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*This review contains minor spoilers.
Coralie Fargeat is a filmmaker who uses a lot of satire, surrealism and excess to tell her stories. In her first feature, Revenge (2017), she gained an adoring fan. With her follow-up, The Substance, she now has a devoted follower and lifelong ride-or-die. The Substance follows Elisabeth Sparkle (played by Demi Moore) who is a former Oscar-winner, and successful host of an aerobics morning show. However, Sparkle is fading out of Hollywood mostly due to her age and inability to keep up with our society's standards of female beauty. She learns of a "substance" that she can inject which will create a younger, better version of herself - essentially a clone but with all the expected societal beauty and age standards of today. Enter, Sue (played by Margaret Qualley) who is this younger, hotter version of Elisabeth. There are pretty strict rules that Sparkle must follow in order for the substance to work correctly - namely, the two halves must switch every 7 days - no exceptions. However, once Sue begins to toy with the idea of existing on her own, creating her own destiny so to speak - it wreaks havoc on Elisabeth and her new reality, of which some of these "side effects" are numbingly memorable for us as the movie audience - both extremely hard to watch and utterly fixating all at the same time.
Fargeat plays in a surrealistic world, which is comprised of both real-life grounded things and also other-worldly ridiculous things. For example, we never learn of the exact time period or setting for the film. It is heavily implied that it is Los Angeles around the 1980's, but then there will be an out-of-context production prop or costume that will make you question when or where you are. For example...snow in California? or topless showgirls during a network TV event? Hmmm... The movie is told through the lens of the male gaze, but in a way that is extremely exaggerated and often ridiculous, but I mean that as a compliment, seeing as it is literal, but also figurative and satirical all at once. The amount of close-ups of women's asses (mostly Sue's), for example, is clearly a choice made by Fargeat to show what exactly the male gaze looks like in popular media. When you get past all the noise that this movie makes - and there is a lot - you see that at its core it is wrestling with the idea of what women (especially those in the public eye) have had to deal with for decades when it comes to age, beauty and longevity in a world that too often will cast them out once those body standards are no longer met. But even more profoundly, The Substance - and specifically Demi Moore's life-changing performance - shows us how we destroy ourselves trying to improve ourselves. You could insert all-too-common products today such as Botox, or even Ozempic. I am not trying to minimize the positives that these things may have, but just saying that it is all in service of our body image. Sparkle takes things so far in her quest to be young and beautiful again that it literally compresses unto her and she explodes.
The other aspects of The Substance that are so riveting are the body horror and practical effects elements engaged within it. Fargeat is channeling and shouting out impressionable Horror classics such as Society (1989), The Thing (1982), The Fly (1986) and even her own work, Revenge (2017). There is an aura of grossness, especially in the final act, while at the same time it keeps its sexy, over-the-top, voyeuristic DNA in tact (no pun intended). The movie is also hilariously funny in the darkest, most melancholic ways imaginable. It is funny as in you laugh at how awry, and frankly silly, our society has become lately when it comes to the era of Instagram, TikTok, OnlyFans and so many other sites/apps that are literally devoted to showing just how hot something or someone can be - and no matter how hard those creators try, it will never last forever and eventually something hotter will come along and take its/their place. That is the vicious cycle of The Substance. Fargeat isn't necessarily tackling the over-arcing idea of feminism (or trying to force us to), but opts to give us her personal vision of how it simply feels existing as a woman in today's fast-paced society. She creates an overblown, out-of-this-world, alien experience for us to witness, and even in its ugliest moments, I truly think that this is one of the more profoundly beautiful cinematic experiences I've had in recent memory.
🍿 SCORE = 92 / 100
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