It’s Elisabeth’s birthday, and she ought to be celebrating. Portrayed by Demi Moore in Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, the actress-turned-TV fitness instructor is a 50-something bombshell: toned legs, shiny hair, radiant megawatt smile. But when she hears a network exec, Harvey (Dennis Quaid), refer to her as “the old bitch,” the smile is wiped off her face. Later, she sees a casting call, searching for her successor: “18-30 years ONLY”. So it’s off to the martini bar, then to A&E.
Vulnerable, lonely and desperate, Elisabeth turns to a mysterious injectable drug available on the black market (though weirdly, no capital appears to be exchanged). Taking “The Substance” will spawn a younger, hotter self through which to live out one’s dreams. Still, there are rules: only one self is permitted to roam freely at any given time (the other sleeps, hooked up to a feeding tube), and the pair must “switch” every seven days, no exceptions. Enter Margaret Qualley’s “Sue”, a gorgeous creature who bursts from Elisabeth’s spine and promptly vomits neon bile – sewing up the wound she was birthed from without tenderness.
Qualley, the spitting image of her mother, veteran Hollywood beauty Andie MacDowell, is cleverly cast as Elisabeth’s fresher-faced doppelgänger. Even smarter is the choice of Nineties sex symbol Moore, who has long defied expectations regarding her body and her age. In 1991, she was photographed naked and pregnant on the cover of Vanity Fair, and was paid a record-breaking $12.5m for Striptease (1996), in which she bared her breasts. The tabloids were shocked when she appeared in a bikini in 2003’s Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle at the age of 40; the same year, she began dating Ashton Kutcher, 15 years her junior. In The Substance, Moore’s nude scenes are clinical rather than sexy – unfolding under harsh lighting and on cold, hard white tiles.
Ozempic, Botox, “vampire facials”: the lengths women will go to to look good and stay relevant are ripe for satire. This grimly funny body horror takes those lengths to comic extremes. Still, it is a blunt instrument.
With her pink leotard, heart-shaped earrings and sticky, lip-gloss-coated pout, Sue styles herself as a brunette Workout Barbie. A drooling Harvey soon hires her as Elisabeth’s replacement. Writer-director Fargeat pays special attention to Sue’s exercise routines, the camera zooming in approvingly on her perky, gyrating bum. It’s exaggerated, and funny, but without access to Sue’s inner life, her vapidity grows tedious. If Fargeat is attempting to criticise a culture that only values women for their looks, it’s a misstep to present Sue as a cipher, whose only ambition is to be admired.
As Sue’s fame grows, she greedily extends her “awake” time, impacting Elisabeth’s body. A shrivelled crone’s finger is the least of her worries. As payback, Elisabeth spends her awake time bingeing on rich food.
It’s easy to root for Moore, who brings a mix of brittleness and fragility to her role as a faded star (Elisabeth’s last name, by the way, is Sparkle). Moore’s face maps her character’s eroding self-respect, which seems to deteriorate with each grasp towards youth. In one sobering, stress-inducing scene, Elisabeth shimmies into a scarlet dress and readies herself for a date. When she glimpses Sue’s image, smirking from a billboard outside her apartment, she returns to the bathroom mirror, piling on the make-up. In typical movie cliché, she smears it across her face in defeat. But the idea that too much scrutiny can lead to self-sabotage is one of Fargeat’s sharper observations. And given the film’s blasé attitude towards blood, it’s a quietly violent scene.
The film is peppered with grotesqueries. Bones crack, a cooked chicken leg emerges from a belly button, and a bloodbath puts both Carrie and The Shining to shame. Fargeat, who directed 2017’s stylish rape-retribution thriller Revenge, relishes lurid, midnight-movie excess. Two thirds into the film, she dispenses with all polite restraint, descending into full-on monster-movie madness. Her relentlessness is grinding, and this section outstays its welcome.
The film is not subtle or subversive. That women willingly buy in to the oppressive forces of the beauty industrial complex is not a new idea, and that we cheer them on isn’t either. It’s depressing to think Elisabeth could be boiled down to her insecurities, or that her dreams are never bigger than to be seen and adored.
It is, however, entertaining. A gory fight sequence in Elisabeth’s plush high-rise apartment is so athletic it becomes camp, while an encounter with a mangled amoeba (to reveal more would be a spoiler) provoked hysterics in this viewer that ended up feeling like relief.
“The Substance” is in cinemas now
[See also: Luca Guadagnino’s wryly horny tennis film Challengers]
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This article appears in the 18 Sep 2024 issue of the New Statesman, What’s the story?