Yes, a movie called The Substance ironically doesn’t really have any, but that’s sort of the point. French provocateur Coralie Fargeat’s first English-language feature is a steaming cacophony of excess. A cathedral to broad, deliberately shallow camp horror that says the quiet part out loud over and over so many times, it might as well be beating you over the head and screaming it in your ear. Which, considering the scale of the visuals and sound design here, it kind of is. An experience that’ll turn both heads and stomachs in equal measure, and cause nothing but arguments across the discourse.
Because there’s no real doubt that The Substance is the most aggressively in-your-face film of the last decade. Even considering we’re in something of a golden-age of bad taste auteurs – giving them Academy Awards (Yorgos Lanthimos) and generous budgets (Fede Álvarez) – this is a lot. A paper-thin morality tale about female body image and fame that feels like it’s been ripped straight from a 20 year-old Reddit thread, zhuzhed up with glossy stars and designed to within an inch of its life.
Set in a bizarre, alternative Hollywood built on ’80s-chic, a scathingly-cast Demi Moore is vintage starlet Elizabeth Sparkle (if you think that name’s not exactly subtle, just wait), a crumbling celebrity who finds herself usurped from her throne as the most watched aerobics instructor in all the land (yes, aerobics – keep up) by a particularly nefarious male network exec called Harvey (told you).
Faced with nothing more than a crumbling retirement eating chicken in front of the TV, she snaps and orders a mysterious neon-green liquid called ‘The Substance’, promising a new lease of life by effectively cloning her cells and creating an ample-chested younger version to re-live the glory days of wearing leotards and shaking one’s ass. The only snag in her clearly very well thought-out plan, is that the two women will have to share the spotlight, symbiotically linked and forced by their very biology to only ever be awake for a week at a time, while the other sleeps. And nobody wants to share in this day and age.
What ensues is a baffling two and a half hour explosion of boobs, bums, slow-motion gyrating and excessive gore, played at the loudest possible volume to the detriment of literally everything else about it. The performances are cartoonish and vulgar; the cinematography like a digital-age rejig of Requiem For A Dream; the vaguely Dorian Grey-esque narrative goes exactly where you’d expect (maybe with a few extra calamitous twists) until completely giving in to self-parody in its final third (Cronenbergian with a big ‘C’, its final bow feels closer to a Rick and Morty skit of the man over a genuine escalation; a gooey practical effects monstrosity that finally gives Society’s Screaming Mad George a run for his money).
Fargeat’s hyper-saturated debut Revenge was an exciting, but very cut-and-paste exercise in style over substance. And while this sophomore effort is certainly a step-up in scale, it also makes her first film look like a well-versed academic text in comparison; a throw-absolutely-everything-at-the-wall approach from a female filmmaker on the rise, desperate to seize and exploit every opportunity given to her.
And so she should. As much as The Substance is blunt, garish, disgusting, unlikeable, bloated and downright nasty, it’s also undeniably – even wickedly – entertaining. A pointedly vapid body horror that positions itself well beyond the realms of simply being in on the joke, thriving on the ostentatiousness of heavy-handed camp to deliver something that is so outlandish and so overdone, it can only be the work of a genre director at the very height of their ambition.
The film’s Cannes premiere, inflated runtime and Mubi-backed release might skew it towards an audience with subtler tastes, but this is as horror as horror gets – cut straight from the Brian Yuzna School of Sick. Destined for cult stardom in the years to come; the sort of deliberately hostile work that demands an opinion, and couldn’t give less of a shit if it’s good or bad.
Long live the new(er) flesh, long live Coralie Fargeat.
The Substance screened as part of Pigeon Shrine FrightFest 2024.
