‘The Substance’ movie review: Coralie Fargeat’s blood-soaked ‘Barbie’ is a morbid comedy of horrors

‘The Substance’ is body horror for the Instagram generation, a delirious plunge into the psyche’s darkest corners, and a Faustian reminder that our most frightening critic is often the one staring back from the mirror

Coralie Fargeat’s Cannes-winning nightmare is a carnivorous, candy-coloured satire that sinks its teeth into Hollywood’s ageism in an outrageous meditation on self-perception and vanity. The French director, infamous for the brutal Revenge (2017), turns her lens back on an industry that devours women, digesting their youth and spitting them out like last season’s trend. What starts as the familiar story of an ageing star, dumped and forgotten, spirals into a hallucinatory tug-of-war between flesh and spirit — a kind of crack-fueled Dorian Gray on a bender across Hollywood.

The film introduces us to Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), a former fitness queen whose heyday was back in the Spandex-drenched aerobics boom. Once the darling of televised workouts, Elisabeth now finds herself unceremoniously discarded by her vulgar, shrimp-slurping boss, Harvey (played with nauseating camp by Dennis Quaid) for no greater crime than turning fifty. Quaid chomps on shrimp with a repulsive vigour, his face so close that you can almost smell the seafood — a perfect encapsulation of Elisabeth’s seething disgust with the men who scrutinize and exploit her.

The Substance (English)

Director: Coralie Fargeat
Cast: Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, Dennis Quaid
Runtime: 141 minutes
Storyline: A fading celebrity uses a black market drug that creates a much younger version of herself with unexpected side effects

Devastated and desperate, Elisabeth’s solution comes in the form of a mysterious Brat summer-coded green goo, a Frankensteinian tonic promising a rebirth of sorts. Called simply The Substance, the titular potion promises to reverse the cruel markers of age, restoring Elisabeth to a more vibrant, youthful self. But here’s the kicker: after injecting it, her body doesn’t just revert, rather, endures a spine-splitting metamorphosis, peeling away her skin to reveal her younger, lither, and ravenously self-confident doppelgänger — Margaret Qualley’s Sue. The twisted new tag team takes turns each week, swapping control of their shared life, navigating their existence with a set of rules that, if broken, risk ruining them both. 

Mirrors and reflections are everywhere. Tortured by her ageing visage, Elisabeth returns obsessively to the looking glass, her own Medusa. Every wrinkle, every sag is a reminder of her fall from grace, of Hollywood’s merciless gaze. And though Sue is her physical “better half,” Elisabeth’s jealousy and horror build in equal measure as Sue revels in the newfound attention her youthful form garners. Through Sue, Elisabeth can reclaim her old show, but the lustrous new skin doesn’t make her life any smoother. If anything, it amplifies the dread. The film’s brilliance lies in how it mines the duality between Elisabeth’s desire and disgust and Sue’s ambition and entitlement.

With scant dialogue, the film’s visual language is quite extraordinary. Cinematographer Benjamin Kracun makes sure no inch of flesh goes unexamined, each camera shot lingers hungrily on every curve, wrinkle, and imperfection. Fargeat’s clever choice of Kubrickian set design — a lurid, plastic-y Los Angeles world straight out of an ‘80s exercise video — only amplifies the claustrophobia. 

But the film of course revels in its grotesquery with a gusto rarely seen outside Cronenbergian horror. Fargeat’s vision is complicit in the carnage, using fish-eye lenses and extreme close-ups to exaggerate each disgusting detail. Every squelch, every drip and tear is magnified to lurid, inescapable extremes, serving up a feast for body-horror fans with a stinging indictment of the lengths to which we go to fight age.

The men of The Substance are predictably vile. They’re caricatures of chauvinism, united in their dismissal of Elisabeth’s personhood the moment she loses her youthful lustre. Yet, she doesn’t shy away from implicating Elisabeth herself. As Sue steals Elisabeth’s life, Elisabeth realizes that she’s not just fighting for relevance; she’s fighting a psychological war against herself, against the expectations and insecurities that have invaded her mind. Caught in a cycle of envy, she grows jealous of her own creation, feeling replaced by the younger body she sought so desperately to reclaim. 

There’s a rawness to how Fargeat tackles these themes. She invokes the specter of aging not with pathos, but with rage — a rage that feels, at times, like a pointed critique of Hollywood’s “hagsploitation” tradition, where older women’s bodies are exploited for horror and repulsion. But here, the horror is interiorized. Elisabeth is terrified not of what others see, but of what she herself has come to believe — that without youth, her worth is lost. Moore’s performance is so fearless and unfiltered that we can feel Elisabeth’s desperation seep from the screen, a plea for validation that seems, ironically, more poignant as it fails.

In the end, The Substance is a pitch-black parable, a reflection on the cost of self-worship and the delusion of control. Fargeat’s comedy of horrors shows us the lengths one might go to recapture the feeling of being seen — only to realize that what truly haunts us is our own image. This is body horror for the Instagram generation, a delirious plunge into the psyche’s darkest corners, and a Faustian reminder that our most frightening critic is often the one staring back from the mirror.

The Substance is currently streaming on MUBI

Published - November 01, 2024 03:38 pm IST