Mary Astor, an actress who appeared in several of the so-called Hollywood Golden Age’s definitive movies, was acutely aware of the life cycle that almost always befalls most performers regardless of the popularity and acclaim they accrue. “There are five stages in the life of an actor,” she once observed. “Who’s Mary Astor? Get me Mary Astor. Get me a Mary Astor type. Get me a young Mary Astor. Who’s Mary Astor?”
The disheartening rotation plays out with brutal pithiness at the beginning of Coralie Fargeat’s darkly funny The Substance, now in most theaters after being touted, depending on whom you ask, either the best thing to premiere at this year’s Cannes Film Festival or the worst. The camera hovers above the Hollywood Walk of Fame star built for our soon-to-be-introduced protagonist, Elisabeth Sparkle (an excellent, very smartly cast Demi Moore); through a montage, we see it go from a shiny installation for which passersby carefully tiptoe around and actively stop to a cracked, dulled square that becomes a place onto which a male pedestrian will clumsily drop his freshly bought burger, unhelpfully smearing the sandwich’s ketchup-drenched innards in a useless attempt at cleanup before giving up.
When we finally do meet Elisabeth, she’s at a pleasant but not especially fulfilling juncture in her career. Years after winning an Oscar, she’s retreated into a steady paycheck’s reliable comforts, her acting ambitions now ostensibly foregone to simply host a Jane Fonda-style workout show on a major network. The film opens on her 50th birthday; it will shape up to not be a celebration but what Elisabeth sees as the end of her life and career as she knows it.
She’s abruptly fired by the network’s CEO, who chalks up the dismissal less to flagging ratings than a basic need for somebody hotter and fresher in Elisabeth’s place. Played by Dennis Quaid with laugh-out-loud piggishness — a trait best encapsulated by an early scene where he devours shelled seafood with nauseating amounts of smacking and squelching — the character is named Harvey. It’s one of many on-the-nose choices in a movie whose profound lack of subtlety is actually among the characteristics that, to my eye, work in its favor rather than the other way around.
Margaret Qualley and Dennis Quaid in The Substance. All imagery courtesy of MUBI.
Elisabeth takes her unceremonious firing so hard that, after getting in a near-deadly car accident upon seeing a billboard for her show getting replaced with something new, she finds herself willing to try just about anything to stave off other aging-process-related injustices. Enter The Substance, a mysterious new drug sneakily recommended to her by a handsome (albeit waxen-faced) nurse who claims that “it changed my life.” All it takes is a quick, detail-shy, but tantalizing informational video for Elisabeth to give it a try. Its proposition, though, is questionable, frightening the more you turn over what it requires in your head.
The user gives what amounts to birth to a younger, sexier version of themselves after an injection of glow-in-the-dark-green goop. They then have to switch back and forth, every seven days, between their new body and their old body, the one not in use for the week trapped in a comatose state. If either enjoys The Substance’s spoils even a few minutes past the seven-day mark, the other will face immediate physical consequences, usually starting with a patch of skin that’s aged what looks like 60 years in a handful of seconds.
Elisabeth’s second self calls herself Sue (Margaret Qualley). Cinematographer Benjamin Kracun shoots her dewy skin and plentiful curves with a hungry gaze that feels less like a basic reiteration of a Penthouse photographer’s leering projections than a way for Fargeat to bombard us with the entertainment industry’s fetishization of youth to the point that it becomes antithetically off-putting. These visuals aren’t devoid of pleasure, though. You sense Elisabeth’s own stare, too, appreciative of the perkier body she’s regained and happily aware she’s being desired again after years of feeling unseen for the beauty for which she was once celebrated.
Demi Moore in The Substance.
It’s never totally clear how much of Elisabeth’s consciousness is baked into Sue’s, and vice versa. They are technically one person, as The Substance’s never-seen makers unsympathetically reiterate on the much-called customer-service line. But they also seem to have separate desires and perspectives, and are consistently surprised when the seven-day cycle restarts and the other has perhaps vengefully left a mess out in Elisabeth’s luxe, floor-to-ceiling-windowed apartment for the other to harriedly clean up. I’d guess that they do share a consciousness but experience memory loss how we might after blacking out during a particularly debaucherous night out. (I love, on a related note, the critic Alison Willmore’s read that The Substance ought to be looked at as more about addiction than aging.)
Sue almost immediately gets famous; she simply answers a casting call in a newspaper to replace Elisabeth on her TV show. The chasm that forms between the two can only widen when the symbiosis is this vulnerable to corruption. Sue gets to luxuriate in the joys of youth and adoration. Elisabeth is soon morphing into something of a living equivalent of Dorian Gray’s portrait, becoming an increasingly depressed homebody while suffering the consequences of Sue’s inevitable abuses of The Substance’s rules. Elisabeth’s spiraling self-confidence is poignantly typified in a sequence where she nervously prepares for a date with an old classmate but ends up standing him up after insecurely taking her warped reflection in the front doorknob as representative of reality.
The dread and mounting tensions of this bad living situation — each woman becomes something like the other’s roommate from hell, like a nastier Single White Female (1992) — gear us up for a bloody climax. But I didn’t expect Fargeat, whose previous film, 2017’s Revenge, had comparatively realistic violence, to conclusively move into over-the-top grotesqueries. It recalls, in off-kilter tone, the B thrillers of Larry Cohen, and, in gory audacity, the body-horror-leaning works of Brian Yuzna and David Cronenberg. Those thirsty for a brainy, illuminating take on the turned-tangible emotional violences wreaked by the expectations society places on women who are aging — particularly women in entertainment, an industry that can turn one’s youthful image into something of a pitiless, taunt-prone stalker — will not be slaked by this movie with minimal dialogue and which has no real vested interest in soberly rendering what modern-day Hollywood is like.
Fargeat maintains distance from reality. In the film’s funhouse purview, a videoed workout class in the 2020s is a viable path for monocultural stardom. Blizzards are not unheard of in Los Angeles. Nearly every sound that would be an afterthought in life, from the stabbing of a martini olive to the zipper of a bodysuit pulled down, is disquietingly turned up. Characters have no friends or family members to commiserate with. It’s completely ignored that it’s more possible now than ever to be a celebrated actress long past your 50th birthday.
Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley in The Substance.
I’ve seen some of these details groused about as examples of Fargeat being out of touch. I saw them more as a means to encourage us to experience the movie less like a cerebral, finger-on-the-pulse treatise on the subject on which it’s founded and more like an illogic-choked bad dream put to the screen whose fundamental pains cannot be easily woken up from. Like a nightmare, grains of truth are as common as exaggerated absurdities and indignities. One might emerge shaken up and bewildered but ultimately take this experience not as the final word on the fears being exploited but as a vessel to think about them more clearly on one’s own accord.
Fargeat’s aims seem to be more visceral than intellectual, like a dramatization of Elisabeth’s anxieties and night terrors stitched together as lucidly as they could be. The Substance’s miasma of self-loathing is suffocating. It’s understandable how one could hate the movie, as many have, given the film’s antic aesthetics (which I’ll cede lurch toward monotony in this nearly two-and-a-half-hour-long movie) and its consistent inclination to lean into sensory shocks they might incur as opposed to traditional, no pun intended, substance as it relates to a subject that largely, and dismayingly, remains unexplored in the movies in a serious capacity.
But in a mainstream horror landscape that has in recent years more often championed movies overconcerned with what they’re “about” while neglecting the visceral power that can be gleaned from aesthetic intention — not to mention the sort of sick fun found in this movie’s gleefully disgusting, almost impressively mean-spirited ending — The Substance refreshingly makes a case for the potency of style in horror.
Peterson Reviews 