The Substance had its UK première at the Edinburgh International Film Festival 2024, 20 Aug
The Substance opens with a diptych of prologues, showing, in reverse order, a terminal condition and its tentative, experimental cure. The first image is a top-down shot of a chicken’s egg out of its shell on a pale blue surface. Injected with a greenish liquid, the egg’s yolk suddenly opens at the side birthing a second yolk, which now lies beside it. The second prologue, also shot top down, shows workmen on the Hollywood Walk of Fame filling an empty square between tiles with a new star for Elisabeth Sprinkle (Demi Moore) – and then, without the camera moving, we see in cruel time lapse the depicted star attracting fans, then slowly getting ignored and cracking in the weather. As she now passes 50, one-time Academy Award-winning actress Elisabeth knows that her star has truly faded, and she is even about to be fired by her shallow boss Harvey (Dennis Quaid) from the washed out workout show for morning television which bears her name, and for which she is poster ‘girl’. So when she hears about The Substance, a mysterious new treatment regime that promises to put her in touch with her better, younger self, the Hollywood has-been leaps at the chance to rejuvenate her career and to renew her life.
Once Elisabeth has picked up her customised starter pack from a locker in a dodgy back-alley storeroom, she will give birth to a fresher version of herself, ‘Sue’ (Margaret Qualley), who will soon win back the revamped job that Elisabeth has just lost, and immediately bring in a newer, younger audience. The problem is that there are rules that come with The Substance: Elisabeth and Sue must maintain balance in their shared life by strictly alternating week by week between being awake or dormant; and any minor deviation from this time-share arrangement can have irreversible consequences. Inevitably rules are broken, as Sue seeks to extend her own schedule of working and partying at the expense of Elisabeth’s waking time and physical integrity. The result is a mess of body horror and self-vampirism, as Elisabeth finds herself becoming the closeted, deteriorating picture of Dorian Gray to her more youthful, more appealing counterpart – and in any attempt to regain the upper hand, Elisabeth is only fighting herself.
Aside from high-angle shots, writer/director Coralie Fargeat likes to film her actors in tight close-ups, with figure-hugging and skin-skirting shots (courtesy of DP Benjamin Kračun) that show off Sue’s sexed-up youth to her best advantage while subjecting Elisabeth to altogether less flattering, more unforgiving scrutiny – even as Harvey’s utter grotesquery (wait till you see the way he eats cocktail prawns) barely matters because of his different sex. Here we see writ large the impossible standards of beauty to which society holds women and to which women hold themselves and each other, not to mention the double standards enjoyed by men.
For in a film focussed precisely on appearances and perception, and on images and reflections, once again, as with her feature debut Revenge (2017), Fargeat engages in cinéma du look, deploying a hyperreal style to suggest a world of fable. Indeed The Substance is an allegory – a hyperbolic cautionary tale dramatising our conflicted feelings about the body, beauty and ageing. Here, as every sign of imperfection is covered over and hidden away, conversely every shimmering surface will eventually be messed up, smashed and bespattered with meaty gore, and every image of Elisabeth/Sue will be iconoclastically defaced.
Secondarily, The Substance dramatises, with remarkable honesty, the toll of parenthood. For after she has birthed Sue (a reproductive process shown in ickily graphic detail), mother/’matrix’ Elisabeth finds herself resentfully having to sacrifices her time, and her very life, to this ungrateful, parasitic daughter from the next generation who selfishly takes and takes and takes some more, and has no intention of ever giving anything in return. Meanwhile Elisabeth is jealous of the youth that was once her own, and that Sue has now inherited from her. The essential inequality in this mother/daughter relationship, with Elisabeth always coming out the worse in their time-sharing arrangement, reflects something intrinsic to the nature of child-rearing.
In the television studio where first Elisabeth and then Sue works, the alarmingly off colour-coding of the corridor and bathroom (all reds, whites and infernal oranges), and even the patterning on the carpet, immediately evoke Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980). Although the setting is Los Angeles rather than the Colorado Rockies, in a sense this film plays out like an extended exploration of Kubrick’s Room 237 sequence, where a beautiful woman emerges from a bath only to transform before the mirror into a hideous, sagging, wasting manifestation of female mortality. The difference is that it is not a hot-blooded, horny Jack Torrance who is horrified by the transformation (though studio exec Harvey will eventually respond as expected), but rather the woman herself, reflecting with self-loathing upon her own rebelling biology and addled body clock. There will also, in the end, be an allusion to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), as Richard Strauss’ Also sprach Zarathustra bursts out on the soundtrack at a point where a moment of human evolution (or at least of monstrous mutation) is revealed as spectacle – but Fargeat’s heart, we suspect, burns stronger for horror than sci-fi.
Showing its characters at both their ugliest and their most superficial, The Substance is a baroque, expressionist, indeed maximalist work that few would accuse of subtlety, but it nonetheless brings some of the substance promised by its title with a grossly cynical take on the beauty myth that will prove a trap equally for Elisabeth and Sue together. This is part David Cronenberg’s Rabid (1977) and the Soska twins’ remake (2019), part Norbert Keil’s Replace (2017), part Justin Best’s Sheryl (2023) and all Tinseltown satire, with its focus on the female body engendering ever more bloody revelations of what is hidden within. The gaze that it so perfectly captures, always looking past essential humanity as it tuts with judgmental disappointment and disapproval at the embodied cracks and flaws it seeks to discern, is of course also our own, so that the film is ultimately projecting an unsightly image not just of its players, but of the viewer. We are all in this picture, and it is not as pretty as it first seems.
strap: Coralie Fargeat’s outrageous Tinseltown satire casts an unforgiving gaze over the beauty myth, engendering grotesque body horror
© Anton Bitel
