Review: THE SUBSTANCE

 by Rob DiCristino

Body. Horror.

It’s prestige season again! Awards prognosticators throughout the movie-verse are already pondering the Best Picture chances of frontrunners like Anora and Dune: Part Two, and endless column inches will soon be devoted to dark horses like Conclave and The Piano Lesson. Will they distinguish themselves from the festival fare? Will they get wide enough releases to connect with audiences? How will they play before the Academy’s esteemed ranks of white, octogenarian men? The real sickos, on the other hand — the hardcore freaks like you and me — will probably spend that time pinning down the most accurate reference points for Coralie Fargeat’s audacious new thriller, The Substance: Is it The Fly meets The Picture of Dorian Gray? Is it Possession meets Cinderella? Is it Videodrome meets Requiem for a Dream? How about Society meets Mulholland Drive? Fargeat (2017’s Revenge) would likely invite each and every one of these comparisons to this fucked-up fairy tale, an uncompromising indictment of a celebrity ecosystem that considers women over thirty expendable — that is, if it can even be bothered so much as to consider them at all.

Hollywood icon Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) has just made the worst mistake of her long and illustrious career: She’s had another birthday. This one must be a doozy, too, because the producer of her daytime workout show (Dennis Quaid as a misogynistic caricature at once over-the-top and frighteningly familiar) has not-so-quietly begun the search for a new model. Finally facing the obsolescence she always knew was coming — although, if the self-portrait hanging in her living room is any indication, she may have been in denial on that front — Elisabeth turns to The Substance, a Mountain Dew-colored serum that promises “A Better Version of Yourself After Just One Dose.” Perhaps expecting that it would simply clear out some cellulite and varicose veins, Elisabeth is shocked when a smooth-skinned, ample-breasted, twenty-five-year-old girl (Margaret Qualley) suddenly tears herself out of a cavernous womb in her spine. Flush with new energy and one of the shapeliest asses ever depicted on screen, “Sue” gets busy reclaiming Elisabeth’s life from the Hollywood machine that tried to steal it away.

So far, so good, but The Substance comes with conditions: They can’t both be awake at the same time. They must alternate every seven days. They’re two bodies sharing one consciousness, remember, and failing to respect that balance comes with deadly consequences. This is fine at first, when Sue’s banging muscle-bound hotties and turning the workout show into thinly-veiled pornography, but each transition back to her wrinkled body fills Elisabeth with more and more existential despair. Why even go out looking like this? Why not just sit on the couch and wait for Sue’s return? As the gap between their identities begins to widen, Sue grows more possessive, more desperate to hold on. She starts fudging the seven-day limit with extra injections of “stabilizer” fluid from Elisabeth’s dormant body, turning seven days into eight and eight into ten. When Elisabeth finally reemerges to pay the price for Sue’s indulgence — rotted skin and jagged bones that have her looking like a Resident Evil monster— she realizes just how catastrophic her pursuit of infinite youth has become.

Or does she? The genius of Fargeat’s screenplay is how thoroughly Elisabeth has built this cage for herself, how completely she has come to define her own worth through the lens of her celebrity. This is learned, of course — The Substance is not subtle about anything, least of all its depiction of Hollywood men, each one a leering insect exploding into orgiastic fury with each thrust of Sue’s hips — but Fargeat isn’t nearly as concerned with punishing these hapless cretins as she is with interrogating the women who allow themselves to be manipulated by them. These are unforced errors, she seems to be shouting. Self-inflicted wounds. Elisabeth is gorgeous! It’s Demi fucking Moore! And yet the longer she stares at Sue’s face on the billboard that once showcased her own, the more addled and ancient she feels. This culminates in The Substance’s best scene, which finds Elisabeth frozen in front of the bathroom mirror so mired in self-hatred that she can’t even leave the house to go on a pity date with some schlub from high school. Raging against Mother Nature’s punishing wrath, she rips and tears at her face until the layers of caked-on makeup begin to look like gaping, hemorrhaging wounds.

And despite every gracious and empathetic virtue we in the audience might bestow upon ourselves, we understand why: Sue is perfect. It’s undeniable. It’s obscene. What feels like entire reels of The Substance are devoted to her writhing on the studio floor in form-fitting lycra or running her hands lovingly over that aforementioned ass in the shower. Fargeat, we learn very quickly, is holding us complicit in Sue’s exploitation: She’s fucking hot! Look at her! Watch her dance! Watch her walk around the apartment in cheeky underwear and bite her lip at juuuussst the right angle when flirting with the dipshit next door! Despite having just a handful of lines — Sue’s lack of intellectual expression being part of the point, of course — Margaret Qualley gives us a perfect avatar for youthful decadence, a performative “Who, me?” that betrays Sue’s deeper understanding of a game she finds, despite everything Elisabeth has been through, impossible to resist. Fargeat is daring us to look away, daring us to pretend that we wouldn’t want — or want to be — this girl.

But as The Substance ratchets up the insanity in a final, gore-splattered act that might as well come with a cease and desist order from the law firm of Yuzna & Cronenberg, Fargeat hands things over to Demi Moore for a performance worthy of every superlative — “Challenging!” “Fearless!” “Batshit Insane!” — you’ll see heaped upon it over the next few months. It’s all far too delicious to spoil here, but again, Fargeat has absolutely zero chill when it comes to dramatizing the brutalities of female celebrity, the utter humiliation and despair women must endure just to exist in a society that still, despite generations of supposed social progress, cannot seem to decide whether or not they are actually people. Fargeat has had enough, and she’s going to make us bleed for that ignorance. She’s going to rub our noses in it. She’s going to spray it all over the walls. For almost a hundred and forty grueling minutes, she’s going to subject us to a cinematic waterboarding that will force us to acknowledge Elisabeth’s humanity, force us to understand what she — and millions like her — have put themselves through for just the slimmest of shots at immortality.

The Substance hits theaters today, September 20th.