Film Review
The Substance (2024) — nightmarish feminist body horror farce lacks a human heart
A fading celebrity decides to use a black-market drug, a cell-replicating substance that temporarily creates a younger, better version of herself.
Films are great psychological defences. On the brighter side, there’s Buster Keaton. Coping with blunted affect, he turns his stone-cold face silly and makes it a defining trait of his deadpan screen persona. In Sherlock Jr. (1924), he reacts to his social anxiety by retreating into his own imagination, where his awkwardness becomes incidental, played up for amusement as he comes to the rescue of his dream girl. On the darker side, there’s writer-director Paul Schrader, wandering through the nightly streets of early-1970s Los Angeles, living the life of a nocturnal animal. He came out on top of his loneliness, depression, internalised anger, stomach ulcer, junk foods and alcoholism, by penning Taxi Driver (1976); few other films have been more horrifying, funny, or personally identifiable, because they came straight out of the writer’s gut, without distilling off any bit of its stinks of blood and hatred. You felt his need to have written it as you were seeing how it turned out, like how Travis Bickle couldn’t have waited another second for the burst of violence he’s destined for, or so he believes. It’s like concrete building up inside him, or rather him being stuck inside concrete: by writing, he was saving his own life.
As such, filmmakers work with their doubts and fears by “sublimation”: they conjure up impermissible impulses and ideations which plague their psyches, and work them into art or social commentary, with results ranging from the delightful to the provocative. And as such is The Substance, a body horror farce of women’s existential anxieties about sex and fame, and the self-hatred that comes with ageing and bodily imperfections. It’s every bit as hammy and garish as you’ve been hearing about, but a void eventually fills you up as it pours cold blood in your face; you leave the theatre desiccated, feeling manipulated, and being cheated on.
Who’s ageing? Demi Moore, at 61, hasn’t had a great role since at least the late-1990s. Here, she returns to the limelight as a fading star (not unlike herself), humbly named Elisabeth Sparkle, an Academy Award-winner who was fired from an aerobics show by her flagrantly misogynistic boss (Dennis Quaid), and on her birthday no less. After a car crash, she secretly receives a flash drive with information about the so-called “Substance”, which promises its user a younger, better self. She throws it down the garbage can, and then, the film lets slip the first sign of its weakness: she doesn’t think to get therapy or has the “good instinct” to pursue transcendental meditation (now so rampant in entertainment circles), or even tries to get a new job before she reconsiders “the Substance”, which she only just threw away.
By showing that she’d rather go to a remote, nameless place for a shipment of something she hasn’t even looked into to inject her body with than to touch grass and think of her options — it’s not like she’s going bankrupt overnight — the film was letting us know that human psychology is out of the picture. We learn later that by “creating” a younger and better version of herself, the sellers meant it to the letter: Elisabeth doesn’t get any younger herself, but someone else (Margaret Qualley) is “born”, by literally breaking out of her body, like a reproducing cell. The whole process is a grand spectacle of itself, with effects that were as good as anything David Cronenberg has done (there were several effects lifted straight out of 1983’s Videodrome and 1986’s The Fly); it can only be believed once you have seen it. I’ll spare you the details, and just hit you with this: don’t go with your stomach full.
There are several set pieces and effects just like this one that can have you squirm to the side, with a great, assured style and movement that rarely falters. What does falter, though, is practically everything else. A curvaceous vixen dressed in candy colours, and whose flesh moves and shines like water balloons, Elisabeth’s other self is a Mountain Dew-blooded walking entrapment device, something out of an NSFW artist’s hand had he been given an Unreal Engine to work with. She names herself Sue, and it immediately becomes clear that it isn’t as simple as one consciousness shifting between two bodies. According to the instructions, Sue has to rely on the “Stabilizer” serum in Elisabeth’s body to maintain basic physical integrity. They change who gets to be conscious or unconscious on a weekly cycle: once seven days are up, her new/old self has to transfer their blood into the other so the latter can revive from unconsciousness as she falls unconscious. The whole sound of it alone should give you the chills.
The scares worked, especially with how superficial feminine beauty at its “perfection” is collocated together with downright freakish deformities, and how the film uses that to turn you on at the same time as it turns your stomach. But you’re not haunted, for better or worse. You don’t know if you should be grateful or disappointed at director Coralie Fargeat for making everyone in the mould of caricatures. It’s hard to imagine what trauma you would’ve gone through had you been attached to them. Conforming to her role strictly, Margaret Qualley’s vibe and screen presence are all surfaces, with no quality. The lighting on her is artificial to a fault, giving off the impression that she’s made out of wax. She’s a walking marionette, as vain and vapid as the film desires her to be.
Demi Moore fares better as she was given more to work with. In a rare scene of emotional sincerity, she keeps returning to the mirror to alter her makeup, in preparation for a date. She can’t settle down knowing that she’ll never be half as beautiful or perfect as she wants herself to be in the eyes of others, so she gives up in the end; the silhouette of her back as she sits before the evening windows looks as melancholic as it’s nightmarish. But insofar as the film tries to seek any emotional truth in the women it claims to be giving voice to, that was about it.
The Substance tries sidestepping psychology by conceptual absurdism, because, you see, the characters aren’t meant to be human-like. But what the film perhaps doesn’t realise is just how psychological its concept of sexual insecurities and human frailties is. Without the psychological foundation, the concept, along with the characters, becomes just another plaything in the palm of the filmmaker. Elisabeth and Sue are both so emotionally distant and psychologically impalpable that you’re essentially relieved of your concern to identify with them as protagonists.
