Having not had a chance to see it in the cinema but intrigued by the hype, I've signed up to Mubi specifically to watch Coralie Fargeat's The Substance. While the film has been out for a while, I'll try to be reasonably light on the SPOILERS here, but if you plan to see The Substance, I'd recommend watching it with as little foreknowledge as possible.
While I'm not as blown away by The Substance as some have been, it's undoubtedly an extremely powerful film, an evocative and lurid dissection of the cruelty of our shallow society. I am certain that a woman watching it would find it even more so, as while men are also subject to society's skin-deep judgment, it is women who must deal with it day in, day out. Nonetheless, it is interesting that the one other user of the Substance we meet in the film is a man, when the rest of the focus is so squarely on women.
The Substance is a thematically dense film, most obviously satirising the cut-throat world of Hollywood and its relentless exploitation of young performers. It also takes on themes of the cruelty and inevitability of ageing; parent-child rivalry; elder abuse; self-loathing and depression; self harm; cosmetic surgery; substance (small 's') abuse and addiction; the nature of beauty; society's reaction to disfigurement; the nature of identity, and more. Fargeat's direction is eccentric, exaggerating shots with extreme close-ups that magnify the grotesqueness of human life, yet this is shown to be, if not better, then at least more real than sanitised, airbrushed fakery.
Of course, she also delivers a stunning level of gore and revolting body horror, realised largely with practical effects – far more viscerally effective than endless CGI. (Although one of the most disturbing images of the film, the replication of eyes within eyes as the beginning of the Substance's process, is a brilliant bit of digital wizardry.) It's no surprise that Calgeat is a fan of David Cronenberg, in particular his masterpiece, The Fly; some moments are lifted directly from that film. More pertinent, though, is the shared use of extreme mutilation and deformation as a metaphor for disease and the ageing process. Like The Fly, The Substance is quite restrained in its use of gore and monstrosity, increasing it until the climactic and over-the-top finale. I'm informed that the film is equally indebted to Demi Moore's previous film, Requiem for a Dream; I've never seen that film, but I know enough about it to see that it shares with the The Substance a gruesome and uncompromising look at addiction and its effects on the mind and body.
You have to admire Moore for taking on such as role as Elisabeth, as someone who has been ridiculed for her own response to ageing, including not insubstantial cosmetic surgery, and having gone from the highest-paid actress in the world to someone whose career was largely considered to be over. Moore is astonishingly good in this, giving a painfully real and understandable performance as Elisabeth engages on her path of self-destruction. She has spoken of her discomfort in performing naked in the film, now that she is in her sixties (more than ten years older than her character), but, of course, she still looks incredible – which is, naturally, what the film is all about.
Even the remarkably beautiful Margaret Qualley isn't good enough for the perfection that Sue, Elisabeth's alter ego, represents, wearing false breasts for her own nude scenes. Qualley gives an equally strong performance, embodying Sue with a shallowness and cruelty that she hides beneath a marketable personality of naivete and Apple Pie Americanism. It's fascinating to watch Elisabeth's downward spiral reflected, and largely caused, by Sue's increasingly brutal treatment of her. Equally fascinating is Elisabeth and Sue's gradual emergence as separate identities, even though they are simply facets of the same person. When they finally separate, the event that kicks off their final descent into self-destruction, they are inevitably fused again, in the most horrific of ways imaginable.
Qualley, though, doesn't actually look particularly like Moore, which only serves to make the divide stronger and Elisabeth's story sadder. Sue presumably represents an idealised self-image; the person Elisabeth always believed she could be. That Sue instantly becomes a runaway success only furthers Elisabeth's feelings of inadequacy and low self-image. Elisabeth's binge-eating (judging by the amount of meat and eggs, largely driven by a need for copious amounts of protein to replace what was lost in Sue's “birth” and “weaning”) is a clear sign of her self-hatred. This manifests more blatantly in her rapid ageing and disfigurement as Sue's selfishly extends her own time, as well as both versions' increasingly vicious treatment of one another. (Never mind the events towards the end; the fact that neither aspect ever decides to put something down on the world's hardest bathroom floor for the bodyswap moments speaks volumes.)
The film comes close to being a two-hander, but it's impossible to overlook Dennis Quaid's performance as the loathsome Harvey. Also worth noting is Edward Hamilton Clark's performance as hopeful suitor Fred. Even though Fred seems a decent enough guy, both men are portrayed as physically off-putting – Fred with his yellowing teeth, Harvey with his shameless face-stuffing and constant shouting – yet they face no recrimination for their flawed, ageing appearances.
It's an intensely visual film, using colour, harsh lighting and extreme camera work to disorienting effect. Everything is extreme here, be it monstrously ugly or aggressively beautiful. Sue's “Call On Me” channelling erotic workout show is a case in point: relentlessly sexy but again using extreme close-ups to push this beyond its limits. Nonetheless, Qualley is incredibly hot in these scenes, forcing the viewer to become complicit in the sexualisation and exploitation of her character.
In reality, though, Qualley found filming these scenes traumatic, and could only bring herself to do them while high. Given that both she and Moore were injured somewhat by make-up and prosthetics, and that even Quaid almost made himself sick by devouring kilos of shrimp, it raises the question of when the depiction of exploitation becomes exploitation in itself.
Where the film falls down, unfortunately, is in the final act, which takes things too far into delirious horror. While there's some uncertainty as to how much we see is real and how much is hallucination, it seems we're meant to view the final, brutal events as actually happening. While it's certainly climactic, the final phase of Elisabeth and Sue's “treatment” and its aftermath takes the body horror into the absurd. Ultimately, it's too much, and sits poorly with the rest of the film, as heightened as it all is. It's a shame, as there were undoubtedly ways to complete the story in a similar fashion without going so ludicrously over-the-top. Still, even in this phase, the film is rife with blatant, in-your-face symbolism, almost screaming “Look at this! I dare you!”
Even as it pushes things too far in its final scenes, The Substance is one of the most powerfully satirical – if entirely unsubtle – films in years; a horror movie that relentlessly attacks its own industry and makes the audience question themselves for watching it.
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