Upon her 40th birthday, writer/director Coralie Fargeat declared that her life was over. “I’m not going to be interesting anymore. No one is going to look at me anymore.” Aging can be hard for some. Not just physically, but emotionally as well. With each passing year, I feel the very same. I find more things to hate about myself from a physical standpoint all the way to where I am in my career. It’s the doomsday clock, with each passing year edging me towards midnight. Art, especially film, places audiences in the shoes of its character, hoping to provide a different viewpoint to their own in order to open their perspective to the world around them. The Substance is a film that does just that, offering a unique female gaze into how society views women, one that lets viewers relate and ultimately sympathise with the infuriating double standards Fargeat looks to expose and discuss in what is possibly the wildest ride of the year.
“Pretty girls should always smile”
The Substance is a rightfully furious film. It mutates from one creature into another, keeping us on our toes as Fargeat lets her angst flow through its protagonist Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), a former Hollywood star turned TV Aerobics icon fired on her 50th birthday for not being sexy and young enough, at least according to Harvey, a TV executive caricature (Dennis Quaid). This sends her down the path of receiving a recommendation for The Substance, a mysterious drug that creates a temporary younger, hotter, more perfect version of yourself. But there’s a catch, you have to alternate between bodies every 7 days. NO EXCEPTIONS. Remember: YOU ARE ONE. Coralie Fargeat is no stranger to films that deal with aging or what we perceive as perfection. Her short film Reality+ (2014) has a character undergoing a tech upgrade that allows him to see what he wants to look like (for only 12 hours a day before his brain needs to recharge), so it’s no wonder that the next logical step would be something like The Substance.
Body horrors are routinely gross, but they’re not designed to just gross you out. What they do so effectively is provide profound commentaries and observations on the internal state of characters and how that evolves and changes with their physical state. They can be surprisingly nuanced, with the obvious likes of David Cronenberg being the rightful master of the genre, while Julia Ducournau’s Raw (2016) and most recently her Palm d’Or winning Titane (2021) (review can be found here) were deeply thematic works that ended up being surprisingly touching stories with important messages of unconditional love and acceptance at their core. Here, The Substance is anything but subtle, and that is by design.
There’s nothing at all nuanced or subtle about how society (ag, sorry I’m trying to avoid the whole “we live in a society” thing here) shoves its impossible beauty standards down our throats. It’s everywhere. Hyper-sexualized to make us all feel insecure about ourselves even when we have nothing to be insecure about. In The Substance, Fargeat’s anger and frustration with this are shown through her “in your face” nature of the film, with Harvey (Dennis Quaid) feeling like a literal manifestation of the beast that determines whether you’re hot or not, if you’re useful to them and how they can exploit it all to make a buck. “Pretty girls should always smile”.
This pushes Elisabeth Sparkle to do what she does because society tells her she no longer has value. In the sequence that leads to the arrival of Sue, Ms. Sparkle inspects herself in the mirror, going over stretch marks, wrinkles and things that naturally loosen or sag over time. She’s still beautiful, but she doesn’t see that, just asterisks and footnotes on what she once was. Shortly after this, Sue (Margaret Qualley) is born, literally breeching from Ms. Sparkle as her back splits wide open, expelling Sue. Once she gains her eyesight, she admires her supple new figure in the mirror, quietly judging the older husk remaining on the floor. It’s an extraordinary introduction between the two: young and old as they initially try to help one another for a better collective future. “Respect the balance”, a mysterious voice advises Ms. Sparkle.
As mentioned before, Subtlety is absent in The Substance. It has no intention of making you work particularly hard to find the real “meaning” of the film. It wants to make you uncomfortable, but it wants to place its ideas and messages on a plate right in front of you. And somehow it works without ever feeling condescending or taking its audience's intelligence for granted. In other hands, this could’ve been sloppily handled, but Fargeat does such a great job in making the messages clear enough for them to link with one another so viscerally. We know it’s about aging, but what Fargeat also wants us to do, is to be able to love ourselves, to be able to embrace aging and how we can adapt to it before we lose that internal battle with ourselves. And although both Sue and Elisabeth are the same, their subconscious doesn’t seem to be shared as one (neither know what their other self has gotten up to), they are the same shared individual. Remember: YOU ARE ONE. It’s an interesting idea that suggests how different we are at certain points in our lives, unable to relate to the decisions we made then or will make in the future. It’s essentially a film about learning to love yourself and your body regardless of age. But it also has to do with how we, the young, see the old, and vice versa. As the film progresses, Sue begins to resent her older self, judging her for spending her time trapped indoors, gorging on food as she is out being exactly what Harvey and society expect a young, attractive woman to be.