When Elisabeth messes up her lifestyle, you wonder when she is going to even think about seeking self-help. And when the excess gore comes in, you’re invited to laugh off your fears, as everything’s so unbelievable to begin with. But the film overindulges itself, outstays its welcome and drags the blood fest on and on to a tiresome finish, even though the way the device — a blood-gushing female John Merrick — is used doesn’t merit the film dragging it out into a long sequence; imagine Carrie White’s revenge taking up all night.
Fargeat has a way of working up our senses, but she can’t touch our hearts. She’s fallen into the same trap that countless other conceptual filmmakers have: all allegory, with no human face. The premise is inventive enough to warrant curiosity alone, but the pillars are not here. You want to connect with the character’s desire to be desired and loved, to no avail. When David Cronenberg tried to comment on the lovelessness of the post-industrial age with Crash (1996), he did it by making his film the very thing he critiqued: humdrum, anaemic, superficial. It was a bona fide piece of pornography for the physically dysfunctional: a metaphor for a Stockholm-Syndrome-esque desire for self-destructive, unsafe sex. Violence and intercourse become the same, as in a car crash.
But Cronenberg doesn’t do anything with the transgressive pathology he portrays, so the commentary never materialises. And there isn’t a story — everything’s in the service of the pornographic set pieces. If it was saying anything, it’s that car culture trivialises the risks of driving, like how porn does for the safety of sex, or how pop culture does for crime and violence. The passions involved aren’t organic, but objectified and mechanical; when the people on screen commit adultery, their witnesses, including their usual partners, react passively and impassively. It works better without a broader message, since if there was any intended, it’s executed tastelessly.
It’s the same syndrome plaguing Fargeat’s films. The film’s message, so far as I can tell, is as follows: the two selves in this film are parallel for many of us who have a figment of our image that’s better, more attractive, and more competent. It’s meant to tap into the Schopenhauerian divide — that when we sink ever deeper into the fantasy we’ve created for ourselves, and the more conscious we are of the gap between that fantasy and the reality, we’ve come to develop a self-hatred, for we cannot reconcile the two. Fantasy is based on reality, but the harsh reality will always stay with or without the fantasy. If one deludes themselves into embracing the fantasy alone, they cease to live like the rest of us.
Why that concept doesn’t work here is not because it’s an invalid one. It’s a running joke that Hollywood people are constantly high on cocaine, and women are a major bloc of the users. Cases of suicide and overdose aren’t at all rare — from Judy Garland to Whitney Houston. But should their psychological torment and self-dehumanization be any surprise if the very industry you work for demands only that you look sexy until you’re out of use? In The Substance, however, there’s such a shortage of that “reality” of abuse, and that Elizabeth’s life and emotions are so empty it barely resembles the life of a human, that the intended juxtaposition doesn’t come out. We don’t get the sense of that Schopenhauerian gap. It doesn’t help, either, that the showrunner and his investors were presented in such an over-the-top parodic manner; their reductive nature, though funny, undercuts anything substantive the film has to say about the industry. If the film intended to suggest that society’s artificial beauty standards oppress women’s nature or innate personality and push them into dressing themselves into plastic dolls for men’s pleasures, we’re not shown the nature that was supposed to have been oppressed to get it.
In Reality+ (2014) and Revenge (2017), as here, Fargeat’s characters are all caricatures, but comedy doesn’t come naturally to her. It may be more forgivable in a more contained setting like a short, as in Reality+. There, she needn’t have developed her characters because it was more of a testing ground for her concept in The Substance. But with a runtime well over two hours, there’s no worse excuse than “it’s not that type of film.” For all too many shots, the movie points to an object or an image for us to be inspired with awe: look, another metaphor!
See, there’s another side to the coin of film as a psychological defence. When you deal with negative attitudes and emotions, particularly concerning yourself, it doesn’t do to draw up a paper and list your grievances about how the world has wronged you and how you deserve better, or crack up your face in the mirror and picture yourself in the image of the Elephant Man. Very often in horror, filmmakers project their problems onto the material, and then leave them there. What Coralie Fargeat and Demi Moore had done with The Substance may be reaction formation, or it may be relief humour ad absurdum: carrying their fears to the extremes, whatever monstrosity that comes out at the end will be too grotesque to be feared seriously, so they’re easy to be laughed off more confidently.
But their fears don’t go away, because all they did was put on a mask full of smirk. It may be what you end up as when you gaze for too long into the abyss. One can be so obsessed with their insecurities that they can’t think out of them, or use their obsession to explore them. By showing us a culture of utter emptiness, The Substance has become the very embodiment of that emptiness. It’s characterised by the same vapidity which it satirizes. And by mocking its characters, the filmmakers were really mocking themselves. Term it whatever you like (“feminist”, “audacious”, “inventive”), but all we have really is the confirmation of our fears, with the vague, buffoonish Capra-esque message: it could be worse, so be appreciative.
UK • FRANCE | 2024 | 141 MINUTES | 2.39:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH
Cast & Crew
writer & director: Coralie Fargeat.
starring: Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, Dennis Quaid, Gore Abrams, Hugo Diego Garcia, Phillip Schurer & Joseph Balderrama.
Originally published at https://www.framerated.co.uk on September 28, 2024. All copyrighted images are used according to the Fair Use doctrine in US & UK law.
