The fairest of them all

THE SUBSTANCE

2024

Written and directed by Coralie Fargeat

Spoilers: moderate, also I get personal and weird

To be clear about it from the outset, The Substance is a shining beacon in a twilit world.  It's the first movie to have been released in nearly two years that I've been compelled to give full marks to—a relatively certain lock for the best film of 2024, and a ready pick for the fourth-best so far (and I am contemplating third-best) of a decade already half over with, and if both these honors are earned against relatively thin competition, I do not mean that to be held against it.  It's likewise worth remarking, especially in 2024, that it's some actual cinema we're dealing with here, all right.  It's blessed with a fussed-over and indubitably-correct minimalist postmodern, fashion magazine sort of aesthetic, punched through with a weirdly timelost 80s gaudiness (the big deal gross-out horror is a part of that, and plausibly not even the most important part), that together situate it in a sort of overheated neverwhen; that neverwhen is created and captured in a disorienting combination of sterile, graphic flatness and vertiginous impressions of endless depth, sometimes on the same sets, by production designer Stanislas Reydellet and cinematographer Benjamin Kracun, executing the will of their director, Coralie Fargeat, making with The Substance her sophomore feature (auteusing, she also wrote the script).  So while her craftspeople's work is vital, it's probably not as important as her own eye and (to use the cliche) her own vision, and especially her own editing, effected by a team that also included, besides herself, Jerome Eltabet and Valentin Feron.  Fargeat has ensured, though I am barely sure how, that a movie that's very similar in any one part of it to practically every single other part of it—a movie that barely has a plot and which involves possibly literally only five locations (even if we're counting an immaculate white bathroom in its protagonist's apartment, that somehow manages to be meaningfully-overdesigned in its minimalism, as a separate "location") and which furthermore shuttles itself between just these five locations without any great deal of plot for a mind-boggling 141 minutes of runtime—from ever feeling remotely visually or narratively stagnant, or indeed ever feeling like it's not in a constant state of acceleration towards some unknowable velocity.  And that's despite its endgame being fairly obvious and fatalistic, even in its specific shape.

Fargeat's script is about stuff, too—no scarequotes! it really is—but it does its work in a manner not of its era, almost completely devoid of didacticism (there is maybe one flashback line that feels so the second time), and achieves the superlatives I'm going to give it in no small part because of how inordinately deftly (the connotations of the word "delicately" advise against it , but the phrase certainly occurred to me) that this script resolves its own internal tensions, for starters between being merely clever and being intelligent, and choosing correctly; then, in a more cosmically balanced and open-hearted way than could be expected from the movie's logline, it resolves its tensions between its selling point, which is its freakish gross-out horror, and its actual point, which is its satirical comedy; and on down, between contempt and compassion, between society and the individual, hell, between man and woman.  It is the platonic ideal of The Discourse Object, transcending discourse.  Nevertheless, I can do no more than to tell you to go see it, for while it's of no use other than to settle it in my own mind, discursion is all we've got here.

So: she just turned fifty, and all that Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore, aged sixty, which I frankly suspect is part of this satirical comedy's joke) is going to get is fired from her job.  Until this morning, she was the host of an aerobics show that, as her boss Harvey (a magnificently slimy Dennis Quaid) explains, has been waning in the ratings, precisely on account of her age.  By fortuitous happenstance, she's in the right place to receive a surreptitious offer of help: an invitation to partake of the secret black market drug, "the Substance," which promises a solution to her problem.  For a brief period, she abstains, but sitting in her house all damn day friendless and alone gets old (this barely ever changes: it really is the profoundest wonder that this movie is n-e-v-e-r boring).  Her occasional ventures outside fail to result in much indication that she's still wanted by anyone, or at least, to the extent it does result in such an indication—as with an exaggeratedly nebbishy classmate from high school (Edward Hamilton-Clark)—that she's still wanted by anyone whose validation is actually worthwhile.  Soon she's willing to take the chance.  Following the instructions of the mysterious organization's brusque customer service representative, she acquires the Substance, already there waiting on her in a cloak-and-dagger deposit box, representing all we shall ever learn about where the Substance comes from, or what the goals of its makers are (and hence one of the film's very best jokes is in this silence: that it really is just some weirdo charity at work, dedicated to making the world a better place by turning a bunch of old hot people back into young hot people for free).

