“The Substance” is Coralie Fargeat’s sophomore feature film after “Revenge” (2017) and stars Demi Moore as Elisabeth Sparkle, a movie star turned television exercise instructor who gets fired on her fiftieth birthday. The promise of reclaiming her success as a better version of herself lures Elisabeth into taking an underground titular drug. The rules are simple. Take the activator, and a younger, more beautiful version emerges. The newer version takes the stabilizer, which gets extracted from the older version, for seven days. After seven days, the older version gets a turn, and they alternate with the admonishment that they are one. The inactive version depends on the active version to feed them and switch. When Elisabeth takes the drug, Sue (Margaret Qualley) is born, takes Elisabeth’s old job and achieves more in a few weeks than Elisabeth did for her entire stint as a fitness instructor. What could go wrong? The runtime of two hours twenty minutes.
What goes right? It is long overdue that Moore get a juicy role. Between choosing to be Moore or Qualley, which is not the point of the movie, Moore seems like a no brainer. Qualley is a phenomenal actor, but it is expected that she takes bold swings as hyper sexualized or off beat characters. Even though Moore’s career is longer, she is not typecast so moviegoers will not arrive with any expectations and enjoy the surprise that Moore delivers. Elisabeth is the strong silent type who is beginning to crack, but instead of erupting she turns the knife inward. Her life is her career, and she has no identity outside of it so once she gets put on a metaphorical ice floe, she panics and falls for the oldest trick in the book: eat from the tree of life, the temptation of eternal youth and the desire to defy nature. Unlike most fairy tales, the older character is not the bad guy. With a page out of Snow White, Sue may be the fairest of them all, but Elisabeth is no evil queen, and Snow White may be evil.
Qualley is a brave actor for never breaking character. Sue is so over the top sexualized that Fargeat films her as a collection of body parts, shiny lamé, skintight leotards with cutouts showing a lot of skin. Between the camera ogling Sue, Raffertie’s electro soundtrack that only “Challengers” (2024) can beat, and the kinetic editing from Jerome Eltabet, Fargeat and Valentin Feron, it is hard not to allow the spectacle to sweep you away. Sue exudes confidence, but when she interacts with network executive Harvey (Dennis Quaid), she behaves like a coquettish airhead, not the cutting diva who snaps at people lower on the totem pole. Her behavior contrasts with Elisabeth, but when introduced as characters, they are at different stages in their careers so who knows if Elisabeth at the height of her powers behaved as callously. Eventually Sue transforms into a nightmarish Cinderella who does not want to go home when the clock strikes twelve. If Elisabeth is Dr. Jekyll, Sue is Mr. Hyde. Finally, beauty bears no relationship to moral character.
The ensuing consequences would make a young David Cronenberg proud. There are no carriages turning into pumpkins, but a lot of superb horror homages: “Carrie” (1976), “The Shining” (1980), “Doctor Sleep” (2019), “The Brood” (1979) and even “Tar” (2022). “The Substance” is ultimately a doppelgänger, vampiric-like, body horror film that serves as an allegory about the damaging, cannibalistic effect that the media has on people’s negative body images, which leads to self-mutilation, a distorted, damaging, demented view of beauty and misogynistic patriarchal values that only seeks male validation. Unfortunately, it takes too long to make that point, and once it makes that point, Fargeat keeps making it just in case the moviegoer missed it the first thousand times that she made it. “Le Monstro” (2024), a ten-minute period drama, conveyed many of these concepts in less time. Every film does not have to be revolutionary, but if given the choice of “Thelma” (2024) and “The Front Room” (2024), it is less avant-garde for an older woman to be depicted as an aging grotesque ogre and using age as an excuse to mock elderly bodies instead of aging as an organic part of life or beautiful because it symbolizes experience in a perhaps too sachharine moment in “Barbie” (2023). “The Substance” is not about aging per se, but it leverages the imagery of disgust over aging, which kicks it right out of being countercultural. It is a little disturbing that horror is mining subliminal fantasies of elderly abuse as part of the collective imagination.
Currently there is intriguing discourse among average women about how older and younger women can stop fighting each other in a losing game and learn from each other, a concept that is possibly the one of the few redeeming qualities of the otherwise middling “My Old Ass” (2024). Other than physical appearance, neither Elisabeth, nor Sue change during this story except by becoming more extreme in their desire to be seen as beautiful. It was a missed opportunity to not do more with the characters or like “Revenge” (2018), have a moment where Harvey gets what he deserves. Fargeat mercilessly, visually and audibly skewers Harvey in a way that usually Australian filmmakers practice: repulsive, crass and exaggerated in outlandish, colorful peacock, wild patterned suits. Quaid seems to love the change of pace in a role originally intended for Ray Liotta.
If the run time, the missed opportunities and the heavy handedness of Fargeat’s story telling is not a deterrent, then you are in for a wild time, and she may deserve the Ari Aster award for going there. Casual sexist, objectifying lines are taken to its furthest corners in creating the visual fulfillment of the words’ promises. For those of you who are into breasts, “The Substance” is going to test your limits. Like the tapestry in “Midsommar” (2019), a montage of a star with Elisabeth’s name on it will convey more information than any prose dump could and functions as a portend for the protagonist’s fate. Fargeat embraces an Eighties era aesthetic, which is the equivalent of visual cotton candy meets crack: the colors, the fashion, the entertainment attitude and aesthetic. The Eighties were about callous greed, and Fargeat may not be making a period film, but she nailed the ethos of the era.
The unofficially most terrifying part of “The Substance” is how little instructions the characters get before conducting a complicated medical procedure on themselves, which does not feel like a huge jump based on contemporary standards in which hospitals send patients home as soon as possible. At least the anonymous dealers of the illicit drug are available over the phone. The logistics of taking the drug, naked in the bathroom, eventually evokes the image of Bluebeard, and the dynamic between Elisabeth and Sue are reminiscent of a toxic mother daughter rivalry.
Fargeat’s color symbolism ranks high for 2024along with Zoe Kravitz’s “Blink Twice” (2024) though the meaning behind each color is different. Yellow is a color that transcends situations and acts as a gateway to the drug. In some incarnations, the drug is yellow, like the gold of the aforementioned star. Both Sue and Elisabeth wear a yellow coat when they try to act nonchalant and undercover to retrieve the drug from a secret location. Elisabeth is introduced wearing blue whereas Sue wears pink. Both colors reflect skin hue depending on circulation and the plumpness or lack thereof of youthful skin. Blue is also the color of the thread that Sue uses to fix Elisabeth. As “The Substance” unfolds, Sue begins wearing more blue as she is in danger of losing her vitality. Closer to the denouement, the drug or puke appears more green than yellow, which signifies that blue, the color of decay, is infecting it and the drug is less effective. There is more.
As “The Substance” approaches its climax, it gets funnier, and gonzo does not begin to describe how wild it gets. It’s lack of nuance and subtlety are the point, but is it so much fun that it becomes what it hates by successfully embodying images of revulsion over aging and making the moviegoer feel superior to Elisabeth and Sue’s decision-making that it overrides thoughtfulness about aging and objectification?
