The science behind Dorian Gray
When the creative genius of David Cronenberg opened that Pandora’s Box with the manifestation of the New Flesh in his film “Invaded Bodies” (1982), giving birth to the concept of “body horror”, where body and mind engage in a fierce battle with results of grotesque symbolism just short of a poetics of the horrendous, perhaps he could not appreciate the shock waves that his fascinating contribution to film narrative would bequeath to subsequent projects in such different paths ranging from the visceral metaphor such as “Swallow” (Mirabella-Davis, USA, 2019) or “Teeth” (Lichtenstein, USA, 2007) to the sublime appropriations of his contributions such as “Titanium” (Ducournau, France, 2021) and “The Wild Region” (Escalante, Mexico, 2016), and now he found his state of purification with “The Substance”, an indispensable work that brings together the most An eighties movie freak like Brian Yuzna’s “Society” (1988) with sensitive and intelligent rhetoric in the form of brave sarcasm about the media deification of bodily beauty without moral skids or cheap denunciations, which shamelessly attacks ageism and the cult of personality.
French director Coralie Fargeat takes up Cronenberg’s baton, breathing vigor and modernity into what the Canadian master has worked with solvency in powerful works such as “McCrimes del Futuro” or “Mapa de las Estrellas”, with the pleasant addition of a masterful performance by Demi Moore, who here offers a role of daring proportions as Elisabeth Sparkle, an old celebrity who carries out her career as the host of an aerobics exercise program (a hurtful parody of figures like Jane Fonda, who did the same due to the scarcity of relevant roles already in her years) until the owner of the network, a ruthless and unpleasant guy named Harvey (a convincing Dennis Quaid), fires her because he wants a younger girl to start. Desperate, she turns to a black market product called “The Substance,” which she learns about when a nurse hooks her up to it after the former actress suffers a serious car accident. With the product in hand and under the promise of giving way to “a better version of herself,” Elisabeth submits to a cell reproduction serum that immediately but painfully generates a rejuvenated, beautiful and perfect duplicate that hatches from none other than her back. Her new self adopts the name Sue (Margaret Qualley) and both must stabilize themselves with a fluid that they must extract from their spines to be injected into each other without fail and with the understanding that both are the same, because when Sue is activated, Elisabeth loses consciousness and vice versa. Of course, like every story with Faustian overtones and remnants of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, there is a conditioning element: a limit of seven days per state, after which they must reconnect with their other body under penalty of very regrettable side effects, which we will discover when Sue inevitably takes advantage of her new vitality while Elisabeth, affected by the excesses of her other self, seeks revenge…
The film finds a great ally in Fargeat’s stylized direction, very much in the style of Kubrick, who masterfully administers generous doses of surreal social satire, middle-age melodramas, eroticism somewhere between macabre and bizarre, strong criticism of labor obsolescence and a forceful denunciation of the objectifying male gaze, without falling into misandric nonsense. “The Substance” is a complete, complex film, full of enormous performances, thanks to the fact that the cast perfectly understands the self-parodying nuance of their roles, while the script procreates idea after idea without waste or narrative overshoot. The explosive ending unifies with winks to the dirty gore of the 80’s Fargeat’s valid intention to mock the hypocritical individualist conformism of the 21st century, with the false illusions sold by Internet celebrities with their embellishing filters to try to match them. This is one of the best movies of the year so far.
Email: [email protected]
