The Substance

The Hollywood movie spectacle has been focused on fantasy, science fiction, and horror for a while now, with all the excitement and special effects this involves. I confess that I’ve put myself at arm’s length from these genres for the most part. I get tired of all the glitz pretty quickly. Unless it’s that rare film displaying insight into real social and cultural issues: a film like The Substance, the second feature from French writer-director Coralie Fargeat.

The Substance begins with a fitness model and star of morning TV named Elisabeth Sparkle, played by Demi Moore. Elisabeth, like Moore, is somewhere in her late 50s and early 60s, and the boss of the studio wants to get rid of her exercise show and replace her with some younger, more attractive woman, to be discovered. Angry and depressed, she is looking at the end of her celebrity career. Then she discovers a flash drive that someone slipped into her pocket. It promotes a mysterious new product called The Substance that can create from your cells a new, younger hotter version of yourself that you can be on alternate weeks. After throwing this in the trash, another painful day of rejection by her boss makes her change her mind and retrieve the flash drive from the can. She calls the number on it, is told to go to an address, where she finds a kit containing The Substance.

The rules turn out to be complicated. The new you has to repair the old body and feed it a special liquid through a tube to keep it alive, and extract cells from the body and inject them daily to maintain your condition. The new you has to switch back to the old you after exactly seven days, no exceptions. The film details the entire incredible procedure very carefully, and with the use of amazing special effects, the suspension of disbelief is cleverly attained.

The younger version of Elisabeth is played by Margaret Qualley, so beautiful that when she goes to the casting call, they immediately hire her to take over the lead spot on the morning show. She insists that she must have every other week off, they agree to it, and then she becomes a sensation.

You need to know that this movie is a bold example of what they call “body horror,” in which we witness the human body going through bizarre and often disgusting changes. There’s lots of nudity, blood, and gross mutations, and the effects can be both frightening and bizarrely funny. The idea soon becomes evident: The Substance is a satire of the culture’s obsession with women’s appearance, and the exaggerated models of female beauty and sexuality that surround us. The one character that has become two symbolizes the real woman that ages and has feelings, versus the impossible fantasy on the screen.

Fargeat is relentless in her assault on this false female body. This theme is fraught with exploitation, but it’s intensified through the special effects to the point where it’s all so over the top that you laugh in the recognition of the absurdity and degradation of the whole thing. My only problem is with how much the point is hammered home, way more than enough for the audience to get it, I think. Still, Fargeat has taken body horror to a level not seen before. And she follows the logic of her premise to the bitter end. It’s a blistering, powerful piece of feminist cinema.