Review: The Substance (2024)

The Substance (2024)

Rated R for strong bloody violent content, gore, graphic nudity and language

Score: 5 out of 5

Between this and her prior film Revenge, I'm convinced of two things about writer/director Coralie Fargeat. First, she is a mad genius and one of the most underrated horror filmmakers working today, somebody who isn't on more horror fans' radars only because it took her seven years to make her next feature film. Second, she really, really likes taking beauty standards, especially but not exclusively female ones, and subverting and deconstructing them into oblivion. Her 2014 short film Reality+ was a sci-fi Cinderella parable set in a world where, for twelve hours a day, people can use an AR chip to look like their idealized selves. In Revenge, she took a woman who she spent the first act framing as a bimbo and a sex object and transformed her into an action hero, in the process stripping her of most of her obvious sexuality even as she literally stripped her of most of her clothes.

With The Substance, meanwhile, her camera spends a long time lingering on idealized female forms that are either nude or clad in very slinky and revealing outfits, only to then subject those beautiful women to body horror straight out of a David Cronenberg film, the result of its heroine's pursuit of the impossible beauty standards that Hollywood sets for women blowing up in her face in dramatic fashion. It's a story that treads the line between horror and farce, but one whose unreality ultimately hits home at the end even as someone who can't say he's been confronted with anything close to what this film's protagonist was going through. What's more, Fargeat is a hell of a stylist, as befitting a filmmaker whose writing so often contain the themes that it does. This movie is filled with rich visual flair of a sort that Hollywood seems to have largely forgotten how to pull off in the last ten years (leave it to a French woman to bring it back), anchored by two great performances from Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley, a killer electronic score by Raffertie, and special effects that turn more and more grisly and grotesque as the film goes on. As both a satire of the beauty industry (especially in the age of weight loss drugs like Ozempic) and a mean-spirited, pull-no-punches horror film, this movie kicked my ass, its 141-minute runtime rushing right by as I hung on for the ride.

Our protagonist Elisabeth Sparkle is a former Oscar-winning actress turned celebrity aerobics instructor who's just turned 50 and received one hell of a birthday gift: finding out that she's gonna be fired from her show in favor of a younger, prettier model. Fortunately, a chance encounter at the hospital after a car accident leads her to discover a revolutionary, black-market beauty program called the Substance. For a week at a time, she can jump into the body of an idealized version of herself, under the condition that she then spends a week in her old body in order to recharge. Elisabeth embraces the opportunity and, under the identity of "Sue", her younger and sexier alter ego, promptly reclaims the stardom she used to have, including her old show. Being Sue, however, proves so enticing to Elisabeth that she starts to fudge the rules in order to extend her time in Sue's body past what is allowed, which starts to have negative effects on not just her body but also her psyche.

The first thing that came to mind as I left the theater was The Picture of Dorian Gray, the classic 1890 gothic horror novel by Oscar Wilde about an immortal man who has a portrait of himself locked away in his closet that slowly ages in his place. While the comparison isn't one-to-one, the allusions are obvious, not just in how Sue's malignant influence on Elisabeth manifests in the form of Elisabeth's body starting to visibly age and decay (first her fingers, then her leg, and on from there) but also in how one of the main themes running through the story is satire of the idea that beauty is the measure of one's goodness. If this film had a single defining line of dialogue, it would be "you are one," the message/warning that the mysterious figure who sells Elisabeth the Substance tells her repeatedly in their phone conversations and in the instructions she receives with it. Elisabeth ignores this and comes to imagine herself and Sue as two separate people, but these words haunt both her and the viewer throughout the film. Elisabeth and Sue being one and the same makes the contrast between Elisabeth's late-period career struggles and Sue's rocketship to stardom that much more stark. The only difference between them is that Sue looks to be half Elisabeth's age, and yet here she is proving that she still has what it takes to be a star. Elisabeth may still be a very beautiful woman, but according to Hollywood, being 50 years old makes her pretty much geriatric to the point that she may as well be a completely different person from who she used to be. No wonder, then, that Elisabeth wants to make the most of her time as Sue, to the point that she's willing to spend longer than her allotted week at a time in Sue's body because she no longer values her "inferior" old self, which turns into a self-fulfilling prophecy as doing so causes that old body to undergo rapid aging.

And Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley, in turn, make the most of the dual role they share as the two faces of Elisabeth/Sue. Fargeat's camera loves Qualley, taking every opportunity to showcase her curves in almost fetishistic detail, while she also holds her own as the more free-spirited version of Elisabeth who lacks the inhibitions and insecurities brought about by the ageism she's experienced. Most of the movie, however, is Moore's show. She gets the big, flashy downward spiral over the course of the film, the same fetishistic camera turned on her naked body to show the viewer how she sees all her cellulite, wrinkles, and other imperfections that make an otherwise attractive woman feel that she's lost her youthful beauty, even before the actual body horror starts to kick in. Her interactions with her boss at the studio, played by Dennis Quaid in a small but highly memorable role as a sexist slob who's literally named Harvey just in case you didn't know who he was supposed to be based on, demonstrate how, even if she did find a way to feel good about herself and age gracefully, the shallow, image-obsessed business she's working in won't let her. Make no mistake, every awful thing that happens to Elisabeth over the course of the film is her fault, but she is no villain. She's an emotionally crippled mess plagued by self-doubt, her trajectory a decidedly tragic one as all of her mistakes slowly, then all at once, catch up to her.

Behind the camera, too, Fargeat turns in a larger-than-life experience where all the little breaks from reality wind up giving the film a hyper-real feeling. I had questions about how somebody with no medical training was able to figure out how to administer the Substance on her own with only minimalistic flash cards serving as instructions (something that, as a medical worker who had to go through training for that, I picked up on quickly), how hosting an aerobics program on television is presented as a pathway to stardom in 2024, or how the network's New Year's Eve special got away with showing a bevy of topless showgirls (though that could just be Fargeat being French). But even beyond the story, I was too wrapped up in this movie's visuals to care. This is a damn fine looking movie, Fargeat's style feeling heavily influenced by the likes of Tony Scott and Michael Bay but turning a lot of their fixations around into subversions of their aesthetic. The film's parade of hypersexualized female flesh is taken to the point where it starts to feel grotesque, the quick cutting and the pounding electronic score are used to create unease as we realize that something is deeply wrong under the surface, the entire film is embedded with a deep streak of black comedy, and by the time the grisly special effects kick in, I was primed for some fucked-up shit -- and ultimately was not disappointed. The last thirty minutes or so of this movie were a sick, wild blast of energy as Fargeat goes full Cronenberg, her vision of Hollywood that's rooted less in reality and more in its worst stereotypes (especially those of people who work in the industry) exploding into a vicious, no-holds-barred mess that was honestly the only way it could've ended.

The Bottom Line

The Substance sent me for a loop and did not pull its punches. I recommend it for anybody with a strong stomach interested in either a scathing satire of the beauty industry or just a good old-fashioned body horror flick. It's one of my favorite films of 2024, and I'm excited to see what Fargeat does next.