After inventorying the tastefully-tastelessly-designed contents of her Substance box, she injects the "activator," and born in horror from a gaping split in her backside is the new her, for whom Elisabeth eventually adopts the pseudonym "Sue" (Margaret Qualley).  Sue is the "younger, more beautiful, more perfect" drone body, integrating Elisabeth's memories and personality, and which Elisabeth uses, in a coup, to reclaim her old job for a new, more oversexed generation.  Meanwhile, her old body is lying there on the bathroom floor, unconscious and inert, yet not altogether useless.  The drug's instructions are clearly labeled and extremely simple: every day a measure of sustaining fluid must be extracted from the original body's back-womb and injected into the drone, and after seven days of activity, the drone is going to have to be put aside so that the original body can rebuild its stores of the liquid, allowing the cycle to begin again, and balance to be maintained; the upshot is that every seven days, Elisabeth's consciousness must be reinstantiated in her old body, no matter whether it looks and feels even worse, now that she has Sue's point of direct comparison.  Inevitably, Elisabeth is not going to follow these instructions, and balance will not be maintained.

If the summary's longer than I expected it's solely because I spelled out the rules to more-or-less the letter (and to add to that, while I was perceiving for a little while a desire for a bit more sci-fi scaffolding here, by the end I was impressed with how little it would've mattered, and by how much almost everything here, notwithstanding a chicken leg, which could be a hallucination, still makes remarkably good literal sense for a movie that was never going to live or die by virtue of making good literal sense).  The thing that needs to be emphasized—for it's possibly the biggest reason why the movie is a satirical comedy before anything else—is that there's no catch: use it right, and the Substance works.

This film—on paper a very-schematic-sounding one—gets at a lot of related things, and going up the ladder, we can start with "beauty is pain but many women will endure the latter for the former," now rendered as excessive hyperbole with all those body horror elements, of which the back-womb is only the start.  It is also about beauty standards, and their oppressiveness, and at this point I have not described a necessarily interesting movie, given the potential banality of these themes (perhaps gratingly so, when its sexagenarian lead actor still looks this good—but then, referring to her performance with the stock, coded phrase "fearless" without applying the same adjective at the same time to Qualley, to whom it applies equally if not moreso, given that she has to be literally flawless to satisfy the textual as well as the formal demands of the movie, while Moore only has to be a human woman, would not be the compliment some people think it is).  It's also another opportunity to ponder the utility of continuing to hammer away at the old truism that there are no roles for women of a certain age, when it simultaneously feels like the lion's share of really terrific roles in Hollywood for any gender haven't involved people much shy of forty for a long while—why, for a key recent example, consider Demi Moore in The Substance—though this is a gap that, bless it, The Substance is addressing with such extreme aggression that it might even be one of those things it's "about," if only as a fuzzy, tertiary theme, apart from the crystalline clarity of the main ones. (My keenest complaint about Qualley here is so small it effectively isn't one, but for a clone born of Moore's DNA, they sure don't resemble one another to any greater degree than any two attractive white women of more-or-less similar size, not even necessarily any two brunette white women, while Fargeat evidently saw possibilities in the very apparent distinction between hazel and blue which apparently overrode asking Qualley to just wear a pair of colored contacts, amusingly enough given I doubt that it could've been some red-line of hers here.)

In any case, I think Fargeat anticipates all this semi-resentful grousing (including about the dissimilarity, though on that count she simply says "close enough" and I'm happy to agree), and she starts building that into her movie, too.  Now, of course, it hits the expected beats.  Even then, it's hitting them with great precision and hugely enjoyable bombast: even something as straightforwardly obvious as the gendered hypocrisy of Quaid's despicable producer—rendered gruesomely unappetizing by way of disaggregated flaw-forward extreme close-ups, notably of an exceedingly butthole-like mouth—becomes something special, when powered by that energy.  There's an omnipresent contempt for men, pursued by various means, a small portion of it through what amounts to sketch-based cringe comedy, and a lot more of it, triumphantly successfully, through form—effectively by giving you what the film has presumed you, heterosexual cisman, have asked for, and laughing directly in your face while it's doing so, with its startlingly extended, frequent, and vigorous visits to Sue's revamped aerobics program (for a long stretch heralded as merely "The New Show," part of a general running backdrop gag reflecting the whole film's heightened and hazy sense of fabulistic reality).  Sue's show is just plain pornography, not entirely distinct from 80s aerobics programs that were also pretty much pornography (and it's on top of an amount of just-actual-nudity that feels like a recent world record, albeit somewhat more "drama" or "art horrory" in its visual choices), except that Fargeat has apparently extensively studied every horny moment that Michael Bay ever filmed (and hyperactively edited) so as to prepare for her own glamorous assault of shimmery skin and clothing that parodies the living daylights out of the male gaze by way of absurdity, with its bewildering SMILE. ASS. CROTCH. SMILE. ASS. ASS. editing rhythms.  (Even on the "obvious" side of this movie's scale, there's a background bit where a whole throng of male crew are obliged to go frame-by-frame through a close-up of Qualley's ass in search of the show's director's subliminal perception of some flaw, which they do with focused, technocratic chilliness, that I found enormously funny-sad.)  But I hear you saying, "if it's just shoving a camera into her barely-covered vagina, then isn't it just—" so I'll cut you off and answer, "yes."