We tend to be incredibly unkind to ourselves. In this case, it’s the younger to the older. While Elisabeth does find some resentment towards her younger self in Sue as well, she tends to be more understanding of her ambitions than the cruel assumptions that Sue makes of her - eventually taking a backseat for better and for worse. It’s so easy for me to relate to this because like both Sue and Elizabeth, I resent my past, present and even future self so deeply at times. With each year, I hate my older self more. A lot of us are also so similar to either one of or both of our parents – an eye-opening glimpse into the future of what we could become and how we could possibly change that. Or maybe it’s the other way around, they look at us, a younger offshoot of themselves, and wish they had the ambitions and physicality of us. It turns into a cycle of self-hatred and regret of things that have happened as well as those that have not come to pass just yet. And then I look back at my younger naïve self, unaware of the failures, successes and missed opportunities that awaits them. If my life was The Substance, I’m fairly certain my younger self would feel the same way that Sue does about Elisabeth, admonishing everything I’ve become, promising themselves they would NEVER become that. But this is also where an important message of The Substance comes into focus. We need to be kinder to ourselves. We need to look at aging as a form of positive evolution instead of ammo to hate ourselves even further.
“You’re still the most beautiful woman in the world”, a former high school classmate tells Ms. Sparkle after bumping into her. She brushes this off, but when Sue is in her world, She begins to appreciate this once small sentiment (at least for her). He doesn’t see her as a thing that used to be pretty, that used to be useful. He sees her as she is now and that’s what matters: that she still matters. ***MINOR SPOILERS When Ms. Sparkle eventually takes him up on his offer for a date, she feels beautiful again, dolling herself up. But despite him validating her existence even at 50, she begins to doubt herself thanks to the perfect face and body of her younger self, Sue,eventually spiraling into doubt and self-hate. MINOR SPOILERS*** And this is often how most of us feel. We don’t realize that someone out there finds us perfect as we are, acceptable. Instead, we scrutinize our every detail, forcing us to hide away from the world, depriving us of true happiness, of complete bliss.
And it’s the body horror genre that allows these insecurities to come alive so effectively in Fargeat’s vision, one that is both beautiful and hideous as it transforms into a lumbering beast by the time the credits roll - a hideous creation of its own doing. She frames and shoots this with a glossy eye, an overly stylized production design most obviously influenced by The Shining (most notably the restroom and hallway at the TV studios), creating a grand sense of unease amidst its aesthetically pleasing design that is as superficial as its characters. Smart editing and framing also allow Fargeat to break the 180-degree rule, placing the camera in places it's not supposed to be - shifting visual perspectives that tells our brains that something is not quite right.
The Substance is the kind of film that requires its actors to go all in. And oh boy, do they do that. Dennis Quaid understands the assignment, leaning fully into his character and chewing each scene as though it were his last meal. In a film that wants to shatter the fine china of nuance and subtlety, he is the bull raging and kicking about, providing the match to the fuse that pushes its protagonist to feel the need to do what she does. Sue, played by the insanely versatile Margaret Qualley, is a character we hate to see ourselves in, a selfish character whose youth blinds her better judgement. Although she serves as a sort of villain to the protagonist, Fargeat constantly reminds us that they are one. A warning call for us to be kinder to ourselves, regardless of the imperfections we sought to get rid of.
Then there’s Demi Moore. It could not have been more perfectly cast. As one of the hot young stars of the 80s and 90s, famously associated with the brat pack, Demi Moore knows a thing or two about being subjected to the impossible beauty standards of the industry, and despite her still being talented and well, gorgeous, Hollywood has seemingly forgotten about her. She gives this EVERYTHING. The toughest performance in the film has her vulnerable mentally, physically and emotionally. It’s a brave performance in a constantly high-flying film that pushes its characters to the absolute limit. She bares all - reminding us of the film’s vital themes as she reckons with herself as a star of yesteryear, while also needing to love herself as she is now and in the future. To repeat what her classmate tells her, “you’re still the most beautiful woman in the world”. Give her an Oscar nomination, please.
Even past all the bloody, chunky viscera, The Substance expertly maintains the profound message at its center: love yourself. Love yourself as you are (at least that’s what I took from it). Art, especially film, has the phenomenal ability to let audiences into a world they’re unaware of, to make them relate to it to generate sympathy. And The Substance does this brilliantly with myself being able to feel what Ms Sparkle is feeling, and better yet, understanding why she is feeling that way. It’s a future feminist classic that is always one-upping itself in every department. It’s gross, weird, loud, camp, funny, unpredictable and the most batshit insane movie of the year that is worthy of Demi Moore’s resurgence as a talent who deserves to have her star shine brighter than it ever has. To quote Elisabeth’s Sparkle’s sign-off: “In the meantime, take care of yourself”.
I’ll certainly try.
Where you can watch it: Mubi (USA, UK), most VOD platforms (USA), in cinemas (Most of the world).
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