Director/Screenplay – Coralie Fargeat, Producers – Tim Bevan, Coralie Fargeat & Eric Fellner, Photography – Benjamin Kracun, Music – Raffertie, Visual Effects Supervisor – Bryan Jones, Visual Effects – Compagnie General des Effets Visuels (Supervisor – Guillaume Le Gouez) & Noid (Supervisor – Chervin Shafaghi), Special Effects – Paul Descoing, Jean Miel & Lola Roine, Makeup Effects Design/Supervisor – Pierre-Olivier Persin, Prosthetics/Main Effects – Pop FX, Monstroelisasue Created by Igor Studios, Sue Effects – KFX Studio (Supervisor – Alexis Kinebanyan), Sue’s Breasts – CLSFX-Atelier 69 (Supervisor – Olivier Afonso), Production Design – Stanislas Reydellet. Production Company – Working Title/Blacksmith.
Cast
Demi Moore (Elisabeth Sparkle), Margaret Qualley (Sue), Dennis Quaid (Harvey), Edward Hamilton Clark (Fred), Gore Abrams (Oliver), Oscar Lesage (Troy), Christian Erickson (Man at Diner)
Plot
Elisabeth Sparkle is a Hollywood actress whose star is starting to fade at age 51. She then learns that she is to be replaced by someone younger on Pump It Up, the aerobics show she hosts. After an accident in the street, Elisabeth ends up in hospital. A male nurse slips her a flash drive that contains an ad for The Substance that promises to create a younger, better version of one’s self. After signing up, Elisabeth is directed to a back alley vault where she receives instructions and a series of syringes to inject. The serum will create a younger double of herself. The requirements are that the double and the original must alternate for seven days and that the other self needs a daily injection of stabiliser fluid taken from the original to sustain itself. After injecting herself, another younger body pushes its way out of a wound in Elisabeth’s back. With perfect figure, the other self calls herself Sue. Sue goes on to audition and obtain Elisabeth’s old job. Afterwards Sue returns home and becomes comatose for seven days while Elisabeth wakes and resumes life and after seven days they exchange places again. However, the increasing demands of celebrity and her enjoyment of the party life cause Sue to have to push the seven day limit. The downside of this is that it takes increasing cost on Elisabeth’s body, turning her haggard and aged, while pushing her deeper into paranoia.
The Substance was the second film from French director/writer Coralie Fargeat. After making a couple of short films, Fargeat first appeared with the woman avenger film Revenge (2017), It was a film I found so ridiculously over-the-top film in its ignoring of basic biology and believability I placed it on this site’s Worst of 2017 list.
Reviews of The Substance have been framed in light of a certain topical political message – a woman directed film, a film that savagely addresses unreal beauty standards that are forced on women, a biting satire of Hollywood’s objectification of beauty. That The Substance is no doubt, but that is not the aspect of the film I am going to be focusing on here. There are other reviewers who are better placed to deconstruct the film is terms of such political messaging. Certainly, Demi Moore does an admirable job taking on such a role at the age of 61 – although part of me notes that while Coralie Fargeat shows us Demi’s wrinkles and botoxed face, when we see Demi, she is still in top shape – she is evidently still working out with a trainer and there is an absence of any cellulite or grey hair as you might see with any regular person of a similar age.
If there is an adjective you could coin to describe Coralie Fargeat’s directorial style, it would probably be histrionic. Everything in her films seems plot stripped away of all but minimal dialogue to a series of visuals where everything from the actors’ performance to the editing cutaways is wound up the fifteen on the dial. In the opening scenes, Demi Moore dines with Dennis Quaid and his exchange is shot in a series of distorted closeups on his face and mouth as he eats shrimp with ugly, disgusting sounds amplified on the soundtrack. Even after he departs, we see a fly floating in his half-finished drink. It is not merely enough to show that Demi Moore is down on her luck, when she meets old classmate Edward Hamilton Clark the slip of paper with his number on it has to fall into a puddle of muddy water. The contrast between the aging Demi and the youthful ideal of Margaret is crudely highlighted by the contrasts between a huge billboard of Margaret outside the apartment’s bay window on one side and a glass-framed portrait of Demi on the wall behind her, where the glass gets symbolically broken throughout.
Demi Moore as Elisabeth Sparkle in The Substance (2024)
Certainly, there are times that Coralie Fargeat’s visuals are striking. A confrontation with Dennis Quaid that takes place in a hallway where the orange walls (which match Quaid’s suit) trail off into stark perspective; the white-on-white of the bathroom or the room of storage lockers; the apartment complex with long corridors of curved dark blue walls; Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley in the streets wearing a vivid canary yellow coat, which kept making me think of Dick Tracy (1990). I did like the montage that opens the film – a shot looking straight down on Elisabeth’s star on Hollywood Walk of Fame that goes from being seen in glamour and lights in a progressive series of cuts to treated with curiosity, being walked over and ignored, having a homeless person push a shopping cart across it to someone spilling the contents of their burger on it. It perfectly encapsulates the rise and fading of Elisabeth’s star before we even meet Demi Moore.
