‘The Substance’ movie review: A thrilling, psychotic scream of pure female rage
The less said about The Substance before it’s seen, the better. That’s not just because this is a film that greatly benefits from going in blind, with the trailer purposefully concealing the plot beyond flashing vignettes, but because, at every turn, it laughs in the face of the discourse it will no doubt foster.
In the trailer and all the promotional material, starring Demi Moore as a fading star and Margaret Qualley as her younger, hotter replacement, the message screamed, “This is a body horror film about ageing!” It’s made out to be a twisted flick about beauty and the societal horror of that beauty disappearing or losing value over time in a world where being youthful and gorgeous is still perceived as the best thing a woman can be.
Plenty of people will go into this film wanting a nuanced take on this argument or at least wanting Coralie Fargeat to defy it in a bold feminist way with an empowering message at the end. Those people will hate this movie. For the subsect of cinemagoers who feel the need to attach socio-political commentary to every little decision, The Substance will be weak.
It starts out as a story told time and time again as Moore’s character, Elizabeth Sparkle, finds her career ending as her network wants a younger replacement. From then on, as she discovers a new treatment that allows her to split in two and live seven days as herself and then seven days as Sue, her younger, ‘better’ self, the plot is largely predictable. It’s not reinventing the wheel when it comes to commentary on society’s perception of women’s worth.
Sometimes, it feels like the only thing left to do with dark feelings of low self-esteem or internalised self-hatred is to drown them out. There’s a reason why women make up the majority audience for things like true crime podcasts or films like Pearl, Promising Young Woman or Jennifer’s Body; it’s because sometimes a brutal film that feels somehow relieving through its violence is the only way to deal with it.
To Moore, this film is about “internalised violence of the self.” Rather than presenting that through another tired narrative that dwells on the sad fact of misogyny that perhaps none of us need, Fargeat instead presents a thrilling, psychotic, blood-curdling scream of pure female rage. It feels like the most fucked up yet satiating act of catharsis rather than being stuck in the emotional prison of societal and personal pressures before The Substance explodes into an overwhelmingly gory camp attack.
Camp is a perfect word for it. Everything in the film is deliberately exaggerated, as if Fargeat’s only mission is to create a two-hour sensory overload. Even before the carnage truly begins in the film’s wild third act, it’s already a body horror in every sense of the word.
Dennis Quaid’s character, especially, is subtly but utterly disgusting as the sound of his mouth moving is zoned in on and turned all the way up as he chops through a bowl of shrimp. The makeup is so brilliantly repulsive with such visceral bodily strangeness that all viewers can do is squirm and groan but then, inevitably, laugh.
The whole film is like the final straw before a person spirals into a total meltdown, with the craft of the movie expertly designed to push audiences there along with its characters. So when it all finally breaks apart in insane scenes akin to the Carrie prom sequence and even a stunning nod to Kubrick’s famed elevator scene from The Shining, viewers are so overloaded that all they can do is surrender to the sheer ridiculousness.
Surrender is the only way. For people who can’t or won’t do that and will instead spend the whole time trying to analyse what Fargeat is trying to say rather than do, they’ll hate it. For those willing to steel their stomach and give into the twisted world of The Substance, it’s an astonishing film that won’t be forgotten.
