The Substance is the newest film directed and written by Coralie Fargeat (Revenge, Reality+).
The film stars Demi Moore (A
Few Good Men, Indecent Proposal, the television series Empire) in the lead role as Elisabeth Sparkle, Margeret Qualley (Death Stranding, Poor Things, Kinds Of Kindness) as Sue, and Dennis Quaid (Footloose, Regan, The Parent Trap) as Harvey.
The film is a bit of a fable, and an unofficial spiritual successor to the excellent Brian Thomas Jones film The Rejuvenator (also recommended, but not prerequisite viewing), and tells the story of a 50-year old fitness content star named Elisabeth Sparkle who is nearing the end of her career. She takes drastic measures to extend said career by injecting a mysterious substance that promises to be a fountain of youth.
The titular Substance is a concoction that literally creates a younger, better clone of the user, in this story played by Margeret Qualley, with some caveats and strict rules.
Of course, those caveats and rules aren’t strictly adhered to in this film, and the resulting complications are incredibly entertaining to watch, albeit very, VERY gross.
Without going into spoilers, I can say with full confidence that this is one of the grossest films I’ve seen in YEARS. A true gem in the body horror subgenre of horror, and definitely worthy of being mentioned in the same conversations as classic films in the genre like Videodrome, Basket Case, From Beyond, Possessor, and even John Carpenter’s The Thing.
This film is really good at putting the viewer into situations where we can experience what the main characters do. Cinematographer Benjamin Kracun (Beast, Promising Young Woman) uses (non-anamorphic, for SHAME! LOL) wide angle and macro lenses to great effect, almost turning the film into found footage horror for a few beats. The way he uses incredibly short focal lengths to exaggerate features and paint very specific thematic narratives around certain characters is done rather well. A very good example of this is in the very beginning of the film during a meeting between Elisabeth and Harvey in a restaurant where Harvey is eating shrimp. The camera lingers and focuses on Harvey’s mouth, fingers, and the shrimp themselves, painting an incredibly vivid picture of a person who is uncaring, oafish, and borderline porcine in the way he presents himself.
I’m pretty sure I’m not going to eat any shrimp any time soon after watching that sequence…
And to further compliment these intentional visual choices is some INCREDIBLE sound design! The way things SOUND makes them seem far more vile and disgusting than they are in reality, the aforementioned lunch scene being a great example. Every crunch, chew, bite, rip, and tear is amplified to very uncomfortable degrees. It’s EXPERTLY done.
Most of the film does this, especially when the yucky stuff happens. Body transformations are shown in graphic detail with macro and wide lenses, accompanied by the sounds you would imagine someone literally ripping themselves from inside your body would make. It’s very, very effective at conveying a sense of disgust. Bodies make noises when they change, ambient sounds are distorted at key points in the story-things sound off, but on purpose.
What’s really interesting in all this is that even through all that really gross, nasty body horror, there’s a TON of beauty juxtaposed. Bodies not only move in gross and disgusting ways in spots, but also in really nice, beautifully shot, composed, and well framed ways. There’s a sequence towards the end of the second act that looks like a really good music video, for example, and while being very beautiful (both in terms of framing, composition, lighting, etc. AND the actors involved) also highlights the sexist and somewhat lecherous nature of the type of content Elisabeth/Sue create. It’s really well shot and when placed in context of the rest of the film prior to that scene, very depressing and almost horrifying.
This film is basically a scathing treatise on the way Hollywood eats up youth and beauty, then spits out depression, deplorability, and despair. Watching Elisabeth fall from grace in the way she does is very sad and depressing, particularly in the ending. And I personally think that having Dennis Quaid’s lecherous, uncaring exec be named Harvey wasn’t an accident…
This film was extremely entertaining, but I don’t think it will resonate with everyone.
First of all, it’s really gross. Like, “you might not want to eat while watching this” gross. This reviewer is a diehard, decades-long horror fan with a broken soul, so it didn’t gross me out all that much. But other people who aren’t as strong willed or as desensitized to body horror as I am will DEFINITELY struggle with watching some of the more intense body horror parts.
The practical effects on display here are top notch. At no point during this film did I wish there was more CG or felt like what I was watching wasn’t real in-story. SFX makeup artist Olivier Afonso and rest of the team that worked on this did an amazing job in turning the always stunning Demi Moore into something WILDLY different from her normal, pulchritudinous appearance. I don’t want to spoil anything, but what she becomes really reminded me of some of the stuff Rob Bottin did with The Thing!
One other thing that may not resonate with everyone is the fact that this film is kind of a fable, almost a fairy tale. It’s not set in a real place, and people don’t act like you would expect them to in the real world. It’s a clearly stylized version of reality, particularly Los Angeles. This doesn’t really become apparent until closer to the end of the film (at least for me), particularly during one sequence that is VERY reminiscent of a signature scene from the horror classic Carrie. It was clear to me by the the end of this film that it’s totally a fable. If you’re expecting a by-the-book, standard type of story, this ain’t it, at least not fully.
All in all, this is definitely well worth a watch. A somewhat powerful, rather sad, and kind of depressing cautionary fable about the potential dangers of chasing youth in order to fit into a system of misogyny, set in a body horror film that apes some of the best work of Cronenberg, Henenlotter, Aronofsky, and Carpenter. Oh, and Demi Moore and Margeret Qualley are fully naked for a lot of this film. Which ironically, serves to drive the point of this film home even more on a meta level-here we are ogling Demi’s and Margeret’s fully naked bodies (full frontal female nudity and everything) during a tale about the dangers of vanity, sexism, envy, and jealousy…
Rather brilliant, if you ask me.
