The Substance is substantial

It’s not subtle, but Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance is blunt confrontation with the pressures put on women to remain youthful, vibrant, and alluring. I want to stretch the sentence longer by appending “for the cis-het male gaze” instead of the other qualifier tha tends to get overused - “society’s pressures”. But there’s the rub that Fargeat’s keeps at; she could be making a visceral argument that it is the dominant male thrust, so to speak, that drives society and therefore, society can’t be easily untethered from masculine influence.

From there, the thesis develops that women are not only objects of but also unwittingly complicit in those societal pressures. Every year, we hope that something will change and there will be less emphasis on looks and maintaining appearances, but that doesn’t seem to be happening too readily. Additionally, with women finding their agency over their own bodies placed in the hands of states that essentially want to punish women for just being women, and the anger that seethes throughout Fargeat’s film is more than justified.

It’a a masterwork. Much has been made of the Cronenbergian body-horror, the performances dialed up to eleven, and particularly, Demi Moore’s in a career best; but I’ve been struck how few reviewers are engaging with the text and the general thematic polemic at the heart of the film.

That the film is a bludgeon in execution might obscure the nuances of what Fargeat is showing us. Demi Moore plays an Academy Award winner, former great actress, now as well known for her work-out show but who is summarily dismissed having been deemed too old by the studio executive who pivots to searching for a younger model to replacer her. Right there is plenty to deal with, but then there’s the next element.

Moore’s Elizabeth follows up on lead for The Substance, a genetic drug therapy that promises the creation of a younger, more perfect her. The idea is that this results in a separate entity that is born right out from your body. In this case, the result is Margaret Qualley looking astonishingly luminous. The two are to trade places every seven days, no exception. The serum that activates the mitosis is to be used only once and there is no you, or her. “You are one.”

This sets up a narrative and visual text of twinning and separation, a whole literally at war with itself to find some kind of acceptance with the larger world or in the more immediate sense, the return to the embrace of the audience. What does Elizabeth lose in this development?

Just about every damn thing. And that’s very much the point, told in as surreal and even slapstick a manner possible. Sure the visuals and ick-factor wouldn’t be out of place in a Cronenberg film (a number of reviewers referenced The Brood, but I was think in more of The Fly) but it’s the broad strokes in cinematography and broadness of performances that underscore the urgency of what Elizabeth is dealing with. 

She is dealing with nothing less than her own erasure. Her sense of self is overwritten by Qualley’s Sue once the latter discovers the uncritical adulation of her audience and network executives. Sue goes rogue by extracting more and more of the stabilizing liquid from Elizabeth’s spine to stay younger and more beautiful as Elizabeth grows more aged, ancient and grotesque. So far, so Dorian Gray.

We never lose sight of Elizabeth; we are not allowed to forget - even if she does - that she and Sue are one. What we encounter is that Sue’s very manifestation underscores and emphasizes Elizabeth’s dismissal from work, her obsolescence as an older woman translating into invisibility (especially with Moore cast as a formerly great actress now faded from public view - not that Moore is, but that that has been a trajectory for many actresses since the dawn of cinema). Even when Elizabeth is not in a scene, she remains present by her absence.

The Elizabeth-Sue split hits all the satirical points, but turns downright tragic as Elizabeth slips into depression and binge eats and drinks. We see Sue cough up a chicken leg during a break in filming (after the leg mysteriously appears on her glute - a visual version of “why that just goes right to my ass”). In turn, Sue parties her brains out and leaves Elizabeth’s condo a wreck.

Through it all, Elizabeth is a woman at war with herself; she’s aged out, she’s no longer desirable, her worth lies in the path and Sue is the literal embodiment of all that she was and more, simply because she is the latest version of the kind of woman that Elizabeth was. 

There are only a couple of male characters. Dennis Quaid plays the exec Harvey (on the nose, ya think?); a vulgar, sneering and leering troll of a man who is well aware of the power he wields and a guy who was in Elizabeth’s class in tenth grade who bumps into her earlier in the film and gives her his phone number so they could get together sometime.

Harvey is precisely what you’d expect; a crass asshole who lives for ratings and for whom women don’t seem to be even sexual objects, just commodities. Quaid leans into Harvey’s vacuousness with gusto. He’s been around long enough that I’m sure he knows his share of Harveys.

