“The Substance” in the cinema: Blowing up the system

In Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance,” Demi Moore competes against a younger version of herself. The film takes an uncompromising look at the obsession with youth.

Ruthless also with the leading actress: Demi Moore as Elisabeth Sparkle in “The Substance” Photo: Mubi

In the entertainment industry, beauty has an expiration date. For Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) it is her 50th birthday. On that day, the actress, who, like her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, has seen better days, is thrown out of her fitness show. The audience expects a younger body in front of the camera, you have to pay attention to the ratings, and ultimately you are also obliged to the goodwill of the shareholders. In just a few sentences, the disgusting producer Harvey (Dennis Quaid) slams the end of her career.

In “The Substance,” French director Coralie Fargeat makes the body horror, which escalates to unbearable levels over the course of the two-and-a-half-hour running time, appear extremely disgusting right from the start of the film. In a fancy restaurant, Elisabeth sits opposite her boss and has to endure the humiliation of being thrown out. The wide-angle camera is just a few centimeters away from Harvey’s face as he shoves shrimp dipped in butter into his mouth, sealing the end of Elisabeth’s career in a sleazy and sexist manner.

Dennis Quaid’s deep and magnificently smug laugh, the close-ups of his fat-covered lips and the highly scaled smacking create a body horror of a very special kind. For Demi Moore, it is even one of the most disgusting scenes in the film, as she recently said on the talk show “Late Night with Seth Meyers”.

A mysterious drug

„The Substance“. Director: Coralie Fargeat. With Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley and others. United Kingdom/USA/France 2024, 140 min.

When Elisabeth is offered a mysterious drug called “The Substance” a little later, she sees it as the way out of her downfall. The drug is supposed to make it possible to become a better version of yourself by replicating your own cells. As long as you stick to one rule: the old and new self must alternate on a weekly basis. A rule that is, of course, not followed.

A phone call with an anonymous voice is enough, and after a few days Elisabeth picks up the package with various liquids, syringes and tubes from a locker. This is where the grotesque madness begins. After the injection of the substance, a younger counterpart of herself emerges from her splitting back.

What follows is an uncompromising reckoning with the sexism, beauty and youth obsession of an entire entertainment industry. The “newborn” named Sue (Margaret Qualley) with her shapely body completely corresponds to the expected ideal of beauty. While Elisabeth’s naked body lies on the floor of her bathroom in a kind of comatose state, Sue is cast as her successor for the fitness show. The boss and his male entourage are blown away.

Pact with the devil

The gigantic advertising banner in front of Elisabeth’s glamorous luxury apartment with a panoramic view of Los Angeles will soon no longer be adorned with her body, clad in a skin-tight bodysuit, but with Sue’s. The female body is a commodity to be quickly discarded. Anyone who is no longer young and sexy is thrown out. For Elisabeth, who knows nothing other than the sexualized conditioning of her body, taking the substance is her pact with the devil.

With a taste for voyeurism, the camera juxtaposes the female bodies, the young and the aged

The world that Fargeat shows us is an anachronistic one. The story seems to take place in the present, at least that is what smartphones and flat screen TVs suggest, but one aspect is missing from this cosmos: social media. Show business on television is still the dominant player in the entertainment industry.

With great pleasure in voyeurism, the camera juxtaposes the two female bodies. Here, Sue’s young, taut and flawless body, and there, Elisabeth’s with its wrinkles and dents marked by time. Fargeat uses provocative images to show Sue’s rise as a new star in the TV firmament.

It is a male gaze, which she wants to dismantle with her film and at the same time perpetuates. While she is showering, the camera lustfully explores Sue’s full breasts and her curvaceous curves, she is repeatedly filmed from behind in her crotch, and when she bends forward while dancing, the camera stares with pleasure through her legs.

Exaggerated media satire

Coralie Fargeat’s exaggerated media satire follows the logic of dramatic excess, which knows neither purification nor mercy for its characters. Rather, the film wants to blow up the entire system. It is enormously entertaining for long stretches and you throw your hands up in despair at the insane, downright absurd ideas with which Fargeat has Elisabeth’s body maltreated. The body horror, which is staged in magnificently stylish and cramped sets, builds up and up before escalating in a grand finale.

Demi Moore, who has hardly been seen in major film roles in recent years, celebrates a brilliant comeback with her ruthless performance. The overly long film sometimes gets lost in redundancies. Fargeat, who won the award for best screenplay in Cannes for “The Substance”, openly bows to the great classics of horror. The Overlook Hotel in Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” is quoted as well as Brian De Palma’s furious blood orgy in “Carrie”.