In the latter half of the film, Demi Moore’s performance becomes so overwrought as to become completely absurd. Especially ridiculous is the scene where she goes nuts in the kitchen with a book of French recipes – splattering herself with an eggbeater, throwing eggs at Margaret Qualley being interviewed on a tv screen, and a particularly laughable series of crosscuts where we see her fisting a turkey, which is crudely intercut with a series of shots of Margaret Qualley pumping her thighs in the aerobics show. An even worse performance comes from Christian Erickson as the old age version of the handsome male nurse we met at the start of the film – Erickson’s performance is so ridiculously overdone, it is something that would have ended on the cutting room floor in any other film.
Into the bargain, the idea of The Substance itself is a medically and scientifically ridiculous. For one, there is the physically ludicrous notion of an entire human body emerging out of a wound in a person’s back. After this occurs, Demi Moore is left lying in her bathroom for seven days with an open wound that runs the length of her spine where for some miraculous reason she does not bleed out. At the very least, the untended wound would have festered and probably become infected.
The other bizarre aspect is the secretive and entirely unexplained organisation behind the process. It reminded me somewhat of John Frankenheimer’s Seconds (1966). Here the organisation operates in a complete black box of which we are privy to nothing except what is required to drive the plot along. However, this is in complete contradiction to the way that every quack remedy and miracle treatment operates in the real world where it is marketed and hyped far in excess of what it is capable of delivering, even when the treatments and effects are debatable or outrightly fraudulent. It makes no real economic sense for an organisation to be offering a miracle treatment to celebrities out of its own goodwill without asking anything in return. At the very least, there should have been a scene where Demi Moore was being asked for money for her second dose. The not dissimilar South Korean anime Beauty Water (2020), which also concerned beauty treatments that have an horrific side effect, does a far better job of depicting this side of things.
Margaret Qualley as Sue, the younger version of Demi Moore. With framed photo of Demi on the wall behind.
However, there is the point that The Substance starts to turn into something other than this over-the-top take on Hollywood celebrity and the beauty industry. I don’t like the term Body Horror and don’t use it on this site – it is indiscriminately used to cover everything from the cinema of David Cronenberg to fairly much anything with gooey meltdowns or lots of splatter and bodies hacked up. That said, The Substance is surely one film that is deservous of such a label. At the outset, what we have seems like a mix of divided self themes from classic horror – the person and their dark doppelganger from The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and the idea from Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) of the alternate self (a portrait) that ages while the original remains eternally youthful. It has also been pointed out to me the similarities between The Substance and the South Korean webtoon Lookism (2022- ), which sets the same premise in a high school setting.
That said, the latter third of the film takes a full deep dive off into the midst of body horror, the likes of which we haven’t seen since the heyday of the Makeup Effects Vehicle in the 1980s. If you like, you could call The Substance Cartoon Cronenberg. There is an amusingly ridiculous scene where a lump appear on Margaret Qualley’s buttock during a dance routine and then in her dressing room she finds it moving all the way around her stomach, before digging her fingers into her navel and pulling out a drumstick. It’s a medically nonsensical sequence, which proves entertaining but immediately has its effect diluted by merely being a dream jump sequence. The desiccated old age version of Demi that we get is absurdly over-the-top with a giant skeletal carapace on her back and tits drooping down to her waist that it feels more like something out of The Fly (1986).
The most entertainingly absurd scenes – and the point that finally pushed me to a point where I actually started to like The Substance – are those that come towards the end with the unveiling of the entity the film refers to as Monstroelisasue. [PLOT SPOILERS]. Here, after nearly killing Margaret off with the termination serum, Demi Moore decides she doesn’t want to and injects her with the leftover activator serum. This produces a misshapen monstrosity of flesh and projecting arms with Demi’s face trapped in the back like something out of Society (1989). She staggers off to the New Year’s ceremony, pasting the picture of Demi’s face from the glass portrait over the creature and planting a makeup smile on it. The ceremony starts to go wrong as the mask falls off and we get such sights as a boob manifesting and pushing itself out of a hole in her head to fall on the floor, before the creature sprays the entire auditorium and everyone in it with an absurd amount of gore, far more than a single human body could possibly ever contain. The creature staggers out into the street and collapses, falling apart while the detached face of Demi slithers along to its final resting place atop Demi’s Walk of Fame star. Incredible! Unbelievable!
