The Substance (2024) One of the Finest Horrors of the Year (Review)

At first blush, Fargeat’s latest feature recalls that recent female-directed Franco-horror opus, Ducournau’s Titane. Both mix sex and horror in provocative ways that reaped laurels at Cannes, with The Substance winning Best Screenplay at this year’s festival. Both display a fascination with smooth surfaces and the ways women become pariahs for challenging the gendered status quo. But whereas Titane is about the cool steel of the automobile, The Substance is interested in a very different form of hard body, the ideal male depiction of womanhood. It’s a subject Fargeat mined to great effect in her previous feature, the kinetic Revenge, where Matilda Lutz casts off her giggly tease persona to best the chauvinistic men hunting her. The Substance keeps this war of the sexes between repulsive and all-powerful men and the women who twist themselves into knots trying to achieve their impossible standards. But Fargeat zooms out from the micro-focus of four people in the desert to take on the beast itself- Tinseltown and all its tawdry glories.

The Substance concerns one Elizabeth Sparkle, a former film star now reduced to some twenty years of Fonda-style aerobics on morning TV. It’s a fall from grace but one that she seems to take in her stride on her fiftieth birthday. That is until Harvey, Dennis Quaid’s repugnant television producer, abruptly fires her for being simply too old. First seen aggressively using a urinal and then shovelling prawns into his mouth with obscenely exaggerated chewing noises (these are not the same scene), Harvey is one of Fargeat’s favourite men to parody, those who are at once obnoxious and pathetic. Men who have power simply because they have a penis. Her women would run circles around them, if only they were given the chance. But then she’s tipped off about The Substance, an experimental technique that promises “the best version” of herself, “younger, more beautiful, more perfect”, to quote the growly voiceover of the commercial Elizabeth watches. It’s a pitch-perfect parody of those advertisements for dodgy supplements the internet is currently awash in, promising life-changing results without telling you the nasty side effects in the vain pursuit of eternal youth. But youth is exactly what Elizabeth needs. And so, naked in her bathroom, she pushes a syringe into her body to bring forth a new self.

Up until now, we’ve been exclusively following Elizabeth, as played by Demi Moore. It’s an inspired piece of casting by Fargeat, drawing on Moore’s image as a 90s superstar famous for her body as much as her filmography. The pregnant “More Demi Moore” magazine cover and her topless scenes in Striptease were groundbreaking for their time, symbols of idealised womanhood beyond the Hollywood cut-off of twenty-five. Moore’s presence as a fully nude actress twice that age (she will be celebrating her sixty-second birthday this year) recalls these thirty year old provocations. It also recalls the cruelty with which consumerism discards those who are considered too old in favour of the young and fresh. Because from out of Moore’s back emerges the body of current provocative It Girl, Margaret Qualley.

From here, a Dorian Gray-style fantasy develops. Qualley gets seven days to live as the young and gorgeous Sue, reaping the rewards for her beauty by taking Elizabeth’s old job as host of the morning workout show. But she has to then spend seven days as Elizabeth, rotting without purpose in her luxurious apartment. Without exception, she must adhere to these demands. Elizabeth and Sue may be separate beings, but they share the same life force, the same vital fluid. A balance must be maintained.

But Sue is a projection of Elizabeth’s most extreme personality, an obsession with her visual beauty that gets Elizabeth into a car accident early in the film. Qualley is often framed gazing at herself in mirrors, on TV cameras or from the giant billboard that carries her sultry image outside her own apartment, in a classic expression of cinematic narcissism. Sue loves to look at herself and she loves others looking at her, especially men. She dresses like the ultimate Cool Girl, rarely seen in anything but short shorts and tight lycra to show off her perfect curves and flat stomach. She giggles and pouts, whispers and winks. Sue is everything men want but cannot have and she regards Elizabeth’s age with a visible contempt; her cocoon is a reminder of her own decay. And so, when the opportunity comes to tilt the balance a little in Sue’s favour, she grasps it, only to wither Elizabeth in the process.

The Substance then starts a vertiginous tilt downwards, as the two sides of Elizabeth’s personality go to war with drastic consequences. Sue becomes even more perfect while a decayed Elizabeth increasingly wallows in consumerist squalor, cutting off her nose to spite her oh-so-pretty face in a performance Bette Davis would applaud for sheer bitchery. Then, at the hour forty mark, Fargeat selects top gear. If Revenge had one fault, it was that it was all too willing to strain credibility to make its astute observations. The Substance has no such concerns. This is very obviously hypercharged fantasy, allegory pushed to the absolute breaking point. This is a film where there’s no names, just “The Show”, “The Network”, “The Substance”. With so much in the abstract, reality can take a back seat.

And what a back seat it takes. I don’t think I’ve cackled in a cinema as hard in months as Fargeat passes Cronenberg and his vaginal orifices to enter Tskuamotoland in fine style. There’s an exceptional use of cinematic reference points throughout The Substance, from The Shining’s long corridors and depictions of cronish womanhood to an inspired Vertigo needle drop. Yet even with this cine-literacy, Fargeat is never a slavish imitator, refashioning these images into something defiantly her own, an entirely coherent development of Revenge that paints the Dream Factory as having its hooks in women so deep that they tear each other down to get a place at the table.

If The Substance has one flaw, it’s that at two hours and twenty minutes it runs the risk of exhausting more than consistently electrifying. There’s at least two moments where Fargeat could have stopped the film and made something of equal power. But somehow, the gonzo finale ties it all together perfectly. Wilde once noted that “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars”, and as we watch Elizabeth sparkling for the last time, there’s a twinge of pathos for this poor woman who dreamed of the impossible; of being an equal in a man’s world. Not everyone’s taste, but one of the finest horrors of the year, for my money. 

Ethan’s Archive – The Substance