I don’t know how ready American audiences may be for Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, given that it’s perhaps the most European depiction of our culture to hit screens with this much buzz in a long, long time. That is to say that you’re less likely to get grossed out by the ample amounts of body horror – which, to be fair, are classically Cronenbergian in their sensibility and executed perfectly – but more by a scene in which Dennis Quaid, embodying the Platonic ideal of a sleazeball TV producer, enjoys a shrimp salad while having a lunch meeting with his has-been star Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore). Elisabeth’s a Jane Fonda riff without the adventures in Southeast Asia or Tout Va Bien, whose acting career declined and fell to the point that she’s hosting an ‘80s-styled Sweatin’ to the Oldies-like on television. He wants to move on and find someone younger to host – a fact she learns after a taping by pure accident, so she’s well-prepared if still deeply unhappy with it – and, at the restaurant, all she can do is watch him eat as he struggles to articulate why with the same vigor he did when he wasn’t aware she was listening. And boy howdy, does he eat: Fargeat captures each crack and pop of the shrimp as he tears into their shells, the meaty crunch of each bite, the bulging eyes from the detached heads he spits into a bowl. It is fucking disgusting, but it’s also a solid metaphor — this is just what he does in life, so it’s fitting he’d do it for lunch.
Back in 2018, Fargeat made a fantastic first impression on genre audiences worldwide with Revenge, a similarly visceral rape-revenge horror picture that was, like The Substance, exquisitely gross, pointed in its provocation, and great. You couldn’t log into Shudder – and probably still can’t – without seeing Matilda Lutz’s blood-stained visage on the password screen, alongside images from other homegrown hits on the platform like Nic Cage in Mandy and the Tooth Fairy from Channel Zero. Its relative success afforded her the broader palette she’s able to paint with here, from the American talent she’s working with to the scale of the set-pieces, which escalate in intensity to a crimson-stained finale that would make Luca Guadagnino wonder why Amazon needed to cover the final moments of his Suspiria in red-tint to obscure the gore.
Money doesn’t always change a filmmaker, and Fargeat’s another fantastic citation on preserving one’s aesthetic ethos even as one starts getting closer to Hollywood. For the sake of brevity, it’s best if I go full Indiewire in pithily describing her style: it’s the New French Extremity – think Gaspar Noe, Alexandre Aja, Marina de Van, Catharine Breillat, and so on – as interpreted by Michael Bay outside of the action sequences. Think of the way Bay adds emphasis and that Tony Scott-style “Realer than Real” feeling he achieves through quick-cut visceral close-ups (a heady reminder of his days creating truly iconic advertising back in the days before Bad Boys), and substitute the pyrokinetic blasts with bursting and surging guts. Even better: imagine how Bay would shoot a recreation of what happened when Florence, Oregan dynamited a beached whale carcass, and you have a decent approximation of Fargeat’s style.
If advertising is all about crafting an ideal and desirable image, she uses its language to heighten the visceral impact of its story, ensuring that we feel almost as one with Elisabeth. She’s getting old – still beloved by her legions of fans, though they grow slightly fewer each day – and she feels it, staring into the mirror at her face, scanning for wrinkles and other signs of the times. It’s made all the more meaningful by Moore, whose image has been picked over repeatedly vultures in the tabloid press since her days in the Brat Pack. Everyone was so stunned that she still looked good in Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, and it’s weird to be surprised that, in the 21 years since that movie released (Jesus fucking Christ), she’s aged, albeit wonderfully. This dysmorphic disconnect forms the backbone of the movie’s conflicts and theme, as it’s about the ephemerality of attention and power more than vanity.
Elisabeth can still move (after all, she hosts a fitness show, so she’s in fantastic shape), has that same charisma, and looks wonderful: it’s just the world that’s passing her by, dropping her into the over-40 wastebasket. In short, she’s not only Demi Moore; she’s most women in front of the camera once snake-like fame starts to contemplate its tail for dinner. However, there’s a solution: after a car accident and a chance encounter with an exaggeratedly gorgeous nurse at the hospital, she learns this doesn’t have to be the end. In the pocket of her yellow trench coat (Fargeat loves a deep color), she finds a USB drive the nurse slipped her, wrapped in loose-leaf paper with a hastily scribbled note: This Changed My Life.
When she connects it to her TV in her living room later, she watches a brusque but intriguing ad for “The Substance,” a miracle cure that seems to promise to reverse her aging in some way. It’s you, but better—it’ll take the old and make it young again, or at least that’s what it seems like. She throws it out, but compiling personal frustrations drives her to take it out of the trash and sign up. Days later, she’s walking through Skid Row to a needle-strewn warehouse entrance, whose automatic roll-up doors stop midway through their climb. Once inside, it’s like she’s stepped into a spaceship: pure and perfect white walls where, inside the white lockers lining them, she finds her first box, the Dollar Shave Club approach to eternal youth without the benefits of home delivery. It’s a lot of steps and instructions that first resemble a make-up kit but become something truly strange: An activator gives way to a needled extractor, which gives way to dual packs of liquified food, with one intended for an “other self.” It keeps stressing that they’re “one,” whatever that means, but it doesn’t matter.
