Coralie Fargeat’s 2024 feature, The Substance, just screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, disgusting audiences and critics alike.
It’s hard to describe The Substance without rambling on and on with endless adjectives. Yeah it’s gory. It’s grotesque. It’s messy. It’s maniacal. It’s unhinged and uncomfortable, hilarious and horrifying, surreal and sickening. It’s delirious, daring, disgusting. It’s techno Dorian Gray! And yet all these words do very little to describe how genuinely psychotic the film is. To put it simply, it is A LOT. 141 minutes of absolute mayhem. And unless something truly evil in the biblical and ancient sense of the word comes out in the next 4 months, The Substance should be the undisputed “Most Insane Movie of 2024”.
The Substance is Coralie Fargeat’s sophomore film, which won Best Screenplay at Cannes and has been lauded in the months since with adjectives and descriptors of its exploits. “Body Horror Masterpiece” is probably a critical consensus at this point and while that is difficult to dispute, and while you can read the endless reviews trying to qualify what the hell this film is, it can not be stressed enough how little words can prepare you for it or convey the tactile experience of watching it play out on an IMAX screen in a packed theatre.
But let’s try. Let’s qualify. Let’s cook. Let’s go. Like with all things, let’s start at the beginning.
The Substance is the follow-up to Coralie Fargeat’s debut, the 2017 thriller Revenge. Revenge, like The Substance, is A LOT of things, but is probably best described as a rape-revenge survival action thriller that veers into surreal splatter, psychedelia and black comedy. It’s a lot. Some have described it as a feminist take on the exploitation film and a reclamation of the rape-revenge genre. Personally, I don’t know if I agree with the use of reclamation, perhaps only if you place “pushing a genre to its absolute limit and logical endpoint and doing it better” under reclamation but that’s beside the point.
I really enjoyed Revenge when I watched it 3 years ago and have been wanting to revisit it since. Despite its incredibly dark subject matter, it’s a surprisingly fun and entertaining movie that culminates in a completely absurd, unbelievably bloody and triumphant climax. Think Death Proof or Inglourious Basterds or Django Unchained (Fargeat has cited Kill Bill as inspiration, expressing interest in “when blood and flesh create something that becomes baroque and operatic”). And since watching it, I have been waiting for The Substance.
With The Substance, Fargeat tackles body horror.
The premise is relatively simple. You can watch the trailer and basically predict the broad strokes of the first two acts. Demi Moore (in what I’d love to call a career best role, but I have somehow only seen 3 Demi Moore movies.) plays Elisabeth Sparkle, a former movie star turned television aerobics instructor who, after turning 50, is involuntarily exited from her show by her boss Harvey (played by Dennis Quaid), to be replaced with a younger, newer and ostensibly more beautiful starlet.
Sparkle, unwilling to be phased out of her job and eager to reclaim her past fame and youthful beauty, turns to The Substance, a secretive injection which promises to unleash a new version of yourself, “younger, more beautiful, more perfect”. The Substance is an apparent success, and by following the procedures, Sparkle is able to switch bodies every week with “Sue” (Margaret Qualley), the “new version” unleashed by The Substance. But remember. You Are One. You Can Not Escape From Yourself. The balance must be maintained and The Substance must not be misused. You can see where this is going.
Like I said, simply and relatively predictable for the most part. The themes are incredibly evident. Body horror to express the fear of ageing, body dysmorphia, cosmetic procedures, beauty standards. All of this is very clear and obvious from the trailer alone. The choice of Moore for the lead is an interesting bit of meta casting, an obvious nod to her status as an A-lister in the past and media obsession with her public and physical image. The same could be said for the casting of Qualley, the daughter of Andie MacDowell, Moore’s past co-star and friend (what is a nepo baby if not a new version of an older model?). It’s a morality tale, “BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR”, “BE HAPPY WITH WHAT YOU HAVE”, etc. A Black Mirror episode on bath salts. The Picture of Dorian Gray for the 21st Century.
But it’s Fargeat’s conceptual execution of virtually every aspect of The Substance (both the film and the procedure within it) that is something to behold, and very difficult to describe. I’ve written 700 words of context up to this point without tackling the film head-on because it’s hard to do it justice without, once again, being reduced to strings of adjectives.
