Feeling crushed by impossible beauty standards and society’s hyperfixation on youth is nothing new. But Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance” arrives in the wake of the Ozempic era, when a quick shot promises weight loss that seemed impossible to achieve without going under the knife just a few years ago. In my social media feed, the ads offer the chance to “feel like your old self again” and to give it a try for cheap and see fast results. Tempting, isn’t it? The parallels between GLP-1 weight-loss drugs to the movie’s aforementioned substance end there. But Fargeat, who wrote and directed the film, twists the search for a “fountain of youth” shot into a blood-and-neon drenched spectacle.
As an actress, Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) once dazzled audiences, but, like her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, she has seen better days. She loses her job leading a fitness class for a daytime TV show when a grotesque executive named Harvey (Dennis Quaid) cancels her program to make room for anyone “young.” Heartbroken over being unceremoniously dumped for her age, Elizabeth learns of a mysterious product called The Substance, which creates a younger version of herself that will allow her to continue working in the youth-obsessed entertainment business. However, like the monsters in “Gremlins,” The Substance comes with a very specific set of rules: She’s only to activate her younger self once, and she and her perky alter ego are to switch off every seven days without exception. They are allegedly supposed to share the same consciousness, but as Elisabeth and her younger self, Sue (Margaret Qualley) continue with The Substance, they learn about the unspoken side effects of pursuing youth at any cost.
Fargeat shows sympathy for both Elisabeth and Sue’s plights as one might for Frankenstein and the monster he creates. What begins as an experiment towards a new beginning quickly warps with unintended consequences. In “The Substance,” Fargeat also references David Cronenberg’s fondness for body horror in movies like “The Brood,” where a mad scientist experiments on a pregnant woman with dire results, Stuart Gordon’s “Re-Animator,” which also features a neon green goo that resembles The Substance, James Whale’s “The Invisible Man,” which follows a medical marvel gone awry, and Brian De Palma’s “Carrie,” in the way it uses copious amounts of blood and destruction to illustrate a girl’s pain. Perhaps the use of Bernard Herrmann’s “Vertigo” theme feels too on the nose, but it fits thematically in the story and its obsessive mood.
As with her lean-and-mean feature debut “Revenge,” Fargeat writes a tight script focused on very few characters. She matches her talented on-screen collaborators with an equally formidable team behind-the-camera including cinematographer Benjamin Kracun, who builds on the lurid pink and blue color scheme of “Revenge” morphing it into a bold and bright color palette fit for Beverly Hills, costumes by Emmanuelle Youchnovski, who incorporates even more eye-catching colors and materials to shape each character’s personalities, and composer Raffertie, whose catchy and propulsive beats make the movie feel like it’s speeding past traffic on the 405.
“The Substance” may use horror trappings to critique the entertainment business and the multibillion dollar industry cashing in on people’s search for the fountain of youth, but it does so with such panache that it’s still having its share of fun. With the caricature of Harvey, who is so cartoonishly loud and awful in every scene, Fargeat and Kracun often switch to a fish-eye lens or uncomfortable close-ups to make him appear even more grotesque and hypocritical for cutting Elizabeth’s show. Production designer Stanislas Reydellet and his team’s stylized layouts also play into the movie’s heightened reality, which can be seen at the TV studio where an overlong hallway is soaked in the orange colors of “The Shining” carpet and at the pharmaceutical depot Elizabeth visits that looks right out of “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
As Sue, Qualley is reimagined into the sexpot-next-door with an idealized hot body who has a fondness for neon workout clothes, lip gloss, big earrings, and boys. Unlike Elizabeth’s fitness show, Sue’s workout videos zoom in on her body parts because those are the pieces of her executives like Harvey are fetishizing and selling to the audience, reinforcing the worship of youth and its gravity-defying skin. As far as mustache-twirling villains go, Quaid may not have the facial hair, but he has a maniacal laugh and heartless persona to match Harvey’s ostentatious suits. He looks to be having a field day behaving badly as the personification of the cruelty women experience in the industry. It’s easily Quaid’s best acting in recent memory, and it’s not even the best one in the movie.
“The Substance” works as well as it does because of Moore’s unbridled performance as a woman struggling with self-hatred, society’s treatment of her, and a newfound dependency on a miracle drug. In one particularly heartbreaking scene, Elizabeth stands in front of a mirror, fussing over the final details of her makeup and outfit. Although she looks glamorous as anyone could hope to look, her face betrays a dissatisfied stare as she sees more flaws than beauty before her. It’s a ritual many of us might know too well as we stress over accessories and lip color in the hopes of looking fashionable, carefully adding or subtracting layers of clothes and jewelry to feel good in our own skin. Elizabeth is so displeased with her image, she aggressively wipes the deep shade of lipstick across her face and pulls off the fake lashes from her lids. She can’t see her own beauty, and that will upend her life. While it may feel like a cautionary tale for our times, the horrors at the heart of “The Substance” have been with us for many years, and the issues the movie uncovers are so much more than skin deep.
This review was filed from the premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. It opens on September 20th.
