The New Flesh
Back in 2017, French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat knocked moviegoers for a loop with her debut feature Revenge, a bold and brutal thriller that combined a premise clearly inspired by such exploitation classics as I Spit on Your Grave and Ms .45, a streak of savage social commentary regarding the ugliness of toxic masculinity and a keen sense of style behind the camera into a film that was both astoundingly gruesome and undeniably thought-provoking—the kind of cinematic rarity that, once upon a time, would have felt at home in both grindhouse and art house theaters. For her long-awaited follow-up film, The Substance, Fargeat is clearly working with a bigger budget and with better-known stars but the basic formula of using the building blocks of trash cinema as a foundation for pointed observations about social conventions not only remains but actually goes to places that are even wilder and ickier than before. I can’t really say that the result is great—there are stretches when I am not even sure that it is even good—but it certainly is something and even when it doesn’t work, it is the kind of film that continues to hold your interest, if only to see if it can somehow maintain or even exceed the level of craziness it has already established. Spoiler Alert—it does and then some.
The film centers around Elizabeth Sparkle, a woman who was once the toast of the entertainment industry as a young woman, becoming both an Oscar-winning actress and an international sex symbol. Alas, those days were a while ago and as the film opens, she is now in her 50s and while she is still considered a glamorous icon, it is only a matter of time before she will have to step to the side to make way for the up-and-coming starlets angling to replace her on the celebrity food chain. That day finally comes, on her birthday, no less, when the network executive (Dennis Quaid) in charge of her fitness show that she hosts—a guy so utterly sleazy and misogynistic in every imaginable way that it comes as no surprise to discover that his name is Harvey—informs her that it is time for her to move on, offering the usual empty platitudes about how important she has been to the network while placing ads announcing auditions for a presumably younger and overtly sexier replacement.
While being treated in the hospital after being in a car crash—it was definitely not one of her better birthdays—Elizabeth is informed of a black-market procedure known as The Substance that, according to its minimalist introductory video, claims that it can regenerate cells and remake the user into a better version of themselves. On the surface, this sounds like the usual snake oil that one can see pitched in any number of late-night infomercials and the video doesn’t exactly explain how any of this is actually accomplished. And yet, the combination of the slick productions values and the soothing tones of the unseen narrator strikes a chord with the newly vulnerable Elizabeth and she decides to inject the Substance. Amazingly (and gruesomely), it works and in the bathroom of her lavish yet antiseptic apartment, her back splits open and a younger and ostensibly hotter version of herself (Margaret Qualley), emerges while she lies unconscious on the floor.
Although the actual process of undertaking the process of The Substance is straightforward enough (and grisly enough to potentially send many viewers with weaker constitutions bolting from the theater), the upkeep and maintenance proves to be a little more complicated. As the anonymous voice behind The Substance explains, Elizabeth and her newer self, eventually dubbed Sue, are not two separate individuals but a single entity and therefore have to work together with absolute precision in order to make everything work. While one of them is out and about in the world, the other is to be hidden away in an unconscious state, regenerating and supplying the other with spinal fluid in order to with maintaining the process. Precisely every seven days, the two switch places and the process begins anew.
It sounds simple enough but, shockingly enough, it soon proves to be anything but that. Sue goes out to audition to be Elizabeth’s replacement, where her Lycra-clad rear and borderline pornographic moves win her both the gig and the attentions of Harvey. Naturally, the show becomes an instant hit and Sue is an overnight sensation, inspiring lust and/or adoration in practically everyone who encounters her. Although Sue is careful at first to maintain the 7-day balance with Elizabeth, Sue begins to break the rules by staying conscious for longer periods of time, a move that proves to have nasty consequences for Elizabeth when she is finally awakened. Before long, however, Elizabeth discovers that there are things that she can do while awake that will affect Sue as well and things between the two—well, one, as the rep behind The Substance is constantly reminding whenever one of them calls to complain about the other—begin to unravel in increasingly grotesque ways.
Many of those who have written about The Substance since it premiered at Cannes earlier this year have compared it to the works of David Cronenberg and indeed, there are any number of similarities to his films, ranging from the use of stomach-churning body horror imagery as a form of social commentary to the decision to limit the scope of the narrative to only a few key characters and a handful of locations. However, while it does at times play as what might have resulted if Cronenberg had stuck Death Becomes Her and Showgirls into the transporter in The Fly, it also fits in the the ways that horror cinema has reflected society’s attitudes towards the inevitability of aging, especially in regards to women. There is a long strain of so-called “hagsploitation” films—ranging from those weirdo things that actresses like Better Davis and Joan Crawford did to keep working after their days as glamor screen icons had passed to current examples like Barbarian and The Front Room—that look upon anyone with wrinkles and even the slightest infirmity with some degree of horror and revulsion. There are also B-movies from the drive-in era like The Wasp Woman and The Leech Woman that are explicitly about woman who are beginning to lose their looks and sexual appeal to men due to aging and the hideous lengths they go to to halt or reverse the seemingly inevitable.
