I hadn't seen this movie advertised anywhere, but that doesn't count for much because I make a point of avoiding media laden with ads that I can't block. But yesterday was my birthday, and since we didn't actually get to see Fourth Dominion when they were in town last Saturday, Catherine suggested we go see a movie since the local multiplex has reduced ticket prices on Tuesdays. With Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice being a rental, and me having no interest whatsofuckinever in yet another Deadpool sequel, I figured I'd check the multiplex's website to see what else they had on.
It was The Substance that caught my eye.
There were a few reasons for this:
- The movie won the "best screenplay" award at Cannes 2024, and I've come to think that a movie stands or falls on the strength of its screenplay
- Demi Moore doesn't make that many movies nowadays, mainly because she doesn't have to, so if she agrees to a project it's probably worth consideration.
- I figured this might be a sci-fi twist on the legends surrounding Elizabeth Bathory, but with a biochemical twist in the vein of Parasite Eve.
- The trailer managed to catch my interest without spoiling the entire movie.
Detailed Review (with spoilers)
This is a movie that runs on style, sharp writing, brilliant camera work, and the performances of its principal actors: Demi Moore, Dennis Quaid, and Margaret Qualley (as Sue). The premise is laid out at the beginning: You can become a "better version" of yourself by using the Substance, as long as you follow the instructions to the letter. Seven days on, seven days off; the "better self" is dependent upon the original, or "the matrix", because they are still essentially one and the balance must be maintained.
The premise is crucial; every horror movie is fundamentally a morality play, and the premise explains why those who die have it coming. Coralie Fargeat shows us why Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) "has it coming". She's just turned 50, and her glory days are long behind her. We know that she was once a big enough star to have been honored on Hollywood's Walk of Fame, but Fargeat shows Sparkle's fall from relevance by showing how her star ceases to draw tourist attention and cracks beneath the heels of pedestrians with more pressing concerns.
By the time we see her, she's reduced to hosting a weekly aerobic fitness show reminiscent of the videos Jane Fonda used to make. It's a relic of the 1980s, legwarmers and all. And Sparkle will soon lose even that, thanks to her boss Harvey, an unrepentantly over-the-top parody of the Hollywood Mogul stereotype played by Dennis Quaid who basically says (while the camera pans to give us a view of a waitress in a miniskirt bending over behind his left shoulder), "At fifty, it stops." It's almost as if Coralie Fargeat expects us to think of Harvey Weinstein, but thankfully she does not subject the audience to a casting couch scene.
While Fargeat begins with suspense and slowly building psychological terror in the first two acts, there are nevertheless little reminders that The Substance is in fact body horror. Furthermore the scene where Harvey (Dennis Quaid) tells Elisabeth (Demi Moore) that her show has been cancelled and that she is to be replaced with a younger woman is filmed mainly in an extreme closeup of Harvey pigging out on shrimp. We see him chewing the shrimp, ripping individual prawns apart with his teeth, talking with his mouth full, and dipping them in sauce. At one point he's waving a half-eaten shrimp around if this was Fargeat slipping in a visual metaphor for something else of Harvey's that's small, pink, and limp. We're treated — if that's the word — flinging droplets of sauce about until one begins to fear for Elisabeth's comfort and wardrobe as the camera cuts to shots of her trying to school her expression to keep her disgust from showing.
This is not mere body horror, but the horror of existing within a body, of being able to see one's life slipping away with every new flaw in one's skin, every new ache and pain, every limitation where none previously existed. It is also the horror of being compelled to deal with other people who not only also have bodies, but can command underserved respect and obedience by virtue of having more money and power than you. It is the horror of living under capitalism, of knowing that you have no inherent value to anybody else, and that others will in word and deed hammer into you their low opinion of you — that you are nothing but your tits or your ass or your mind or your muscles, your ability to further enrich the already wealthy — until you start to believe it yourself, despite yourself.
Elisabeth's day only gets worse from that disastrous lunch. It is little wonder that, despite initial misgivings, she eventually dials the number offered to her and requests The Substance. Of course, it doesn't get delivered to the door. She is given a pickup address and mailed a card with her customer ID number embossed on it. At no point are names exchanged here. Elisabeth Sparkle is not a human being to whoever is distributing the Substance; she is merely number 503. When she calls for assistance, the voice on the other end won't even respond when she gives her name, only her number.
Among other things, Coralie Fargeat carefully crafts a sense of inevitability. As soon as we see the explicit instructions for safely using The Substance, it is obvious that these instructions will go unheeded. The violation of the balance between Elisabeth and her younger, "better" self Sue is a relatively small one: a single extra dose of 'stabilizer', which Sue extracts from Elisabeth's body in a procedure resembling a lumbar puncture or spinal tap. But that extra dose comes at a cost to Elisabeth; when she is finally permitted to return to consciousness, the index finger on her right hand is that of a woman three or four decades older than her 50 years.
It just gets worse as The Substance continues to draw upon both Robert Louis Stevenson and Oscar Wilde, as if the film was an adaptation of The Strange Case of the Picture of Dorian Hyde. For despite the exhortation to Elisabeth and Sue that the remember that they are one, neither Elisabeth nor Sue can accept the other. Furthermore, Sue is not necessarily Elisabeth's "better" self. She is selfish, short-sighted, and cultivated no resources but her beauty, which Fargeat depicts as giving her the power to overwhelm men. All the while, Elisabeth is not only prematurely aging as Sue demands ever more of her, but falling apart when she is permitted to regain control of their shared life.
