Is The Substance brilliant feminist critique or a soulless mess?
For better and for worse, The Substance, the new, buzzy body horror film, sends up oppressive beauty standards with the subtlety of a blowtorch.
The substance itself, a brat-green liquid labeled “ACTIVATOR” in the font of a minimalist skincare line, ignites a strange cellular reaction. When injected into an egg, as in the film’s title sequence, the yolk trembles and splits into two. Injected into Elisabeth, played by the cannily cast Demi Moore, a “newer, better you” – an idealized clone named Sue (Margaret Qualley) with more collagen and fewer wrinkles – emerges from a gnarly slice along her spine. (The substance’s mysterious company, off-screen save for a few lockboxes in a vacant Los Angeles, provides twine for the strikingly icky stitch-ups).
Dualities abound in The Substance; Elisabeth is besieged by reflections – by old photos of herself as a younger, more successful fitness TV host, by mirrors reflecting her aged (and at 61, beautiful by any standard) face, by an aspect of her psyche so desperate for youth that it’s willing to split into another being. The rules of both the substance and the film are rigid – switch bodies every seven days, via nutrition packs and a crisp multi-step procedure evoking weight-loss regimes hawked on Instagram – yet murky. Though the company stresses that Elisabeth and Sue “are one”, they do not share a consciousness, instead competing with each other for more time and bodily control to increasingly brutal, grotesque and excessively bloody ends. (Suffice to say, there’s a Dorian Gray asterisk to the substance, and neither obey the rules.)
If Elisabeth doesn’t even get to experience the firmer ass and glowing youth she so wantonly craves, why continue? That question lost me, but given the pressure women feel to never age, the internet’s relentless panopticon of self-critique and the dearth of roles for female actors of Moore’s age to sink their teeth into, The Substance’s audacity is enough to attract attention for meaning that may or may not be there. Fittingly for its fissured protagonists, the film, from the French writer and director Coralie Fargeat, has provoked some of the most polarized reactions this year. It drew raves at the Cannes Film Festival, where it netted Fargeat a screenplay award and led some viewers to walk out mid-screening. Reviews have been similarly divided between effusive praise – The Substance as deranged, brilliantly disgusting feminist critique – and exhaustion with its punishing, hyper-stylized portrayal of a woman reduced to maddening obsession.
I’m admittedly more in the latter camp, though I arrived at The Substance already wary of a wave of voguish, nominally feminist cinema that presupposes female trauma and finds deflated, if splashy, dramatic stakes in the reveal of everything and everyone being the worst possible version imaginable. These so-called #MeToo thrillers – Promising Young Woman, Don’t Worry Darling, Blink Twice, among others – more directly concern sexual assault, which is not Fargeat’s direct focus, though The Substance does feature a cartoonishly boorish media executive named Harvey played by a repulsive Dennis Quaid, who overtly dismisses Elisabeth for her age and objectifies Sue. But the Substance, though a genre film, operates in a similar register, over-indexing visual flair and psychological extremity over coherent logic or much to say beyond yeah, it’s pretty bad out there.
Still, Fargeat’s willingness to go there – and by there, I mean a woman’s brutal self-annihilation for a pervasive idea of beauty – needles even after the film devolves into an egregiously long and prosthetics-driven mess. The film’s most intriguing conceit is also its downfall: taking on Elisabeth’s warped, deeply lonely worldview by setting her spiral in a brutalist, surreal Los Angeles devoid of a recognizable entertainment industry or personal backstory. In interviews, Fargeat has said the film’s disconnection from reality was a deliberate choice to make the story more timeless, to represent Hollywood more as a hologram of ideas than a specific place. The bluntly retro (minus smartphones) and starkly color-coded film provocatively looks like borderline psychosis. One could argue that fully inhabiting Elisabeth’s delusional lust for youth, her level 11 body dysmorphia and lacerating self-loathing, is the point. But the effect is not so much relatable timelessness, or mitosis of the mind brought to life, as abstract to the point of alienating. The 1992 film Death Becomes Her, starring Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn as petty and youth-obsessed women, delivers the same message with far more wit, specificity and practical effects.
Fans, and certainly Fargeat herself, would say the film’s bluntness, its gonzo too-much-ness, is an effective style choice. I’d argue for all its intriguing material, Fargeat’s deliberately unsubtle execution crosses the line into self-satisfied excess, boldness mistaken for brilliance. That the Substance provokes at all, though, may be evidence of its success; these are the private anxieties that rankle, contradict and gnaw at our inner selves, that shade our perceptions and are often uglier than we’d ever admit.
Related: Blink Twice and the problem with #MeToo thrillers
And certainly casting Moore, a 90s icon who has endured misogynist judgment, excess scrutiny and waning opportunities, in this flashy of a role is a victory in and of itself. The film’s most effective sequence owes to her alone: anxiously preparing for a date, Elisabeth dresses and fixes her face on loop, never satisfied enough with her appearance to leave. We see her visage darken with anger, disappointment, disgust – at the fine lines, the shadows, the evidence of age. For a fleeting, heart-wrenching moment, there’s a full woman in the mirror.
