Aside from Demi Moore’s explosive performance or Coralie Fargeat’s razor-sharp screenplay or bold direction, what I really loved the most about ‘The Substance’ is how the film manages to criticize not just the obscene standards for beauty that we impose upon women (and that women impose upon themselves because that’s how society has programmed them) but–and this is me just digging deeper–also the way we idolize and praise people for their beauty and their looks and it’s really so shallow and worthless, the way ‘The Substance’ manages to position it within the frame.
‘The Substance’ is about an aging actress, Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), who has managed to stay in the public eye by hosting aerobics show. When she discovers her producer (Dennis Quaid) is replacing her with “someone younger” on her birthday, she gets distracted while on the road and suffers an accident. At the hospital, someone hands her a mysterious flash drive with a promotion for a drug called The Substance, a radical treatment that will create a younger, “better” version of the user who will stay active for seven days before having to switch again with the older body. Desperate to stay in the limelight, Elisabeth takes The Substance and finds her younger self to be played by Margaret Qualley who now calls herself Sue. As Sue, she auditions for Elisabeth’s old show and finds herself the hottest new face in Hollywood. With a new lease on life, she finds that balancing her life between bodies for a week each is too limiting, and Sue starts to break the rules to disastrous results for Elisabeth.
From the get-go, the movie leans on the formalist aesthetic and takes on an absurdist mode. Everything from the cinematography to the production design and sound design is exaggerated to the highest levels. Even the acting is almost comical, especially for Dennis Quaid. It’s only Demi Moore who can play grounded as she must deal with the struggles of society’s unrealistic expectations for women’s aging. Later, she shifts to the outrageous when the scene calls for it, but her fear is real; her portrayal of it is palpable and jumps off the screen.
But while Moore works her magic on the film’s heart, Fargeat is off having mad fun with the rest of the film. ‘The Substance’ is in the genre of body horror and she is unafraid to be gross and grotesque and brutal. The forming of the new, younger body is a violent act, where the old body is ripped open like a shell. There’s blood and organs and later on when things get really messy, there’s violence that is enhanced by extreme close-ups of flesh and blood and the sound of bones cracking and flesh on liquid. It’s a sensory assault that disturbs as much as it can amuse.
The other way by which Fargeat subverts the body horror genre is how the camera is as equally obsessed by beautiful bodies of women. As Sue, Elisabeth can reclaim the glory she had in her past and she’s out there gyrating and exercising and showing off every curve of her body: butt, cleavage, crotch. While it definitely objectifies the woman’s body but, interestingly enough, while this obsession for youth and beauty is imposed by men, it is framed by Elisabeth’s own obsession with her body. As much as it is the male gaze at work, it is also the female gaze who, by submitting to men’s wants and desires, wants to have this body and to show it off. The constant exposure of these body parts, where at first comes off as alluring, later on becomes a sort of prison. The perfection of Margaret Qualley’s body becomes part of the horror because it’s the symbol of Elisabeth’s own entrapment to the society’s unrealistic expectation of women’s body.
But the most ironic thing about all this is that Demi Moore, a woman in her early 60s, looks absolutely amazing. She looks just as good as Margaret Qualley when you consider her age and so when the film through Dennis Quaid’s character calls her old and undesirable, it underlines and amplifies the film’s message. Outside this cartoon world that Fargeat wrote and directed, Demi Moore is old and unfit for television but, in reality, she’s absolutely divine. And this idea plays out in Demi Moore’s performance that it adds an extra layer that makes the film so much fun to watch.
The film gets crazier and crazier as it unfolds. In fact, I found two scenes, two great moments when the film could have ended but it kept going, pushing the boundaries of taste and horror to its limits. I feel that the message was already made but the extra twenty minutes of blood and gore and violence is still a lot of fun.
My Rating:
The Substance is now showing! Check showtimes and buy tickets here.