Fred, the high school chum, however, is used as a possible buoy later in the film when, after hitting rock bottom, Elizabeth calls him and makes plans to meet out of a need to be seen, by someone, even someone she doesn’t remember. It’s a sequence as terrifying in its own way as the more visceral horrors in the film as we see Elizabeth make up her face and then, after catching a glimpse of Sue’s billboard gazing into her condo’s living room, returning to make up her face again. And again. And again. Until she is worn down from trying to make herself attractive enough for just a guy and is beaten down by the image of this younger Other that is her but a her that is not. 

And I don’t necessarily mean “not” as in “not her”, but as being the her that she is no longer. Sue is Elizabeth’s psst and her overriding present as Elizabeth is pushed back into the darkness, off the screen, out of memory. 

Elizabeth on the phone to the Substance rep: “The balance must be respected.”

The rep: ?So respect it.”

We understand that the process by which the Substance is to be used is to be kept in a strict balance. One wonders what the chances of that are. We encounter one more guy in the film; the older part of the young nurse who gave Elizabeth the number to call to find the Substance. He asks Elizabeth if Sue has begun to consumer her at a diner near where she goes to collect refills of more serums to maintain the process. 

Granted a kind of eternal youth or at least, a prolonged one, who wouldn’t be seduced by wanting to live that life again. But the tragedy is that, as the tired old saw goes, it’s wasted on the young. 

It’s in the exchange with the older, as decrepit as Elizabeth will soon be, man that we see Fargeat opening up the scope of the ageist part of the polemic. She is quick to bring us back to the specific tragedy of what women face, though, and it only gets worse from here. 

Hopefully, not spoilting too much, but the denouement is one of the fiercest and yes, perversely slapstick wind-downs I’ve ever seen. Suffice it to say that Elizabeth and Sue merge into a third entity out of a kind of necessity and a conflict where we see Elizabeth acting out of compassion for this younger Other Yet Her and Sue out of anger and fear. The result is one of hte finest creations ever, one that would have fit in well with the creature in John Carpenter’s The Thing or any of Rick Baker’s creations. It’s a sculpture more than an effect.

Eventually, Monstro SueElizabeth makes her way to the event that Sue was to emcee and let’s just say that Fargeat goes full Carrie on audience, and by extension, the whole damn set of shitty values that privilege looks over character and the replacement of worthy goals with vapid, fleeting dreams as sustenance for a life lived.

I can’t say enough about Moore’s performance in this. She’s always been, to me, at best a good actor, very often capable, but I don’t think I ever glimpsed any quality in her previous performances that gave a hint of what she brought to the table her. Jesus, she’s fabulous. 

Since Elizabeth Taylor played Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, there have been a number of instances where a beautiful actress has buried her looks or dispensed with make-up to look blowsey or less attractive; that’s not quite what Moore does here. 

She’s still Demi Moore and still attractive, but yes, she’s shot under unforgiving light, often close-up where the camera accentuates lines and the pinched corners of her mouth. Moore retains her movie star face, but it’s rendered drab and gray in stark contrast to Qualley’s Sue, which even in close shots, reads as a shiny, flawless plasticine. Benjamin Kracun deserves high praise for his work as cinematographer here.

There are uncomfortable close-ups of people eating food (Harvey eating shrimp is as horrorific as any of the body horror in the film), fish-eye lens shots of hallways that lend a literal skewed perspective and a woozy sense of reality to the spaces that Elizabeth finds herself in, mirroring very much her disassociative sense of self and slippery sense of identity.

Qualley, by the way, just freaking rocks. She’s turned in another effortless performance and shocking because I don’t remember her every being shot so alluringly. Which is, of course, the point.

Fargeat deconstructs the female body repeatedly. Even in the workload-out segments where Moore and Qualley are shot in spandex (and admittedly, she ratchets this up in the Qualley sequences) and to look “sexy”, the overall context of the film blunts any sense of exploitation. It’s one of the most skilled subversions of the male gaze in cinema.

With Qualley’s sequences in the work-out portions, the editing runs at MTV breakneck pace, focusing on a thigh, a butt cheek, her hips, but as “exciting” as the editing and the music tries to make those moments, they’re defanged by the context in which thery’re located. I do like this film.

To be sure, there are some near-nauseating moments, but I’d argue everything has its reasons for looking the way it does. There are no wasted or gratuitious bits.

If Moore doesn’t get a nod for her work here, there’s something wrong with the Academy. Fargeat should receive similar accolades, but that’s not likely to happen with a film this visually harrowing and worst, rich in ideas.

All that aside, it’s worth a revisit. It’a rare that a film with this much on its mind comes along and delivers. One hopes that it gets a broader audience on streaming (though it should really be seen in the theater).