position on an train present that’s notable for its skimpier outfits and extra sexualized content material.
Operating in a heightened The Twilight Zone-ish vein at the similar time that it overtly shouts out to The Shining and 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Substance dramatizes its motion with one excessive, drooling close-up after one other, many of them fixated on flawless pores and skin and completely sculpted butts. In doing so, it objectifies to each show the attract of youth and attractiveness, and to caustically rattling our everlasting obsession with them—a censure that pinpoints males (by way of Harvey and the unseen Substance mastermind) as co-creators and peddlers of these poisonous magnificence requirements.
Given that Sue is a pure, idealized kind of Elisabeth, it’s predictable that she not solely craves the limelight, however is keen to use her attractiveness and intercourse enchantment to grab it. The drawback, nevertheless, is that at the finish of every seven-day interval, the duo should flip-flop between being animated and inanimate—a course of facilitated by Sue’s building of a secret room the place they will lay undetected throughout their slumbering week.
The Substance’s hyper-real motion is directly dreamy and gnarly, to not point out apparent; Fargeat performs each word huge, daring, and unambiguous. Consequently, there are stretches throughout the movie’s 140-minute runtime when it dawdles, working its means by twists and turns which might be foreseeable from a mile away. Though by no means sluggish, it invariably feels distended.
Fortunately, Moore and Qualley are distinctive as two halves of the similar narcissistic and fame-hungry entire, exuding imperious and overwhelming eroticism that’s laced with foul desperation and madness. The Substance manages to concurrently titillate and decry such titillation with out ever affecting a scolding tone, and as Sue turns into more and more possessive of her awake time—and resentful of Elisabeth as the ball-and-chain holding her again from fulfilling her ambitions—the movie turns into squelchier and sicker, to its nice profit. Mutation reveals the darkish, corrupted coronary heart of these conjoined beings, and the director doesn’t skimp on icky, gooey, bloody monstrousness, all of it embellished with vaginal and penetration-related designs and imagery.
Gazing at Moore and Qualley’s nude frames with an depth—alternately admiring and disapproving—that echoes the protagonists’ personal self-critiques, The Substance acknowledges the pull of floor splendor with a purpose to eviscerate modern magnificence tradition. There’s no mistaking what it has to say, typically to its detriment, and but its out-there impulses are spot-on, proper by to a 3rd and remaining chapter that chooses to re-hammer house its factors in ever-crazier trend. Dialing it as much as 12 when 10 would have sufficed, it reveals a real gonzo spirit that reveals the true ugliness of vainness.