She wants her old life back, and she wants it even better than before, so, in her white-paneled bathroom, she plunges the activator syringe into the vial containing the neon-green substance, ties off her right arm, and injects the mystery liquid into her arm. At first, nothing happens. Was it a scam? What did she do? Then, she collapses, her body morphing and changing – until something hatches out of a giant hole in her back. Fargeat films this from her POV, seeing her corpse-like-yet-still-alive old body on the ground as she makes her way to the foggy bathroom mirror. When she wipes the steam away, she finds herself in an entirely new body, one younger, fitter, and hotter, and she takes the name Sue (Margaret Qualley) as she goes about seizing the new opportunities that await her, the producers and casting directors unaware that she and Elisabeth are one-and-the-same. Or are they?
See, “The Substance” has one major flaw: After a week in the younger body, Sue has to move back into Elisabeth’s body to maintain the “balance.” Each day, she takes a maintenance dose of spinal fluid from her original form, and that week is spent as Elisabeth allows the fluid to recharge. But, as Sue, Elisabeth’s been given everything she wants: fame, glory, and power, all handed to her nearly immediately. When she goes back to her old body, all she sees and feels is exhaustion and pain, and it sucks. As you might expect, there comes a point when, in the midst of an ill-timed tryst on Sue’s seventh day, she goes over the limit. Blood spurts from her nose, and her head pounds as she pulls an extra dose from Elisabeth’s spine to extend the party for a few more hours. When she switches back, she discovers the consequences of this late and rule-breaking extension, localized to a single finger.
At that point, Elisabeth and Sue start to cleave, two halves of one personality split between two bodies, resembling terrible roommates more than a single person. This cognitive dissonance makes Elisabeth resent Sue’s youth and her success – her old boss (Quaid) loves her, she’s getting opportunity after opportunity that old Elisabeth never had a chance at, and her beauty taunts her from a well-placed billboard easily seen from her apartment’s windows – and causes her to lash out against her younger self. In turn, Sue hates being in Elisabeth’s body, hates the gross messes she leaves for Sue to contend with when she wakes up after a week, and, importantly, she knows what happens if she keeps drawing doses to stay young. So, this conflict between the two pushes them towards an ugly resolution that will genuinely cause audiences to yelp at like fainting goats when it rolls around.
It’s somewhat ironic that a movie stacked with great performances, meticulous and rhythmic editing, and an astonishing visual style would win Best Screenplay at Cannes, but Fargeat deserved the accolade. This is an introspective body horror movie that has Cronenbergian psychological depth, accompanied by Lynchian absurdism in its depiction of the maximalist garishness of celebrity culture, topped off with a Tim-ian and Eric-ian approach to surrealist and, occasionally, disgusting humor. Its visuals and sound design amplify the story, and it’s just bizarre how beautiful a disgusting movie like this can be. Outside of the well-rendered practical effects used to enhance the gooey nature of the gross shit here, Fargeat loves deep color, filling every frame she can with it. The interiors are vividly rendered, from the Kubrickian red hallways with patterned carpets that line the studio where Sue and Elisabeth shoot their shows to the bleakness of Elisabeth’s apartment, where her youth taunts her even before she picks up her first box in the form of a giant portrait of her in her glory days. It’s engrossing and overwhelming, a shock-and-awe show of force for the people in the theater who don’t have Shudder subscriptions and have no basis for comparison. But it’s bleakly, blackly funny in that absurdist humor, which separates it from both Cronenbergian seriousness as well as winking-and-knowing horror-comedies – Quaid’s mouthfuls of celluloid are pure cinematic fantasy turned past eleven, a Gordon Cole-like intrusion of pure Francophone-gone-Hollywood style on the quiet moments between the ick.
At 140 minutes, The Substance has an epic length for a genre picture, and Fargeat oscillates between those three stylistic dimensions at a ferocious pace, ensuring that any frame isn’t wasted. Yet the most interesting aspect of her work here is its consistency – its contradictions are its characters, and the film would be lesser than if it weren’t for Moore and Qualley’s work inhabiting different dimensions of the same character. It is impressive how much shit they put up with here and how much they were given in return by their director. It ranges from how Elisabeth’s initial discomfort at running into an awkward guy she went to high school with turns into a painfully dashed attempt at restoring her self-confidence during the throes of Sue-Mania; to how Sue’s dreams of stardom come so close to being a reality only to be dashed, one tooth and fingernail at a time, at a pivotal moment, with Ren and Stimpy Gross-Ups of bleeding gums – it’s brave work, rooted in deep-seated emotional discomfort as much as it is physically.
This is the secret to The Substance’s success: It makes its quieter notes and cues genuinely subtle, which are easy to miss in the middle of Fargeat’s elegant chaos. It’s masterful work, executed with precision, oddly beautiful, and deeply disgusting, and much like a YouTube video of a dermatologist lancing an oversized cyst, immensely and strangely satisfying.