Movie review by Greg Carlson
The epic ambitions of Coralie Fargeat’s sophomore feature “The Substance” are trumpeted by its whopping 141-minute running time, a length that may please body horror aficionados and exhaust the less patient. Demi Moore is brilliantly cast as Elisabeth Sparkle, a longtime media personality and aerobics segment host whose cruel boss (an absolutely repulsive Dennis Quaid) fires her in favor of a newer and younger ingénue. A devastated Elisabeth soon decides to try the Substance, a self-administered kit of injections, stabilizers, and liquid food packs that rather miraculously divides her in two. From Elisabeth’s own body, Sue (Margaret Qualley) is born. The only hitch is that consciousness must be traded every seven days without exception.
Fargeat’s fierce allegiance to David Cronenberg manifests most directly in the gruesome procedure that first brings Sue forth from a fissure along Elisabeth’s spine and then in a multitude of increasingly horrifying transformations that earn comparison to special effects hall-of-famers like “The Thing,” “The Fly,” and “Society.” The chic, gleaming modernism of Elisabeth’s antiseptic, subway-tiled bathroom will be interrupted with several types of fluids. The sun-drenched landscapes, gleaming lip gloss, and neon spandex struggle to hide the decay of thinning hair, rotting teeth, and putrefying flesh. Slick production design stands in for sturdy world building; Fargeat elects to keep the provenance of the Substance shrouded in mystery.
The satiric blade that slices into Hollywood’s insatiable hunger for youth and beauty also carves out empathy for the self-hating Elisabeth. The most effective element of Fargeat’s script (which received best screenplay honors at Cannes) is the extent to which the viewer understands the protagonist’s impossible bind. Sue and Elisabeth, we are constantly reminded via the Substance’s minimalist marketing materials and customer service line, are one and the same. But in dramatizing the weekly cycle of turn-taking, Fargeat makes the choice to pit the two halves against one another, amplifying the damage caused by breaking unbreakable rules.
In a different universe, Elisabeth and Sue might have attempted to cooperate with one another before descending into the depths of hell. Fargeat’s own obsession, however, favors visceral gut-punches and a barrage of stylistic homages to cinematic heroes including Hitchcock and Kubrick. Opportunities to play around with aspects of the mind-body problem are left unexplored. The film’s reception has sparked conversation about all manner of subtext, from the refreshing way that Fargeat focuses on an older woman to the critique by Amy Nicholson that “It’s a superficial film about a superficial world.”
Ultimately, Fargeat elects to withhold characterization to the brink of near absurdity, perhaps to point all attention to her queasy burlesque of the cruel entertainment industry. Without any interiority to parse, we are outsiders looking in. In her tough-minded takedown of the movie, Hannah Strong calls it “hagsploitation.” A film of deliberate circles, cycles, and repetitions, “The Substance” keeps insisting that none of the procedure’s side effects can be reversed. Some will find in the Grand Guignol ending an affirmation of feminist ideals, while others will identify the complete opposite. In either case, “The Substance” owes to Demi Moore a debt that cannot be fully paid.