“The Substance”, a French (allegedly) satirical body-horror film with an American cast from director/writer/co-producer Coralie Fargeat wears its allegorical underpinnings overtly. So officious, and rampant, are its allegories I suspect audiences might leave it with myriad (and likely) conflicting ideas of its primary critique. Societal perceptions of beauty, ageing in a youth-obsessed world, womanhood in a misogynistic society, addiction and self-hatred all coalesce in a provocative film with a finale that offers a spectacular and gory finale.
Since its premiere at Cannes earlier this year, where it won the prize for Best Screenplay, Fargeat’s work has been lauded for its audaciousness. “The Substance” is a meeting of prestige cinema and B-movie sensibilities and in some ways reflects a shift in what kind of works are taken seriously. Its premise is intriguing as it traces the rapidly devolving self-worth of Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), a faded Hollywood star whose 50th birthday finds her unceremoniously ousted from her current position as an aerobics host on a network morning show.
There is fairy-tale quality to “The Substance” that renders it as a kind of bleaker, more adult, version of a Hans Christan Andersen fable: an ageing woman, either narcissistic or insecure, makes a deal with an unseen figure to split her being into two and retain her youth. The unseen figure insists on the specificity of the rules created. Any change in rules will bring harm. However, the ageing woman hates herself and her ageing body. So, naturally, her newer, younger self retains that same increasingly malevolent disgust at that ageing body and begins to resist the rules of the deal. Naturally, chaos and then tragedy ensues.
The substance of the title is a miracle drug of sorts which is suggested to Elisabeth early in the film by a minor character. It promises the allure of youth, offering Elisabeth a new lease on life in the form of cell regeneration. It will create a younger, more (ostensibly) beautiful self who can emerge from Elisabeth’s ageing body with the two sustaining each other through bodily fluids. In alternating week-long periods, each persona will have control of their body while the other lies in a catatonic state. This new persona, who names herself Sue (Margaret Qualley), soon replaces Elisabeth as the star on her morning aerobics show and what promised to be a new lease on life for Elisabeth turns to a cage for her growing isolation and dejection before things reach catastrophic heights of absurdity. The premise is rife with potential, but early on – with its garish sound-design, its brightly lit rooms, and its ultimate assault on the senses I found myself more dismayed than engaged at the casual cruelty of its point-of-view and the recurring sense that too much of “The Substance” is happy to lean on the broadest of metaphors while refusing to treat its world, or story, with care.
Good satire benefits from a surety in its refraction of the real world. It is a balancing act that carefully conveys to the audience who and what is being satirised through deconstruction but “The Substance”, at first thrilling in its broadness, begins to wear you down with its 141 minutes running time as it bludgeons the audience with many nods to things that are amiss in the world but with little interest in incisive assessment or engagement with it. The makers of the substance, heard on the phone but never seen, insistently remind Elisabeth and Sue that they are one. It’s a oneness that is often mired by a lack of follow through in the film which often struggles to devise a visual or thematic way to explicate that oneness. Elisabeth and Sue switch bodies often seeming to retain no memory of what the other has been doing, but it is unclear whether Fargeat intends for it to seem that way or whether this is a metaphor for the way substance abuse renders one’s memory as fallible. The dynamic leads to a question that the film seems only able to answer metaphorically. What keeps Elisabeth returning to her alter-ego when little seems to serve her in her own body well? The constant visual references to “The Shining” suggest a potential reading of addiction, but it’s this kind of flat metaphorising without robustness that intrigues, puzzles, and then dismays as Fargeat sets up a rickety set of plot-points in a film struggling to maintain a clear point-of-view. Troubling, it is at once critical and at times guilty of the beauty standards its characters are trapped in.
If “The Substance” is a critique of ageing, it finds itself stymied by a rising inability to distinguish a point-of-view for itself that exists outside of the characters. Early on, a homeless figure on the Hollywood walk-of-fame is a sign of degradation and the film continues along those lines, often seeming to flatten the nuances of its characters’ plight. In one of several sequences that show Elisabeth and Sue in similar situations, the camera moves across the bodies of Moore and Qualley looking at their naked selves in the mirror. Benjamin Kracun’s camera tightly moves across the length and breadth of each body and as beautiful as Moore is, it’s hard to escape the sense that the camera insists that Qualley’s younger, more supple body is the ideal. The film is all but shouting at us – Moore may look good, but she’s still not young.
At first the point-of-view seems to be Elisabeth’s, as if the film is confronting the sad way she has internalised the patriarchal standards of her world represented by her boss Harvey (Dennis Quaid) who is eager to push her out of the picture, and eager to leer at Sue. But, Fargeat has made a film that too often cannot and will not separate Elisabeth’s own self-hatred from the film’s point of view so that by the middle section when Sue’s refusal to follow the rules creates a series of body troubles for Elisabeth the camera seems to be making a spectacle of ageing. The camera gawks at every wrinkle, and every physical attribute that suggests so much that the thing the film seems most certain is true horror is an ageing body. It’s a primary reason I’ve struggled to align the rampant cruelty of its perspective with the director’s own words on the film’s satirical intentions. This offers yet another reminder of the importance of reading a work on its own rather than through the lens of intentions, but it also reveals a film that is too often operating within its own hetero-patriarchy, even as the shape of it suggests something more biting or subversive.
There’s no pathos or empathy here and as we watch Elisabeth’s life descend into what could be tragedy I find “The Substance” absent of emotional effect because of its flatness. Reading it as a fairy-tale is compelling but even the most hubristic characters in fairy-tales are intriguing for the ways that their wrong decisions are mired in a desperate humanity. “The Substance” is stultifying in the way it refuses any interiority to Elisabeth. Casting Demi Moore, a woman who has publicly struggled with beauty standards in Hollywood, is its sharpest hook and Moore is excellently digging into depths that the film needs. But the film loses air when she’s onscreen and as it amps up its plot, the refusal to offer this woman any interiority begins to detract from what might work. By the time its body-horror finale comes, it’s easy to give into the heightened absurdity of the gore but it’s hard not to feel dejected by squandered potential. It’s impossible to care about the characters, when even the filmmaker seems trapped between a malevolent and ambivalent gaze.
The Substance is available for rental on Prime Video
