In Coralie Fargeat’s gory fantasy, youth and beauty come with a monstrous price.
By James Verniere/Boston Movie News
From French mad-queen-of-gore Coralie Fargeat comes the buzzy, Cannes-winning entry “The Substance,” featuring a bravura turn by Demi Moore in full scream-queen mode as Elisabeth Sparkle, a TV-fitness beauty icon. Elisabeth is about to be replaced by her hilariously uncouth boss—ahem—Harvey (Dennis Quaid), with a younger version of herself. In this dark, body-horror fairy tale for the Age of Aging Kardashians, Elisabeth’s solution is to create a younger version of herself using a black market drug (not Ozempic, salmon sperm, or Sculptra) with dire, if not monstrous, side effects. Moore has generated genuine Oscar buzz for this daring turn.
I know it all sounds like a cheapo Roger Corman horror premise from the 1950s (in fact, Fargeat’s plot is almost a replica of Corman’s 1959 bio-thriller “The Wasp Woman”). But “The Substance” ups the ante with bigger production values, a poly-chromium color scheme, “Titane”-ready sound design, fabulous fashions, brand names, and enough blood and viscera to choke Stanley Kubrick.
Sparkle’s catchphrase, “You Got It,” is ironic because, of course, she no longer has it. After injecting herself with the “Substance,” Elisabeth gives grotesque birth to her younger self in the large bathroom of her posh flat (Why the two have different colored eyes, we do not know). We are told they are one and the same, just different ages. They each get to live Elisabeth’s life for one week and must return to a form of hibernation while the other body snatcher takes over. It doesn’t make a heck of a lot of sense. But you go along with it. There is a great amount of nudity involved in both roles, and you have to give 61-year-old Moore credit for being willing to expose herself to the camera of Benjamin Kracun (“Promising Young Woman”) and for all of her yoga, Pilates, and cosmetic surgery.
Elisabeth’s younger self dubs herself Sue (Margaret Qualley) and auditions to be “the new Elisabeth Sparkle” and, of course, gets the job from a jubilant Harvey. Sue makes some excuses to explain why she can only work every other week. But soon, she is stealing an extra day or two from Elisabeth, whose body parts begin to suffer from the “lack of balance” and show signs of, gasp, age.
Fargeat has been compared, naturally, to body-horror maestro David Cronenberg. But with her very heavy hand and insatiable need to shock, she is more like the new, better Eli Roth and, in the third act, the wannabe John Carpenter of “The Thing” (1982). “The Substance” is all about metamorphosis and how women in our post-#MeToo society nevertheless continue to feel pressured to remain eternally youthful. But at the same time, this premise makes “The Substance” feel retrograded.
In addition to recalling Corman’s “The Wasp Woman,” “The Substance” also derives elements from Oscar Wilde’s 1890 eternal-youth cautionary tale “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Elisabeth and Sue are Wildean sex-crazed narcissists. Elisabeth’s work and living space are full of portraits of her (a billboard of Sue will soon impinge Elisabeth’s view). Elisabeth and Sue only need one another and their fame to feel alive. You can be sure that when a character pukes in Fargeat’s world, the result is colored chrome yellow. In addition to the two terrific leads, 70-year-old Quaid, currently also playing Ronald Reagan on our screens, is a total, repulsive hoot in a role intended for the late Ray Liotta.
One expects a film of this sort to run its course in under two hours (“The Wasp Woman” was a slim 63 minutes). Even M. Night Shyamalan’s wearisome “Old” (2021) was shy of two hours. But Fargeat ups the ante again and goes for almost another half hour. Despite the risible freak show excesses of a final mutation, Fargeat won the award for screenplay at Cannes. Take that Yorgos Lanthimos, whose 2023 feminist horror film “Poor Things” is superior to this barking insane asylum of a film. Fargeat reportedly ran out of fake blood in making her debut feature, “Revenge.” In “The Substance,” she hoses us with it. She also shamelessly co-opts an iconic piece of music from a Kubrick film. But a final crazy shot of something delicate, awful, and yet beautiful inching across a sidewalk on Hollywood Blvd. is inspired and poetic, even if you are by this time pissed off and exhausted (I was).
‘The Substance’
Rating: R, profanity, nudity, gore, violence, gruesome images.
Cast: Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, Dennis Quaid.
Director: Coralie Fargeat
Writer: Fargeat
Running time: 2 hours, 20 minutes
Where to Watch: AMC Boston Common, AMC Causeway, Alamo Drafthouse Seaport, Coolidge Corner Theater, and other suburban theaters.
Grade: B
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