Although The Substance sometimes struggles to cope with its lengthy 141min running time, Coralie Fargeat makes good use of all the elements of body horror to serve her narrative and message.
There are two wars going on inside Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), former TV star of a sports show. The first is to regain her former body and perfect curves, which would delight Harvey (Denis Quaid) – a TV network executive with a barely concealed misogyny – who catalogs Elisabeth as useless now that she’s 50. The second war stems directly from the first, that of regaining her former glory, her daily life as a star in the uncompromising world of show business.
To achieve this, Elisabeth has to cheat, to deceive the continuity of life and aging by enlisting the help of a mysterious company, providing her with a device enabling her to create another, younger version of herself. But this comes at a cost: every week, Elisabeth has to make way for her younger body, Sue (Margaret Qualley) and vice versa.
Directed by Coralie Fargeat (Revenge), The Substance pushes its visuals, sound design and narrative to the point of excess, overflow and disgust. Beyond being a satire of a Hollywood run by men, whose every portrayal intensifies the caricature of their inappropriate, sexist or self-serving behavior. Fargeat pushes his film into an increasingly graphic horror body, with impressive bodily transformations.
Because obviously, the rule of the week to be shared between each body is established only to be transgressed and Elizabeth to suffer the consequences. Sue experiences television fame and Harvey’s praise with her perfect body, and pushes the limits imposed by the device ever further, transforming Elizabeth’s body a little more each time.
The Substance highlights not only men’s repression of women’s bodies, but also the physical and psychological confinement that women impose on themselves in a society that only has eyes for pure, beautiful girls. Fargeat concentrates her film on gaze, that of men towards women, but also of women towards themselves. For much of the film, the filmmaker emphasizes the physicality of her actress Margaret Qualley, only to weaponnize the viewer’s gaze against himself, towards a body deformed and bruised by the fixation on perfection. Like a consequence of obsession.
More than anything else, The Substance also seems to be a personal film for Demi Moore, who has been in Hollywood for over 40 years and has also had her fair share of remarks and obsessions about her own body. As she recounts in her biographical book Inside Out: A Memoir in 2019 in an anecdote after a casting call asking her to lose weight: « And so began my process of trying to dominate and control my body—and of equating my worth to my weight, my size, my exterior. »[1] A destructive feeling also shared by the director, as she describes to Collider: « I would say the one thing that brought this story to life would be my life. Since I was a kid. I think about how I have to live with my own image and how I learned to be super violent about it, and it made me feel that I was never good enough »
While the performances of Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley both deserve praise, Moore’s seems all the more impressive in view of her career. To say that there is an autobiographical link between The Substance and Moore/Fargeat would be stretching things a little, but it’s undeniable that these three women bring a part of themselves, of their feelings and experiences, to this film.
On her horrific side, Coralie Fargeat operates in a slow burn narrative, with an ever more expressive organic side, right up to shots largely referencing Cronenberg’s The Fly in the gradual decomposition of the body. This is the right place to honor Pierre-Olivier Persin’s fantastic work on the prosthetics used in this film, fascinating fabrications in their complexity and repulsiveness.
Because of this extreme body horror and caricature of its characters, The Substance can easily be considered a humorous film (in the positive sense), pushing the line between gore and the ridiculous right up to its final minutes.
Although The Substance sometimes struggles to cope with its lengthy 141min running time, Coralie Fargeat makes good use of all the elements of body horror to serve her narrative and message.
[1] MOORE Demi, Inside Out : A Memoir, Harper, 2019, p. 72.
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