The Substance (2024) - Coralie Fargeat does what she wants

                                                                                                       Credit: allocine.fr

Here is a film that doesn’t shy away from anything. The Substance, directed by Coralie Fargeat, is one to watch between the fingers or from behind a very large cushion, even for those who are strong of heart and robust in the face of gore. Blood, injections, disfigured beings, an intense – an unnecessary – scene of Dennis Quaid eating shrimp like he’s been starved for a year. Demi Moore is excellent as Elisabeth Sparkle, a fading movie star who is dismissed from the long-running aerobics TV show she has been hosting for years. Following a car crash, a young male nurse tells her about a black market serum that generates a “younger, more beautiful, more perfect” version of one’s self – while one being remains unconscious, the other has seven days to live (the other self requires “stabiliser fluid” injections daily to prevent deterioration), before they must switch again. And so, in grotesque detail, Elisabeth births Sue (a haunting performance from Margaret Qualley), who is immediately hired as “the new Elisabeth Sparkle”, but whose hunger for existence starts to disrupt the balance required to ensure safety for both selves. There is a very literal – and perhaps rather cliché – sense of division in The Substance, one that isn’t hard to distinguish – old and young, beautiful and ugly, self and other. At times, it is strikingly obvious – agonisingly long close ups of Qualley’s buttocks as she records the aerobics show – and at others, less so, in particular a scene in which Elisabeth changes her clothes and makeup multiple times in anticipation of a date, before giving up on it altogether and sitting on her bed aimlessly. It is one of the rare scenes where violent behaviour or gruelling imagery – in her frustration, she manically rubs her face and claws out her hair – produces another emotion besides disgust – in this case, that of disappointment and frustration with one’s own ageing body.

This is not to say that all of The Substance’s gore is gratuitous. Sue’s abuse of Elisabeth’s body carries a large part of the film, never showing signs of slowing down – at first, it is quiet, an extra couple of hours so that Sue can dress up and party, or have sex with a stranger. Then, gradually, a day more is stolen, then another, to disastrous consequences for Elisabeth. This would all be well and good were it not for the final forty minutes of the film, which seem to take everything The Substance has expressed so far and burn it. It is here that Fargeat’s latest falls victim to its sheer desire to disgust – while some of its grossest scenes are clever and reasonable, others seem to grace the screen simply to make people squirm (see shrimp). Is this necessarily a bad thing? For splatters or extreme cinema, perhaps not. For a film like The Substance, with its underlying message of women’s relationship to their bodies, the fear of ageing, the dangers of plastic surgery, it falls flat, shock value that hides a struggle to wrap a plotline or scene. Nevertheless, The Substance is efficient, to say the least – aesthetically pleasing, atmospheric in location and sound, intense, and featuring the impeccable Moore and Qualley duo-as-one, who each hold their own while the other lies on the bathroom floor.