The Substance (UK- France, 2024). A Working Title Films/A Good Story/Blacksmith Films Co-Production. Written and directed by Coralie Fargeat. Cinematography by Benjamin Kracun. Production Design by Gladys Garot, Stanislas Reydellet. Costume Design by Emmanuelle Youchnovski. Music by Raffertie. Special Makeup Effects Artists: Pierre Olivier Persin, Olivier Alfonso, Frédéric Balmer, Marison De, Sandrine Denis, Brian Kinney.
I initially thought about writing a Korean-language review for this film, which I obviously liked a lot despite some misgivings (discussed below), but I decided to start with an English-language one.
The French director Coralie Fargeat scored big with her sophomore picture Revenge (2017), an outrageously harrowing tale of a rape survivor turning the tables on the perpetrators. It was almost tailor-made to court controversy, utterly unafraid of the potential accusations of exploiting female sexuality as well as of overt misandry from both self-appointed custodians of “correct” feminism and misogynistic male viewers. Talk about a “divisive” movie that can make strange bedfellows out of the sworn enemies! The Substance, the winner of the best screenplay award at the 77th Cannes Film Festival, has received a similar type of response, allegedly triggering walkouts during the screenings.
Make no mistake, this is a full-blown body horror film: geysers of blood are showered on dozens of its cast in one hilariously overdone scene and it is not shy to display horrifying prosthetic SFX makeup on its principals, the kind of what-have-I-just-seen body transformations so extreme that in most other movies, such as Troma’s Toxic Avenger series or a Frank Henenlotter film, they would only work as sick jokes. The great thing about Fargeat’s opus is that all these excesses are presented with neither a shock-jock (at heart masculinist) comic glee nor an intellectualized, winking irony.
Despite infusing dollops of truly funny dark humor into the film— the best bit being the hideously deformed Elisabeth (Demi Moore) shouting down her lecherous neighbor (Gore Abrams)— she is quite sincere about the organic, corporeal ways in which she unfurls the film’s horrific premise. Fargeat does not shy away from slathering the big screen with gigantic close-ups of not only Margaret Qualley’s porcelain-skinned derrières but also a hypodermic needle stabbing an arm and a purple-grey wound leaking puss.
It is also one of those horror films from female helmers— there are quite a few of them receiving global attention at this point, including Jennifer Kent (Babadook), Natalie Erika James (The Relic, Apartment 7A), Arkasha Stevenson (The First Omen), Michelle Garza Cerbera (Huesera: The Bone Woman) and Rose Glass (Saint Maud, Love Lies Bleeding)— unafraid to skirt the boundaries of tasteless exploitation and yet never losing sight of the female subjectivity. The film is ruthlessly efficient in purging it of superfluous exposition or contextual description. For instance, we never find out the “motivation” or corporate pitch behind the Substance that allows Elisabeth Sparkle to transform into her “idealized” self, Sue: we are not even sure if there is a corporation behind it, or whether this is some kind of an alien social experiment. What we get instead is a sequence that explains how the transformation process works in BIG block letters that a four-year-old could comprehend.
The “LA” Elisabeth’s inhabits is manifestly not a real location but a spot in an ultra-stylized, I am almost tempted to say, fairy tale universe (Fargeat apparently filmed all exteriors in France). You cannot also find many other recent movies in which male chauvinistic behavior is so openly and grotesquely displayed, summarized in a shot in which the unsubtly-named TV executive Harvey (Dennis Quaid) lights a cigarette and his puckered lips are filmed to exactly look like, well, another human organ at the opposite end of the body (in equal measure cringe-inducing and funny as hell).
And yet, as Alexandra Heller-Nicholas points out in one of the more thoughtful defenses of the film, The Substance is so viscerally honest about the aging female body that it almost becomes a documentary in this regard. At heart of the film’s power lies the two bold performances by Moore and Qualley. Moore’s sheer level of commitment to her role is frankly jaw-dropping and itself provides, meta-textually speaking, a powerful critique of the view that the film objectifies woman’s body. At 61 at the time of filming, Moore is still extremely beautiful, but she is unafraid not only to expose her vulnerably naked body to the clinical scrutiny of the camera but also to envelope herself in a series of increasingly hideous prosthetic makeup that leave little to imagination in terms of a “deteriorating and mutating female body.” Is it just me or she appears almost liberated playing these progressively grotesque versions of herself, all with their physical hindrances (hunchbacked, huge knots of swellings on her fingers, etc.)? Qualley’s surreally gorgeous body, again in full display in its nakedness, was apparently prosthetically enhanced but she is also good in projecting joyful callousness that suggests a mind gripped by substance addiction.
Ma Rong, my graduate student, pointed out that the Elisabeth-Sue relationship, in its graphic and sometimes unexpectedly touching details, reminds her of one between an ailing, deteriorating mother and the daughter who must care for the former (this is actually the pretext Sue uses to have regular seven-day reprieves from her new job as the hot star of a TV fitness show). The contests of wills, recriminations, deceptions and eventually (literally) mutually destructive behaviors between Elisabeth and Sue are squarely based on the fact that they share the same identity. In a mother-daughter relationship, the same gender between them could create a sense of identification in which the kind of qualities the mother rejects or hates in herself could also be projected onto the daughter. We see a similar dynamic played out between Elisabeth and Sue. As I was watching the film, I kept wondering why they both treat the other self with such lack of compassion or acceptance: after all they are the same person. And yet, this is probably more “realistic” among the human relationships than I would care to admit. (I also agree with Ma's view that The Substance is more "hyperrealistic" than documentary-realistic if we were to most appropriately characterize Fargeat's approach)
For me, the film’s power was somewhat marred by its completely over-the-top climax, although I do not believe it deviates from its thematic focus and just becomes a “horror movie” even at this juncture. Since it is made in a punch-you-in-the-face sensory-assault style and with a laser-sharp focus on bodily manifestations, the parade of mutated organs and mismatched body parts in the last quarter feels in sync with the rest of the picture. And as I have mentioned, none of this is presented in a wink-wink, we-are-going-to-gross-you-out “self-aware” manner. Even the very ending of the movie, outrageous as it is, tied to the imaginative Sam Raimi-like opening sequence involving Elisabeth’s Hollywood Star of Fame, is resolutely focused on the latter’s subjectivity, so it never feels gratuitous or condescending.
Still, the aforementioned geysers of blood go on for a tad too long, the mutated body makeup has one too many gross details like a flesh-embedded, half-formed denture or a jutting hand: it is a bit overwhelming. Something grotesque, yes, but also less messy and more aesthetically consistent with the theme of the dual-split personality of the protagonist might have worked better.
To reiterate, The Substance is a great body horror film, but I would not hesitate to call it feminist, although certainly not in a usual way that gets a stamp of approval from the border police of the definition. It might be acutely uncomfortable to watch for both male and female viewers, but, like her previous work Revenge, it never goes the easier way of tidying up the narrative in a genre-mandated conventional way or teaching a moral “lesson” to its female protagonist. It is not exactly an uplifting drama of female empowerment, but in its almost ridiculously graphic depictions of the anxieties and societal expectations that all women face regarding their aging bodies, it is brutally honest and finally quite affecting, perhaps even touching.
A note: Alexandra Heller-Nicholas in the essay quoted above cites two Asian horror films, Helter Skelter from Japan and The Yoga Academy from South Korea, both interesting and illuminating examples, but one Asian horror film that in my view most closely covers the same thematic grounds and subject matter is the animated film Beauty Water. I have reviewed it in a previous entry to this blog space, so interested parties might want to check it out if you are not familiar with the movie.
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