So let’s talk feelings. To call the body horror effects of the film visceral isn’t accurate, it’s viscera. The biggest fear I had all the while watching this horror movie was that someone in the seats behind me would vomit on my head. Pus, blood, spit, vomit by the gallons, it is not for the faint of heart and can feel like an endurance test. I consider myself having a relatively strong stomach and a high tolerance for stuff like this. I’m not a gore fan but I can hold my own in that arena. I can proudly say that when teeth were pulled and nails ripped off in the film, I grimaced far less than those around me. But still, there were moments where I genuinely panicked to myself thinking, “Oh man, I’m not gonna make it” or my favourite saying of the week, “Brother, I am cooked”. 24 hours after watching, I am currently hungry as hell while writing this, and there is a delicious smash burger in my fridge waiting for me but I am not quite ready to face meat again just yet.
So let’s talk about the meat. It’s a central focus of any body horror film but The Substance in particular. And it’s very easy to gross people out. Aside from very impressive practical effects work, the ability to superficially disgust an audience isn’t inherently worthy of praise. I could show an audience a video of someone eating feces and people will repulse, that doesn’t make me Cronenberg or Carpenter (it makes me John Waters). Just like how jumpscares can feel cheap, appealing to instinctive reflexes won’t get you far. It’s gotta mean something.
The best way I can approach this is through Margaret Qualley’s Sue. Qualley is one of the best young actresses working today, an incredibly fearless and ferocious performer who I have never not seen just go for it all the way with her role and this is by far not an exception (This seems to be her first time in a horror movie, which seems like far too late. She’d kill it in a Scream movie, either as final girl or Ghostface, think Emma Roberts or Mikey Madison). The way Fargeat depicts Sue onscreen is so overtly sexualized and glamourous, it’s more comical than in any way erotic. It’s a satire of the male gaze (although the male gaze is borderline impossible to satirize; no matter how intentionally absurd it is, someone will probably be into it).
At one point I was reminded of those Carl’s Jr commercials and it struck me that’s exactly what these scenes are. They are absurdly sexualized commercials for meat. Fargeat’s close ups reduce Sue to portions of meat; breasts, waist, buttocks, lips, eyes, all zoomed in on and glistening, gyrating in absurdly revealing outfits. She has a similar approach in the beginning of Revenge, where the protagonist is shot from the point of view of the men watching her, overtly sexualized and glamorous, leering with an obvious undercurrent of predation.
She shoots deteriorating bodies the same way, hyper fixating on flaws, discolourations and imperfections brought on with age. Except the energy behind these shots are less in line with the glitz and glamour of those of Sue, but more with how Fargeat depicts rotting food and carcasses.
No one can accuse Fargeat of being subtle. Just as Revenge was described as a feminist take on the exploitation genre, the same could be said with her approach to the body horror genre. The morals of her story are clear; We don’t allow women to age, we treat them as disposable and discard them for the new model. We zoom in on their supposed flaws and analyze their bodies to death. We force them to endure humiliations to be tolerated and call that tolerance love. We reduce them to portions, to be consumed, swallowed up and spat out.
But remember, we are one. And we cannot escape from ourselves.
I loved the first two hours or so of The Substance. It has been awhile since I was so floored and shocked by a film. Despite reading reviews about it, and being able to proudly say I have been a fan of Fargeat since 2021, I was blown away by how extreme, bold, fresh and audacious the film was in its execution. It is a genuinely funny black comedy (although not in the way some in the audience reacted) with unbelievable practical effect work. I love the way Fargeat shoots indoor spaces as sterile liminal zones, making everything feel so surreal and nauseating even when there’s nothing explicitly disgusting happening. Quaid and Qualley are pitch perfect and Moore would be a shoe-in for a Best Actress nomination if I didn’t think the screener links would kill off half the Academy within 90 minutes.
But the film does falter in its final act, and that hurts it a lot. In many ways, that feels somewhat inevitable, it is a film that fearlessly escalates itself in its horrific designs, but eventually the more unhinged something gets, the more you appreciate why we have hinges in the first place. A speeding train can only go so fast until it derails and crashes.
As much fun as I had in the final act (which I won’t spoil, namely because once again it is impossible to describe with justice because I don’t know what the hell I saw, except to say that it takes a page out of Revenge’s absurdly bloody climax. David Ehrlich has compared it to that of Akira, which I can understand), the film unravels a bit thematically and you’re suddenly hit with the fact that it’s 141 minutes long and doesn’t delve into its material as deeply as it could in that timeframe. Still, if you are looking for an unforgettable theatrical experience, this is an unmissable film. If you can make it through it. No pressure.
The Substance is written and directed by Coralie Fargeat, and stars Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley and Dennis Quaid. It is distributed by MUBI and will be released in theatres on September 20th.
Thanks for reading this review.