Although many of those films were little more than sexist and ageist trash, some of them—particularly The Leech Woman—have been reclaimed in recent years by those who have chosen to look at them and their ostensible themes through an explicitly feminist framework and indeed, The Substance is a film that seems to have been created specifically by someone who took such writings to heart. Perhaps not surprisingly, the result is not particularly subtle in the ways that it uses its goofy/gross conceit to comment on the ways that society is perfectly willing to commodify young women for their beauty and sexuality and then cruelly dismiss them the minute that they no longer check off every one of the impossibly high and arbitrary standards we set for them, all while allowing men to hold their allure and power no matter how old they get. Fargeat’s blunt narrative and in-your-face visual style is undeniably arresting at first but after a while, it becomes apparent that she doesn’t really have anything startlingly new to say on the subject at hand and what she does offer up in the way of commentary is not especially profound and begins to wear quite thin as this nearly 2 1/2-hour-long film plays out. Towards the end, whatever nuance still on display is cast aside for a wildly gory climax that is good for a couple of gorge-inducing laughs but comes perilously close to allowing viewers the chance to ignore the important issues that the film does raise.
And yet, even though The Substance is messy and ungainly and too often threatens to go complete off the rails into sheer lunacy of a sort that might give Yorgos Lanthimos pause, it still makes for mostly compelling viewing. Fargeat brings a lot of style and energy to the proceedings and gives the film a chilly and austere basic visual style (one clearly influenced in parts by Stanley Kubrick) that allows the more lurid elements—from an almost indecently sexualized closeup of Sue’s perfectly made-up lips sipping a Diet Coke to the various grotesqueries that emerge from both Elizabeth and Sue as things progress/degrade—to pop off the screen with a practically 3-D intensity. While her screenplay does not cut especially deep—at least from a dramatic standpoint—it is not completely one-note and takes care to indict both men for the more debased attentions that they are able to inflict upon women due to their positions of power and women for the lengths that many of them will go in order to attract and maintain those attentions.
However, the best and most consistently surprising and entertaining elements of The Substance are the performances from the two leads. Because her role has any number of parallels with her own real-life experiences of being a top star eventually pushed aside by the very same industry that commodified her in the first place and because it involves a lot of nudity, Demi Moore’s work here will no doubt be described by many as “brave” and while it certainly is, it is for reasons that go way beyond those relatively superficial reasons. Earlier in her career, she demonstrated a kind of steely-eyed determination both on and off the screen that could be quite effective when utilized properly (such as her performance in G.I. Jane) but which could come across as abrasive and off-putting in the wrong context. That sense of determination is still there and has been cannily deployed to underscore Elizabeth’s determination not to lose everything that she has worked so hard for over the years just because she is on the wrong side of 50. At the same time, Moore demonstrates a real sense of vulnerability as her character finds herself at loose ends following her firing and the increasing desperation over what happens when she realizes that her alleged better self is betraying her as well. It isn’t just the best performance of Moore’s career—it is one that is so strong and suggestive that it makes you want to go back into her past filmography and see if she was doing work like this back in the day but we were too blinded by tabloid headlines involving her marriage, her infamous Vanity Fair covers or her equally controversial Striptease payday.
By comparison, Qualley is a relative newcomer but over the last few years, she has developed such an impressive string of performances in films like The Nice Guys, Once Upon a Time. . . In Hollywood and, in the last 12 months alone, Poor Things, Drive-Away Dolls and Kinds of Kindness, that she has become one of those rare performers whose mere entrance into a scene means that things are about to get interesting. Watching her morph into a knowingly over-the-top variation of the kind of celebrity sex bomb whose alluring-yet-vacant gaze seems to emanate from every TV screen, magazine cover and billboard is hilarious and horrifying in equal measure, as is the increasingly messy war of attrition that she gets into Elizabeth. It is the stuff involving her character towards the end where the film threatens to go completely haywire (without going into too much detail, imagine a cross between the prom sequence in Carrie and the Mr. Creosote sketch in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life) and it is almost entirely due to the force of her performance that the whole enterprise manages to stay relatively tethered.
As I said, The Substance has a lot of flaws to it—it goes on for far too long, the insights it has regarding the objectification of women and the insane beauty standards they are required to follow are not especially insightful and some of the deliberately over-the-top elements (including a turn by Quaid so wildly and deliberately overscaled that it makes his turn in Great Balls of Fire seem restrained by comparison) seem destined to turn off as many viewers as they entertain. That said, the film is certainly never boring, the stuff that is good (like the performances from Moore and Qualley) are really good and when it is all done and you head out into the street feeling fairly gobsmacked by what you have just witnessed, you will know that you have certainly experienced something that you won’t be forgetting anytime soon. Whatever you may think of The Substance, it is certainly an experience—weird, loopy, snarky, convoluted and very gruesome, to be sure, but an experience none the less.