TIFF 2024 Film Review: The Substance
CORALIE FARGEAT STUNS WITH HER SELF-LOATHING BODY HORROR KNOCKOUT
Once again transmogrifying old-school exploitation into her own feminist styling of New French Extremity, Coralie Fargeat trades in the empowered bloodletting of 2018’s Revenge for body horror. The Substance is one-note, obscene, and about as subtle as a sledgehammer — and it also happens to be one of the best movies of the year. Minor spoilers ahead…
Let’s get one thing out of the way: The Substance really only plays one note. A hagsploitation sledgehammer of internalized misogyny and LA-branded self-loathing, Coralie Fargeat’s followup to 2018’s Revenge tosses subtext into the bin to directly comment on the grotesque subjugation of women’s bodies at the altar of Hollywood. Many will bristle against The Substance and its explicit, repetitive assault on good taste, but it’s precisely the juxtaposition of its bluntness and wanton escalation of sickly textures that makes it so effective. It’s one note, but Fargeat knows the exact amplitude to blow out the speakers and bring the house down.
Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) is a waning Hollywood megastar. Newly 50 and basically a relic in a youth-obsessed culture, her last vestige of fame as a TV fitness personality is eighty-sixed by a slimy, shrimp-scarfing exec (a deliciously over-the-top Dennis Quaid). Dumped by the network looking for a younger, hotter, hipper star, Sparkle is relegated to her empty cavern of a Los Angeles apartment as her billboards across town are replaced and her studio posters are shorn from their walls. It isn’t before long, however, that she stumbles upon the titular miracle drug: a neon-green serum of shady origin that grants a second life as the “ideal” version of yourself, sprouting from the spine like a Xenomorph backburster. “Younger. More beautiful. More perfect.” The catch? Your glossy alter-ego can only live for seven days at a time before you have to switch back. In big, bold lettering, the instructions emphasize: “You must switch every seven days. No exceptions.” With stringent rules for its activator vial, food matrices, and stabilizers, “The Substance” seemingly goads to be abused; it’s only a matter of time before Sue (Margaret Qualley) — Elisabeth’s glistening, ingenue counterpart — begins cheating the system for extra minutes, hours, and days, and the side effects are predictably horrific, parasitic even. “The balance…is not being respected,” growls an increasingly anguished Elisabeth. Curt and detached, the disembodied voice from the corporate help desk simply replies: “Then respect it.”
“…Coralie Fargeat’s followup to 2018’s Revenge tosses subtext into the bin to directly comment on the grotesque subjugation of women’s bodies at the altar of Hollywood.”
It’s easy to see the obvious touchstones — Frankenheimer, Yuzna, Tsukamoto — that The Substance borrows from, but Fargeat is firmly her own artist in pacing, construction, and aesthetics: there’s a symphony of squishy parts that work only in conjunction with each other, and it’s one that ends up being much more than the sum of its influences. From its sterile, commercial gloss to its run-on escalation of oozing grotesqueries — the movie threatens to end no fewer than five times — The Substance goes well beyond just toeing the threshold of decency, it obliterates it. At festivals, many midnighters tout pushing the envelope and being “the most shocking film of the year,” but in the rare case of The Substance, it means it: a movie that holds up a disgusted, cartoon mirror to a culture that only places worth on women when they're young and unblemished. You might be able to predict every telegraphed misuse of “The Substance,” but you’ll never guess just how far Fargeat is willing to go.
A film like The Substance, even with its excessive genre impulses, doesn’t function without the commitment of its principal actors, and Fargeat coaxes a pair of barnburner performances from them: Qualley, as gleeful participant in a system defined by absurd beauty standards, and Moore, as a new body horror icon that crescendoes from tragic, self-hating victim to gross-out, exploitation crone. As two sides of the same coin, Elisabeth and Sue eventually collide into a font of gore, guts, and displaced limbs, which also brings us to the most salient critique of The Substance floating around: Why does it hate its characters more than the culture it’s railing against? Is it the nature of its blunt satire, or is it complicit with its willful mean-spiritedness? Your mileage will vary, but whether you wince, cackle, or simply abandon the theater out of disgust, one thing is quite clear: The Substance is unforgettable.
