Where The Substance perhaps goes on for a shade too long, it more than makes up for it with its rich themes, powerhouse performances and swing-for-the-fences craftsmanship. Few films, even in a genre as innovative as horror, have the brass neck to be so unashamedly idiosyncratic.
French writer-director Coralie Fargeat made a powerful debut with her 2017 feature film, Revenge, a graphic yet subversive thriller. Her sophomore feature, the body-horror satire The Substance, sees her pump up the shock factor. It’s the most squirm-inducing movie in many a moon – a grotesque, crude and erratic picture as bonkers as a Troma Entertainment feature. It’s also one of 2024’s best films.
The core of The Substance details the pressure and toxicity of beauty standards, particularly those enforced on women in the public sphere. Demi Moore, an icon of 90s cinema, plays Elisabeth Sparkle, a 50-year-old actress who once knew success and stardom—one of the opening scenes shows her receiving a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. But she has now faded from public memory, reduced to hosting aerobics TV shows, only to be suddenly fired by the chauvinistic producer Harvey (Dennis Quaid). His reasons are blunt and callous; she’s too old and not beautiful enough.
Distraught, Elisabeth obtains a black market serum known only as The Substance. It’s designed to create a younger, more perfect version of the user. Both the user and this new body will share a single consciousness, swapping bodies every week to prevent the user’s physical deterioration. Elisabeth, desperate to relive her glory days, takes The Substance and, through the first of several gruesome Cronenberg-esque sequences, gives birth to a new, youthful body named Sue (Margaret Qualley).
Subtlety is not in this film’s vocabulary, but Fargaet has no interest in being discreet. Her script is unorthodox, even by screenwriting standards – utilising huge, detailed paragraphs of descriptive action and changes in font size to convey the excessiveness of the set pieces or dialogue, blatantly disregarding the ‘less-is-more’ rule. Its rambunctious style and imagery are by design, as Fargaet shoots scathing venom at misogynistic beauty standards, decrying how those ideals are commodified for perverted capitalist gain at the expense of women’s individuality or mental health. Virtually every aspect of the filmmaking reflects this.
Benjamin Kračun’s cinematography intertwines with the editing to create an aesthetic reminiscent of exploitation media. This includes a small moment where Sue drinks a can of Diet Coke, a tiny close-up sequence shot with such emphasis on the character’s lips, and thus her sex appeal, that it borders on pornographic. Close-ups exist in this picture not just to dwell in the meticulous detail of the body horror, brought to life through astonishing makeup and prosthetics, but to satirise the carnal corporeality of media that objectifies women, turning its signature filmmaking techniques on itself in order to lambast it. Benjamin Stefanski’s (Raffertie) pulsating score of histrionic electronic beats echoes like a warning siren to the film’s themes of unattainable beauty and dwindling mental health.
Yet it’s the self-destructive characterisation that makes The Substance so intriguing. Sue, thanks to her youthful confidence and magnificent body, becomes an overnight sensation, achieving the success that Elisabeth once had. However, despite their shared consciousness, Elisabeth and Sue begin to develop their own agency, becoming resentful of each other as envy, depression, and greed run rampant. Visual parallels bring the character differences and inner worlds to the forefront, particularly in shots from behind the characters’ heads as they walk down the street. Sue strides as if she owns the world, whereas Elisabeth seems to shrink as her self-esteem declines.
Elisabeth is a fascinating, tragic anti-heroine. She’s painfully aware of how she has been victimised by the machine of Hollywood, cruelly discarded when her services were no longer wanted – a modern-day Norma Desmond, one could say. However, despite her recognition of the beauty constructs the film criticises, Elisabeth still fundamentally believes in those standards; her inner turmoil stems from the fact that Sue fits the toxic, objectifying bill, whereas she doesn’t.
The visuals of grotesque ageing are so horrific, not because old age is something disgusting, but because those visuals are tinged with such self-loathing. The Substance is, ironically, brimming with colour, from the bright yellow of Elisabeth’s jacket to the glossy pinks and blues of Sue’s lifestyle. Yet, Elisabeth remains in internal darkness, forever missing the forest of self-acceptance for the trees of impossible beauty. In a way, The Substance is the most visceral movie on addiction since Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream.
Demi Moore gives possibly her greatest performance as Elisabeth. Despite the eruptive scenes of dialogue and body horror that would make Kafka cringe, Moore’s acting is often silent. Arguably, the film’s best scene is when Elisabeth gets ready for a potential date; her otherwise normal makeup routine becomes increasingly chaotic as her self-hatred bubbles to the surface. With only facial expressions, Moore captures the intricacy and horror of inner strife in devastating, lionhearted detail. Qualley is Moore’s equal, embracing the more bombastic sides of the film with abandon. The two hardly ever share the screen, and yet their dynamic resonates with haunting engrossment.
The Substance may be revolting, gnarly and surreal, but compassion forms the foundations of Fargeat’s writing and direction. The film goes through many complex setpieces, themes and tonal shifts – it’s horrifying, stomach-churning, tragic and even morbidly funny within moments of each other – but it’s Fargeat’s feminist touch, her empathy for those who feel they have to conform to regressive beauty standards, that maintains engagement, never once feeling gratuitous even as blood and guts literally start flying everywhere.
All the while, the film pays its respects to its various influences, with some shots and technical choices serving as direct or subtextual homages to movies gone by, be it Carrie, The Elephant Man or, perhaps most overtly, Kubrick’s The Shining. From its harrowing opening scenes to its utterly insane final act, The Substance emerges as its own unique beast.
Where The Substance perhaps goes on for a shade too long, it more than makes up for it with its rich themes, powerhouse performances and swing-for-the-fences craftsmanship. Few films, even in a genre as innovative as horror, have the brass neck to be so unashamedly idiosyncratic. That is only part of what makes The Substance such an entertaining, timely piece of media. Here’s hoping Coralie Fargeat gets to flex her feminist storytelling and unrelenting imagination for many more years to come.
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