The Substance (2024) | REVIEW

Directed by Coralie Fargeat — Screenplay by Coralie Fargeat.

For whatever reason, there is a recent trend in French cinema where rising female filmmakers are gravitating towards horror filmmaking to tell stories with plenty to say. Palme d’Or-winning filmmaker Julia Ducournau is the best example of this, as her critically acclaimed oeuvre — consisting of Raw and Titane — is filled with sensationally good and attention-grabbing body horror films that in the case of Titane is so out there and distinctive that you can’t describe it without getting strange looks from the person you’re talking to about it. French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat — whose first film was the revenge thriller appropriately titled Revenge from 2017 — is following in her footsteps. Her sophomore effort was, similarly to Ducournau’s Titane, warmly received at the Cannes Film Festival. While Ducournau won the main award, Fargeat’s evocative and expressive body horror film The Substance earned her the festival’s prize for Best Screenplay. Like Raw and Titane when they were released, The Substance, which reportedly received a standing ovation at upwards of 9 minutes at its world premiere, is an excellent piece of genre filmmaking that is sure to be remembered as one of the best and most memorable films of the year.

Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance follows Elisabeth Sparkles (played by Demi Moore), a long-time celebrity, who, after turning fifty years of age, is fired due to Tinseltown ageism from the aerobics television show of which she has long been the face. Soon after this vulnerable development, Elisabeth is offered the opportunity to take a mysterious serum — the titular substance — that, when injected, would initiate a process by which a new, younger, and more perfect version of yourself would be ‘born’ or ‘released’ from out of you. After some deliberation, Elisabeth decides to bite the bullet and inject herself with this strange, clone-releasing substance. As promised, a new and much younger version of herself comes out of her, and this new version, dubbed ’Sue’ (played by Margaret Qualley), gives Elisabeth an opportunity to have a younger version of herself grasp another chance at superstardom. However, there is a catch, Elisabeth and Sue have now entered into a symbiotic relationship with some very firm rules that restrict when each person can be in control and for how long, as they must transfer consciousness from one body and to the next every seven days. However, while the bright lights that Sue seeks out may be the stuff of dreams, the increasingly reclusive lifestyle that Elisabeth now lives with causes issues. Soon, for multiple reasons, they’ll consider testing the rigidity of the rules that have allowed for this second chance at stardom, but some processes, as they’ll learn, have those rules in place for a reason.

There’s nothing new about the search for a mystical and magical fountain of youth. Stories of such a mythical body of water go back thousands of years. It has been said before that youth is wasted on the young, and many would be desperate to turn back the clock if given the opportunity. It is only natural. What isn’t natural are several of the many ways that people try to stay young in the modern day. For some, it’s botox, liposuction, or hair transplants. Recently, it’s been the wildly popular diabetes and weight-loss medication Wegovy/Ozempic that has taken the world by storm, including Hollywood where stars can take recurring injections and successfully achieve weight loss. I doubt that Fargeat, who directed and wrote this film, had Ozempic in mind when she thought up her premise, but it’s impossible not to think about it when you watch the film. Building off of all of that, The Substance is a film about the ticking time clock of aging, the fight to keep the fifteen minutes of fame going, gender norms, the gendered ageism of Hollywood, the side effects of pumping your body with unnatural substances without proper understanding of the consequences, and, in addition to all of this, it is a feminist satirisation of the male gaze and a scolding of the plastic beauty standards of Hollywood. There’s even a line of dialogue that, if I remember and interpreted it correctly, may speak to how different generations of feminists should strive to work together, but I digress. 

Though the film is not exactly unsubtle about its ideas (while it worked for me, I can understand if it feels a little bit repetitive in the long run), Fargeat makes these points early and often and with a great confidence in her and her collaborators’ sense of style. It’s got great, inviting, and attention-grabbing use of color to emphasize Fargeat’s exaggerated reality, interesting bird’s-eye-view frames, ultra close-ups to depict the gross sexism and gendered age double standards when it comes to the patriarchal figures such as its Hollywood exec caricature played by Dennis Quaid (whose part, though one-note, is quite memorable), and then it also features well-executed sequences of music video aestheticism that pinpoints a sexist male gaze that emphasizes the way women may be objectified in Hollywood and used only for their looks and physical attributes. There is a fair bit of nudity in the film and, with this focus on the male gaze, the camera ogles at Sue in action in her celebrity day job, but it is a feature and not a bug, as it communicates the film’s points fairly sharply. Fargeat’s film also wears its inspirations on its sleeves. There are obvious allusions to Snow White, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. At the same time, Fargeat clearly threw in plenty of visual references to everyone from Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, and Brian De Palma to David Cronenberg and Nicolas Winding Refn. 

Ill-thought-out attempts to stay young artificially, have led to many star transformation horror stories and this film definitely plays into our collective knowledge of such real-life body horror stories to execute on this film’s visual ideas of body transformation, which go to extremes that both shock, horrify, and impress. Put simply, this is an extraordinary body horror film that picks its moments to go all the way, in Cronenbergian fashion, to tell a story of body dysmorphia, decay, cellular division, and side effects. The gradual or sometimes rapid transformation of Elisabeth is executed in such a brilliant way that you’re treated to body horror to the nth degree — it’s disturbing, it’s gory, and Fargeat is unafraid of going to the extremes of the genre despite how off-putting or campy it may be interpreted. The film’s use of make-up and practical effects to pull off the transformations in sometimes monstrous ways is seriously impressive. Body horror isn’t for everyone, but if you’re into this kind of thing — e.g. David Cronenberg’s The Fly — then, rest assured, that you get your money’s worth here. 

‘Fearlessness’ is a word often used when describing actors going all the way to fulfill the potential of their parts, and its use in film criticism has perhaps become a little bit of a cliche. Nonetheless, it is ‘fearlessness’ that best describes the approach that both Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley has taken to Fargeat’s film. Not only does the film require them and their physical attributes to be studied while they’re presented as fully nude, the film also asks them to be open to the kind of physical performance that both makes them out to be ogled at and that positions them in vulnerable positions from which they have to give themselves over to the vision of their filmmaker. For Margaret Qualley, this represents the latest in a series of brave and exciting projects (see Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things and Zachary Wigon’s Sanctuary) in which she gets the chance to play with genre and break out of the traditional ingénue parts that many actresses in her position might fall into. Qualley isn’t just eager and willing to take on the challenge of this part, she also executes it with pizzazz. But because Demi Moore has not been taking these bold parts in recent years and because she has sort of fallen into the background of Hollywood despite her once quite pronounced stardom, it is Moore’s turn that takes the headlines. Moore, who is now in her sixties, doesn’t just agree to appear fully nude and give herself over to the degradation of Cronenbergian body horror, she also delivers arguably a career-best performance while doing so. I know for a fact that many other cineastes and critics have already been screaming it from the rooftops, and I’ll happily add my voice to the chorus — this is an Oscar-worthy performance from Demi Moore. 

Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance is a striking and unforgettable body horror social commentary masterwork elevated both by its sense of style and two genuinely stellar performances from thespians at opposite ends of their careers. I’ll concede that some of its overall messaging is unsubtle to an extent that, for some, it may feel like you’re being hit over the head repeatedly with it over the course of its slightly excessive runtime. That said, I think that if you’re willing to give yourself over to the madness and the body horror satirization of the feminist genre narrative, then the film is more than worth giving a chance. It certainly is an experience to remember.

9 out of 10

– Review Written by Jeffrey Rex Bertelsen.