By Jake Wilson
THE SUBSTANCE ★★★½
(R) 141 minutes
“Death to subtlety” appears to be the motto of Coralie Fargeat, the French writer-director of The Substance, an audaciously morbid satire on Hollywood, the beauty industry, and the dream of eternal youth. There are drawbacks to this approach, but it does ensure the images stick in your mind: a chrome orange corridor out of a Hanna-Barbera version of The Shining, or Dennis Quaid as a good ol’ boy TV executive leering into the camera, misogyny oozing from his pores.
Demi Moore as Elisabeth Sparkle, a TV exercise show presenter deemed past it by her station boss (Dennis Quaid), in The Substance.Credit: Madman
The “body horror” aspect of The Substance takes a while to kick in. But from the outset, techniques such as wide-angle lenses and extreme close-ups are used to distort and fragment everything we see, perhaps reflecting how the heroine, Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), views her body as well as the grotesque system she’s part of.
For decades, Elisabeth has been the alluring yet wholesome host of a breakfast aerobics show, a role presented as the height of mega-stardom (the film is set in Los Angeles but was shot in Paris, and Fargeat’s idea of the US entertainment industry remains abstract). When her overseers insist she’s finally reached her use-by date, Elisabeth strikes a Faustian bargain with the mysterious purveyors of a new miracle drug, letting her transfer her consciousness into a glamorously youthful alter ego named Sue (Margaret Qualley).
Of course, there’s a catch: much as Cinderella had to leave the ball at midnight, Sue has to revert to being Elisabeth one week in every fortnight or pay a terrible price. It’s a fanciful concept represented in gruesomely physical terms, allowing Fargeat to go to town with “practical effects” while testing the resources of her stars: many scenes play out without dialogue, especially when Elisabeth has to transform into Sue or vice versa.
Margaret Qualley becomes a younger version of Demi Moore in The Substance.
This is an excessive film but also a pared-back one, moving down a single narrative path for well over two hours while leaving little room for doubt about where the story is headed (besides Faust and Cinderella, significant precursors include Sunset Boulevard, the Rock Hudson vehicle Seconds, and a couple of stories by Edgar Allan Poe).
Yet for all the bluntness, there’s more than one way to understand the moral. The Substance is undoubtedly meant as a protest against society’s practice of throwing older women on the scrapheap – but it can also be taken as a parable about addiction, or a vision of the innate horror of the ageing process, or even a warning about what can happen if you refuse to accept your time is up.
Equally, there’s a hall-of-mirrors side to the film, as if the actors had been hired to comment on their own pre-existing star images rather than to portray full-fledged characters with inner lives. When Qualley is stretching and twirling for the TV cameras, is she parodying a stock idea of sexiness or going through the same motions for real? Aside from what we might project onto her, is there a difference? In The Substance, the surface is what counts.
The Substance is released in cinemas on September 19.
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