Because horror movies are morality plays at heart, it is tempting to see every horror that befalls Elisabeth Sparkle as a just desert. If she (and her younger self Sue) had only followed the instructions, one might argue, everything would have been fine. But Coralie Fargeat subverts this expectation not only through plot and characterization, but through Mise-en-scène. The world Fargeat has built around Elisabeth is one in which one inhales misogyny with every breath as surely as one does the ubiquitous car exhaust poisoning the atmosphere of Los Angeles. This commodification of women as the sum of their looks and winsome personalities is so pervasive that one cannot help but internalize it; to defy this milieu is an act of defiance worthy of Milton's Satan or Shelley's Prometheus; to have expected Elisabeth Sparkle to turn her back on a world that had no further use for her is as futile as it is cruel. And when the grotesque synthesis of Elisabeth and Sue take the stage for the film's final and utterly over-the-top act as "Monstro Elisasue", Fargeat makes no further attempt to be subtle about her point: if old women are monstrous, it is because a world ruled by a few men for their own gratification made them so.
If there is any irony in The Substance it is that anybody with a discerning eye could see that Elisabeth Sparkle didn't need the Substance. Though she wasn't a young woman, wealth and privilege had served her well; she might have been fifty years old, but she was still an attractive fifty. She could have made a life after Hollywood for herself, if she had cultivated even a semblance of inner strength or self-worth not connected to what men saw and felt when looking at her. Even after Elisabeth started using, she might still have saved herself if she had taken to heart something another Substance user had told her: "Remember that you matter."
Fargeat attempts to show Elisabeth's continuing appeal through the fumbling advances of a character named Fred, a former classmate who asks Elisabeth for a date after the most cursory attempt at polite conversation ever filmed. Perhaps Fred was merely so overjoyed to meet a former classmate with whom he's always been infatuated, but after watching Harvey eat shrimp while throwing Elisabeth under a bus one can't help but suspect that Fred's interest is that of an incel who has seen a woman "hit the wall" and must now settle for him. And let's not look too closely at Elisabeth's neighbor across the hall; Fargeat has done everything but insert a subtitle saying, "This man rapes his couch nightly." He was happy to yell at Elisabeth for renovating her apartment, but he changed his tune in a heartbeat when it was Sue who opened the door.
This works because Fargeat's cinematography is particularly effective in making the audience see Elisabeth as she sees herself. This is most explicit as she prepares for a date with Fred. Every time she sets out to leave, she is confronted by a billboard showing Sue, and she plainly feels unable to compete with Sue's nubile sex appeal despite all of her efforts to doll up. Elisabeth's perception of herself is a cracked lens distorted by the misogyny she has internalized after decades in a Hollywood that instead of bringing out the unique beauty every woman possesses, discards women who don't conform to a preconceived notion of beauty as defined by men like Harvey and a group of even older white men identified only as "the shareholders". Nor is it merely women who suffer; it was a man who told Elisabeth about The Substance. He used it himself, and Elisabeth is soon enough given a look at that user's original self, a fat seventy-year-old man with rheumy blue eyes, a stark contrast to the lean and hungry male nurse who had slipped Elisabeth that fatal phone number during an examination, calling her a "perfect candidate".
Thus we see equality of a sort. Rather than liberating women from arbitrary and harmful beauty standards, we subject men to them as well. Rather than eliminating privilege by uplifing those who suffer its lack, we tear down those seen to possess privilege so that all may suffer. All but the shareholders, anyway, and their lackeys: men (and more often women nowadays) like Harvey.
If The Substance is body horror, it is a thoroughly French and wholly existential body horror. I really should have expected as much, but despite having grown up on horror movies I kept getting ever more horrified as I watched, wondering all the while what I had gotten my wife and myself into. When French women turn their hands and eyes to the making of horror movies, they do not fuck around. Nor should they.
Everything in The Substance proceeds from is clearly-outlined basic premises, running on increasingly nightmarish logic as extrapolation is piled upon extrapolation, to climax in an utterly grotesque ending worthy of Brian De Palma's production of Carrie. You thought a bucket of fake blood was bad? This movie uses tanker trucks of the stuff, after almost two hours of relative restraint and subtlety. While the last act is as over the top and balls to the wall as a GWAR concert, the prosthetics and effects are as Oscar-worthy as those of 2023's Godzilla Minus One, Demi Moore should get Best Actress, Dennis Quaid and Margaret Qualley should get Best Supporting Actor and Actress respectively, and Coralie Fargeat should get Best Writer and Best Director. And I'm saying this as somebody who usually dismisses the Academy Awards as a self-promotional and self-congratulatory exercise in public, metaphorical mutual masturbation.
My recommendation is that you see this in the theater at the first opportunity, if it's playing in your area. I can no more believe that this movie was made on a budget of $17.5 million than I could that Godzilla Minus One had been made on one of $15 million. We need more movies like these, movies that punch well above their budget and manage to entertain without being vapid schlock. In my opinion, this movie gets two thumbs up and a "holy shit"; it ought to be seen in an IMAX theater with Satanophonic 666-channel surround sound.
And "Monstro Elisasue" would be a bitchin' name for a feminist death metal band.
Image Credits
I do not hold copyright to any of the images used in this review, but am claiming "fair use" in using them to comment upon (and provide free advertising) for the film.