‘The Substance’ REVIEW: This year’s most visceral cinematic experience
‘The Substance’ REVIEW: This year’s most visceral cinematic experience
A red-dragon cloaked figure standing over a nude woman with a massive stitched wound on her back in ‘The Substance’ | Still from CreaZion Studios
The Substance is simply lightning in a bottle, the rare kind of film that exhibits and maintains a rip-roaring, viscera-spewing electricity that sizzles throughout its entire runtime.
The film follows fading star Elizabeth Sparkle (played by Demi Moore, who glows ferociously in a career-defining comeback role), who is recommended to use an experimental drug called The Substance after being fired from her job as a television fitness personality for being deemed too old and unattractive by sleazy, libidinous executives who prefer fresh, perfectly-aligned flesh that they can lust over.
The ominous, anonymous male benefactor of The Substance explains to her that the drug will release the “best version of yourself.” Desperate, Elizabeth orders and uses the drug on herself, and the results aren’t as glamorous and painless as one might expect.
I’ll try my best not to spoil the various body transformations, so let’s just say that Liz, upon consuming The Substance, gives birth to—and transfers her consciousness to—an absurdly glossy, curvy body, which she names Sue (Margaret Qualley). As Sue, Elizabeth relives her glory days, gaining newfound fame after getting her job back when the sleazy, libidinous executives thirst after Sue’s deceptively innocent charms and Barbie-doll figure.
Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) looking at a snow globe with a figure resembling her younger self in ‘The Substance’ | Still from CreaZion Studios
Through Sue, Elizabeth’s life becomes a fairy tale straight out of Hollywood. She finds the attraction, attention, and company that her older self craves. She no longer worries about seeing something wrong with her every time she looks in the mirror. No one points out a wrinkle or a flab of fat in this perfect, young, gorgeous body.
But being Sue has its limits. The story establishes early on that Elizabeth must follow a strict regiment to use The Substance. Every seven days, Elizabeth must switch back and forth between her two bodies. As Sue, she must also administer a daily dose of stabilizer for the new body using fluid extracted from her old one. There are several more rules, but it’s best to discover them for yourself. All you need to know is that life with The Substance is a lengthy, often gnarly process, but Fargeat keeps the exposition simple and straightforward in the film, making it easy to keep track of.
However, this is easier said than done. During her week as Elizabeth, she waits idly at her grand apartment, counting the days off until she returns as Sue. There is a brilliantly constructed, highly distressing, almost wordless sequence in the middle of the film where Elizabeth gets herself ready to go out but keeps stopping herself short to change what she wears, removing and reapplying makeup every time she looks at this flawless image of Sue, imagining how she will be perceived by the outside world as a woman in her fifties.
It all culminates in Elizabeth roughing up her face and hair in a devastating fit of self-hatred, and it doesn’t take long before the old crone starts abusing The Substance, spending more time as the rising sex symbol than is recommended. And abusing The Substance has consequences so dire that audiences won’t be prepared for what’s about to happen.
Elizabeth Sparkle looking at her own reflection with such disdain in ‘The Substance’ | Still from CreaZion Studios
There’s one thing to make clear about The Substance: it is not subtle at all. Fargeat lays her grievances thick and bare about the way society sees beauty and holds people to such unrealistic standards; how the industries where beauty is currency dispose of those who fail to meet those standards; how the commodification of human bodies leads those working in these environments to desire altering their bodies in aspects that would tick all the boxes; and how this can turn into a self-destructive obsession when the results fail to attain the satisfaction and validation that they’re hoping for.
The film also highlights that people like Elizabeth/Sue are partly culpable in reinforcing this collective mindset of idealized beauty as they go to lengths to chase after perfection. But Fargeat is mindful enough not to pin them down and judge them for giving way to their desires and insecurities that originated from harmful misconceptions that the misguided society imposed on themselves. Instead, she jabs at the men in positions of power who formed that idealization in the first place.
The film is neither anti-men nor anti-women; instead, it takes a stand against these existing ideals that people of all genders are pressured to comply with and condemns all those jerks who continue to perpetrate this line of thinking.
And like her debut feature, Revenge (2017), Fargeat subverts the voyeuristic gaze on hypersexualized female imagery, but this time by making the camera closely linger on something grotesque as much as it does on something suggestive. The film turns the way audiences have grown to look at these human bodies as objectified figurines against themselves.
For each time the camera ogles Margaret Qualley forming “SUE” on her lips in a tantalizing fashion, there are also gross-out moments—as disgusting as Dennis Quaid munching down a plate of shrimp like a glutton with grease squirting out of his lips and fingers—that are even more numerous to throw them off balance.
Sue (Margaret Qualley), Elizabeth’s perfect version of herself, doing perfect splits with a portrait of Elizabeth behind her | Still from CreaZion Studios
And those are not even the worst parts of The Substance, which I will conceal, because every time you think Fargeat has shown the film’s most revolting imagery yet, she will immediately up the ante, often crossing the boundaries of taste and challenging the audience’s resistance against rushing out of the theater and vomiting in the nearest toilet.
And yet, the film’s excessive tendency to push itself to the most outrageous extremes, in addition to being stomach-churning, is also gut-bustingly funny. It helps when you have a filmmaker who’s as confident, playful, and self-aware as Fargeat, who manages to hold the film’s ground with a no-nonsense, economical approach to storytelling where she is able to establish so much through visual motifs and evocative sound design.
An example of this is the film’s clever opening montage, which consists entirely of overhead shots focusing on an important symbol and presents those shots in different settings and contexts to tell a celebrity’s rise-and-fall story with increasingly comical and emotionally stirring results.
There’s also a gleeful cheekiness and commitment to a hyper-stylized theatricality in Fargeat’s direction, such that a morbid hilarity takes shape in the film’s blunt, ostentatious nature. Fargeat is a crude craftswoman in that sense, where she is constantly hammering down the same nails with all her might for 141 minutes so that their pointy ends eventually emerge through the other side, as she sprays the subjects on the canvas with geysers of viscera.
Some would take issue with its lack of subtlety, how Fargeat spells out the themes so blatantly, how her characterizations are simplistic and reliant on archetypes to communicate those ideas, and often utilizes intense sound and imagery to make up for what it’s lacking.
I understand where the criticisms are coming from, even though I don’t necessarily find them an issue to weigh this film down. I also don’t think that the film warrants repeat viewings for me to understand the themes when everything Fargeat wants to express has already been expressed more than enough in repeating variations throughout the film.
One of the important rules of using The Substance in ‘The Substance’ | Still from CreaZion Studios
Instead, I will watch The Substance again for the sake of reliving that whirlwind of emotions I felt as I saw it for the first time. This is, hands down, one astonishing achievement of filmmaking that expresses the more abstract human emotions in garish, trippy symbolism and a rich, elaborate soundscape where you can feel every gnarly crack of a bone or the squelching of pus in an infected wound.
It may not be the most thematically layered movie regarding the subjects it tackles, nor the most subtle, but Coralie Fargeat’s ability to marinate imagery and sound to create an immersive, repulsive, euphoric cinematic experience makes those vigorously hammered nails sparkle. It’s a balls-to-the-wall, no-holds-barred, perfectly realized artistic vision that Fargeat is able to bring out with such finesse and tenacity, without losing her way through its crazy narrative.
‘The Substance’ will be shown in select Philippine cinemas on September 25, 2024.
