Blunt object horror is bloody and cleansing

Substance is not a subtle film. The filmmaking is aggressive. The metaphor is a blunt object. The music is loud and booming, and the color palette is bright enough to tear the film away from your eyeballs. It is animated by a white-hot fury that escalates throughout its epic 140-minute runtime, building to a stunningly audacious climax that sprays blood on the audience. It is maddening and absurd in the best possible way.

Writer-director Coralie Fargeat brought a similar go-for-broke mentality to her 2018 debut feature. Revenge, a film that would never have considered a tasteful medium shot when the extreme fisheye close-up was available. Fargeat directs the hell Substance also, using dramatic camera angles to infuse even random moments with a sense of hyper-stylistic delirium. A character throws something into a trash can? He sets the camera down. The same character walking down a hallway? He sets the lens low to the ground, distorting the perspective and making an ordinary place disorienting and strange.

Then there’s the body horror. Stars Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley spent hours in the makeup chair preparing for their scenes in the film, and the practical latex prosthetics are kinky and surreal in the style of Screaming Mad George, the special effects artist behind the film. Society AND Freaked. They combine with the aesthetics of syringes and latex gloves to best describe them as “high-fashion cosmetic procedures,” bringing to mind “miracle cures” like Ozempic and Botox that encourage people (mostly women, let’s be honest) to stuff themselves with substances whose side effects won’t be known for decades so that they can become more palatable to patriarchal standards of beauty.

None of that stops the shitty, fat-ass men who run the world from throwing you out when you no longer give them a hard-on, as Elisabeth Sparkle (Moore) brutally discovers at the beginning of the film. Elisabeth is incredibly famous—billboard famous; Walk of Fame famous—and has been for decades. You’d think that would give her a little leverage when it comes to renegotiating her contract as the host of an aerobics show that broadcasts her toned body and radiant smile to millions of American homes every week. You’d be wrong.

In a scene that only hints at the coming revulsion, lecherous network executive Harvey (Dennis Quad) has a mouthful of shrimp as he informs Elisabeth that she is being put out to pasture. Themes in Substance are mostly expressed visually, and the film’s cast of male characters is itself a snide commentary: This movie is populated by average-looking men who judge women who, frankly, are out of their league. Quaid is very much in on the joke, playing Harvey like a cartoon wolf; toward the end of the movie, he brings in a pack of grizzled white guys in suits to gawk at Elisabeth’s eventual successor, and they parade around like Elmer Fudd hunting rabbits.

Little do they know that Elisabeth is also Elisabeth’s successor, reborn as a younger, smoother version of herself who calls herself Sue (Qualley). She does this with the help of the titular Substance, who injects himself intravenously with no questions asked, after receiving direction from a suspiciously smooth medical assistant. Substance contains a set of rules: First, you must activate the process only once. Second, you must stabilize your “second self” every day. And third, once your ideal self is born from your current body, you must give each of them the same amount of time – seven days each. Without exception.

Sue is receiving so much positive attention that it seems almost too good to be back in her old body for a whole week. And so she begins to push the limits of the system, and Elisabeth will suffer for it. It is these side effects that push Substance into the realm of “hagsploitation,” a horror subgenre that treats the aging female body as an object of fear and disgust. The difference is that these feelings aren’t imposed on the characters, but rather originate within them: Elisabeth projects her self-loathing outward when she panics after waking up with loose skin or varicose veins. (These changes quickly progress far beyond anything you might call “normal aging,” but again, this isn’t a subtle movie.)

The complexities of making a living based on appearance, and the void that remains when that life is no longer possible, provide rich text for Moore, whose “it girl” days in the mid-’80s also led to a long career as a famous movie star. But Moore is 62, and certainly aware of her changing status in the industry. Fargeat gives her the opportunity to work through the stages of mourning her former self on screen — particularly anger — while also playing with cultural stereotypes of older women. One can only hope that her performance was cathartic for her. It is certainly cathartic to watch.

Sue, meanwhile, loves every second of the superficial admiration laced with resentment she feels for her young, sexy form. Pretty girls smile, and Sue’s cheeks ache from the exposure of her firm, pink gums. As a character, she is an empty vessel, both in the text and in practice: Fargeat often shoots Qualley’s body in close-up, breaking her down into a collection of perfectly symmetrical parts. But while both stars do a fair amount of nudity in Substancethe camera’s gaze is not sexual; instead, we are invited to assess and closely examine waists, buttocks, and arms with the impartial eye of a mathematician (or a butcher).

Here the metaphor can be a bit misleading because Substance indulges in objectification in the name of critique. But there’s no mistaking the film’s feminist intentions. In Fargeat’s eyes, performing femininity is a grotesque, masochistic act. It’s a game you can’t win, no matter how much you excel at it. And the only way out is to lean in, to become the monster society already thinks you are. It’s simple: just stop shaving your legs, or wearing makeup, or punishing yourself for enjoying food. And from what I can tell, being a monster is a lot more fun.

Director: Coralie Fargeat
Writer: Coralie Fargeat
Starring: Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, Dennis Quaid
Release date: September 20, 2024