The Substance (2024) Mubi/Horror RT: 140 minutes Rated R (strong bloody violent content, graphic nudity, language) Director: Coralie Fargeat Screenplay: Coralie Fargeat Music: Raffertie Cinematography: Benjamin Kracun Release date: September 20, 2024 (US) Cast: Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, Dennis Quaid, Gore Abrams, Oscar Lesage.
Rating: ****
I don’t usually pay much attention to nudity in movies anymore. I did when I was a hormone-charged teenager, but didn’t we all? I sat up and took notice of it in The Substance. It’s not that it turned me on; it was more out of admiration for Demi Moore. The actress has always been bold and uninhibited. In 1991, she posed naked for the cover of Vanity Fair while pregnant with her second child. Now at 61 (she sure doesn’t look it!), she bares her body for all to see. Most actresses stop doing nude scenes once they hit middle age and become self-conscious about their aging bodies. That doesn’t appear to be a concern with Demi. YOU GO, GIRL!
Written and directed by French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat (Revenge), the satirical body horror-thriller The Substance is insane as in insanely grotesque and insanely bloody. It bears the influences of Stanley Kubrick, David Cronenberg, Frank Henenlotter, David Lynch and Brian De Palma. It’s easily the craziest movie I’ve seen all year. It’s also f***ing brilliant.
Elizabeth Sparkle (Moore) used to be one of the hottest actresses in Hollywood. That was when she was young and beautiful. Now that she’s just turned 50, the industry no longer has any use for her. By way of a birthday present, she’s fired from her gig as a fitness instructor on a morning talk show by a creep of an executive (Quaid, The Big Easy) who wants somebody younger and hotter. Not only that, she gets into a car accident while watching her billboard get torn down. That’s when her life takes an interesting turn.
Elizabeth learns of a serum simply called “The Substance”. It’s sort of a fountain of youth, sort of. When injected, it creates a younger version of the user. Desperate to be desirable and employable again, she injects herself with the neon green stuff and gives birth to her younger self out of a slit in her back. That younger self is Sue (Qualley, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood). She and Elizabeth are “one” meaning they share the same consciousness.
Naturally, there are specific rules governing the use and effectiveness of The Substance. Elizabeth/Sue must inject herself daily with a “stabilizer”. Also, and most importantly, the two have to switch places every seven days with one out in the world while the other rests in an unconscious state. There are no exceptions to the rules. Violating them causes irreparable side effects.
Sue wastes no time making a name for herself starting with taking over Elizabeth’s old job. She becomes an instant star and loves it. It doesn’t make Elizabeth feel any better. She feels despondent and even more insecure. Sue quickly gets addicted to fame and all the admiration she’s receiving. This causes her to break the cardinal rule which leads to dire consequences.
After all the garbage I sat through these past few weeks, it’s great to see a film that has something on its mind. The Substance is the thinking person’s horror film. It has a lot to say about ageism and our society’s obsession with youth and beauty. Fargeat takes it to bizarre extremes by turning her tale into a warped version of The Picture of Dorian Gray with Elizabeth suffering the consequences of Sue’s dangerously selfish behavior. The makeup artists do a tremendous job with the film’s more grotesque aspects. Even better, it doesn’t appear to be CGI. It looks like they went old school with latex and prosthetics.
The look of The Substance is equally awesome. The bold, bright color scheme perfectly contrasts the hideous goings-on. The production design by Stanislas Reydellet heightens the film’s surreal reality with beautifully composed shots. The scenes in the overlong TV studio hallway immediately bring to mind The Shining (1980) with the distinctive carpet design. Other scenes have a sterile feel similar to Kubrick’s style. The blood-soaked finale will surely remind viewers of Carrie (1976) with the gory manifestation of female rage.
Moore, who hasn’t starred in a movie in ages, delivers a brilliant performance as a no longer relevant celebrity consumed by self-hatred and feelings of inadequacy. She’s desperate to recapture her youth and the popularity she once had. In one especially heartbreaking scene, she has a meltdown in front of a mirror while trying to look good for a date with an old high school acquaintance. No matter how she tries, she can’t make herself look perfect. It speaks to society’s treatment of aging women and the lengths they’ll go to in order to be desirable.
Qualley is also quite good as Sue, a perky sort who loves that everyone loves her. She’s sexy and she knows it. So does everybody else. Her show isn’t so much about showing people how to stay fit as it is showing off her perfect body, every part of it. The camera fetishizes her as do the men filming her in action. She embodies vanity perfectly seemingly without realizing it’s one of the seven deadly sins. It helps that she’s quite beautiful herself, but would you expect otherwise from the daughter of Andie MacDowell?
Quaid gives his best performance in years as the grossly exaggerated studio exec obsessed with his new ingénue. He’s really more of a caricature than a character. Fargeat and her cinematographer Benjamin Kracun often switch to a fish-eye lens or extreme close-up to make him appear more hilariously grotesque. I’d even say he’s the real monster in The Substance.
It goes off the rails near the end, but it’s part of the brilliance of The Substance. Fargeat finely calibrates the weird factor, finding just the right balance between gross-out horror and biting satire. It’s not so much scary as it is disturbing and disturbingly funny. It’s not for everybody. It’s definitely not for mainstream audiences looking for something conventional. The Substance is an unconventional as they come. It’s completely original and worth seeking out. It’ll stay with you for a while, consider yourselves duly warned.
