Melissa Anderson
Coralie Fargeat’s new body-horror film starring Demi Moore is short on hits, long on misses . . . and focused on bobbing butts.
Demi Moore as Elisabeth Sparkle in The Substance. Courtesy Cinetic Media.
The Substance, written and directed by Coralie Fargeat,
opens in theaters September 20, 2024
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Among the most piercing aperçus in a book full of them is this sentence from Hilton Als’s 2013 essay collection, White Girls: “She was as conscious of her body as she was fearful of it; in short, she was a woman.” That fear—that hatred—of the corporeal self so particular to women reflects, in large part, the terror and rage of being reduced to nothing but a body, one subjected to countless harms by millennia of misogynist fiats. Heightening the lucidity of Als’s observation is its equable tone. In contrast to that calmness, a string of recent high-profile productions, made for screens big and small and all falling within the body-horror genre, attempt to dramatize his insight as clamorously as possible. Alexia, for instance, the serial-killer protagonist of Julia Ducournau’s Titane, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2021, undergoes extravagant physical transformation, not least by becoming pregnant via sexual congress with a car. Last year brought us both the gender-swapped, Rachel Weisz–headlining Dead Ringers, a blood-soaked limited series for Prime Video that didactically demonstrates the infernal history of gynecology, and Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things, a Frankenstein-inspired tale in which the insatiable carnal needs of the stitched-together heroine—played by Emma Stone, who won the Oscar for Best Actress for her performance—are upheld as proof of her unimpeachable, virtuous sex positivity. (Coincidentally, all three have been crisply demolished in 4Columns.) The latest entry in this ignominious canon is Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, another Cannes prizewinner, for Best Screenplay. It is by far the most inane, repetitive, and benumbing of this cluster, so much so that its predecessors seem like Jeanne Dielman in comparison.
The premise, which is also the lone idea, of The Substance, the French filmmaker’s second feature (following 2017’s Revenge), could fit on a grain of rice. Fearing complete obsolescence, a middle-aged, once-feted actress, Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), begins injecting herself with a black-market elixir that allows her to become a “better,” younger version of herself. This springtime state lasts strictly for seven days, after which the fading star reverts back to her over-the-hill misery for another week; the on-off sequence repeats. Complications—and set pieces flagrantly cribbed from immensely superior movies—arise when Sue (Margaret Qualley), Elisabeth’s twentysomething avatar, drunk with fame and adulation, begins to disregard the inviolable deadline. The longer Sue extends her stay, the more decrepit Elisabeth becomes.
Margaret Qualley as Sue in The Substance. Courtesy Cinetic Media.
Taking strident, impotent aim at the pitilessness of Hollywood, the boorishness of male entertainment machers, impossible beauty standards, and female self-hatred, The Substance is an orchard of worm-filled, low-hanging fruit. Fargeat’s attempts at savage satire are undermined by her oddly generic, anachronistic vision of celebrity and the Dream Factory itself. After an opening montage of the physical decay and desecration—cracks, a dropped ketchup-slathered burger—of Elisabeth’s star on the Walk of Fame, we are introduced to the past-her-prime performer taping a TV exercise show given the Pynchonian name Sparkle Your Life with Elisabeth. This segment inescapably summons Jane Fonda’s workout tapes, a phenomenal success . . . of the 1980s (and merely one cycle in Fonda’s long career, not its terminus). Even though Sue is an ascendant supernova and thus a logical candidate to headline, say, a hotly anticipated film or prestige streaming series, she too hosts a television aerobics program with a lusterless title: Pump It Up with Sue. (The antecedent of “It”: Sue’s taut butt, endlessly filmed bobbing in extreme close-up.) Bewilderingly, as a sign of her A-lister status, Sue is asked by the vulgar network head, Harvey (Dennis Quaid)—his villainous name typical of the film’s thudding obviousness—to host The New Year’s Eve Show, the kind of ancient variety spectacular hospitable to has-beens.
Margaret Qualley as Sue in The Substance. Courtesy Cinetic Media.
This nonsensical framework typifies Fargeat’s inability to skewer the cultural ills that so aggravate her. In lieu of precisely parodying her targets, she relies instead on superfluous repetition, leading to The Substance’s distended 140-minute running time. Any incident meant to stoke our dudgeon, its “cruelty” immediately apparent, must be shown at least twice, as with a card affixed to a bouquet of consolation roses given to Elisabeth after the network sacks her. The note, amply lingered on and filling a large part of the screen, reads: “Thank you for all the years with us. You were amazing!” Worried that the audience may not understand the significance of the past tense, Fargeat found it necessary to include, a few seconds later, a tight close-up on “were.” Incessantly we hear, thanks to Elisabeth’s calls to Substance HQ to complain whenever Sue has exceeded her time limit, this bit of Goop-derived philosophy: “Remember there is no ‘she’ and ‘you.’ You are one. Respect the balance.”
Demi Moore as Elisabeth Sparkle in The Substance. Courtesy Cinetic Media.
The Solomonic directive invariably ignored, we must endure the wearying repetition of the Elisabeth-to-Sue-and-back-again metamorphosis, each with more dire consequences for the former. The first instance of this transformation demonstrates, if only fleetingly, some striking visual power, a keen sense of the physical and psychic violence wrought by outlandish youth-restoring techniques: as naked Elisabeth writhes on her blindingly white bathroom floor, Sue emerges from her dorsally, via the older woman’s split spinal column. But Fargeat quickly blunts the force of this scene by larding it with a gratuitous reference to the “Stargate” sequence in 2001.
Margaret Qualley as Sue and Demi Moore as Elisabeth Sparkle in The Substance. Courtesy Cinetic Media.
That is not the only Stanley Kubrick film quoted. The Shining is copiously cited, as is Brian De Palma’s Carrie, at least three movies by David Lynch, and essentially the entire corpus of David Cronenberg. (Even the score of Hitchcock’s Vertigo is repurposed.) As with all epigones, Fargeat succeeds in replicating only the superficial aspects of what she’s referencing—the geysers of blood and mass destruction unleashed by Sissy Spacek’s telekinetic teen during the climax of Carrie, for example—while evincing no capacity to imbue these special effects with any original meaning. The incarnadine mayhem in De Palma’s movie indelibly captures the fathomless ire of its tormented heroine, if not all female adolescents. The sluices of gore that inundate the final act of The Substance, on the other hand, make us conscious not of Elisabeth’s body but of our own, and its most urgent need—to flee this movie, which evaporates from the mind instantly.
Melissa Anderson is the film editor of 4Columns and the author of a monograph on David Lynch’s Inland Empire from Fireflies Press.