Since it has to be: we are, by necessity, yoked to Elisabeth, and that's her worldview, too.  The film's contempt for patriarchy is real, earned, and funnier about it than any peer I'm aware of, and the movie has essentially no less contempt for Elisabeth, whose everything is bound up in that feeling she gets when the eyes crawl over her, broken within a framework of patriarchy, and quite possibly broken because she would've been anyway.  It pursues this with caricature and totalism: what Fargeat and Moore were doing with Elisabeth clicked for me, intellectually, during one of her increasingly-fraught periodic retreats to the old flesh, when the attention she craves has suddenly stopped again, and she actually deigns to make a date with that nebbish I mentioned, because he said she was beautiful as-is; she can't even do it, because she thinks she might not live up to his standards.  (Her apartment has an entire wall that's a window, through which a billboard of "Sue's" show taunts her day and night; hence Elisabeth is violently jealous of herself, and "Sue" is somehow even less reasonable.)  I do not suppose that The Substance ever hits really "complex characterization," nor should, but it has a certain full-dimensionality to its arguments (and a whole other dimension in the sheer kineticism with which it flings them at your head) that winds up punching straight through to something truly elemental.  It helps so much, sure, that it knows how to play, and is so constantly funny, even when it's juggling two or three tones at once; but I expect this (ironic) universalism is how it effortlessly squares its circle of parodying the male gaze by asking its viewer to contemplate its hilarious conceptual joke while you (the general "you"; or "I") sit there laughing, with a great sense of humor about yourself, saying, "yes, I get it," while intently staring at Qualley's frame-filling crotch.  Really, it's already squared that circle before it even gets there: there's nothing less pornographic about the aftermath of Sue's first emergence, and her first look at herself.  It's only pursued with more elegance, formally-speaking, with medium shots that capture her whole body, and far longer takes, more akin to appreciating a statue than having a camera mock-fucking her on our behalf.

And while I have not detailed my praise for these actors, Qualley and Moore are amazingly, well, fearless: besides a lot of cold days on set, there's an awe-inspiring recklessness to everything they do in their conjoined and well-synchronized performances that never even quite comes off as "camp," just crazed and scary-funny, set to acting tasks that even inside the micro-structure of Fargeat's individual scenes demand of the actors the same grueling, "it's very long but also somehow constantly escalating, despite also starting at basically 11" intensity that the entire movie calls for—while in each case, as the body horror ramps up and up and up, each woman is obviously gonna end up buried beneath effects prosthetics that, fair's fair, probably won't make anybody who's ever seen a Brian Yuzna production puke.  Yet let it further be known that Fargeat goes to the absolute utmost with the same tools, and in something akin to the same way, to do something new and mind-bending on behalf of her heroine's extended climactic body nightmare.  There are details to praise in each woman's performance, of course: the most actually-frightening image in the whole movie is the visceral threat of what Moore might do to her own face, for real and by accident, as Elisabeth applies, smears, reapplies, and claws off each unsatisfactory facefull of makeup for her "big date."  Still, I don't know if the most crucial note doesn't belong to Qualley anyway, as she wakes up for that first time and takes herself in.  There is joy to it, because it is a miracle, and this movie is—at rock bottom—a sick and curdled comedy about a stupid asshole who squanders a miracle because she can't take a drug as directed.

But her joy still matters, and it got me.  I don't know what to tell you: throughout my own life, I've only ever been able to relate to my own body in more-or-less the same way, with somewhat more self-awareness than Elisabeth or Sue (if with significantly less success than Moore or Qualley), always acknowledging in some cerebral and not sharply-felt way, because I've been told hundreds of times and do not actually need to be told again, that any gaze exploits and objectifies, yet wishing I could satisfy it anyway; a gaze, after all, is how you know you've been seen.  I could feel age even before I began to get old; I knew that youth had been wasted on the young.  For a long time, probably since I realized that I had only figured out how to be a proper person very late, I've had the grim apprehension that the life cycle of the human being really is a joke—the animal who knows it's going to die also gets to be the animal that takes forever to start living, then begins to decline, irreversibly, no more than halfway through its span, getting uglier, then ugly, sicklier, then sick, less fuckable, then unfuckable.  Then dead.  We're not as butterflies, whose lives climax in the end.  Elisabeth screwed it up, but I know why she did it in the first place, and there is a disgusting beauty to her final, maddened, quixotic efforts; she made a bid for a climax, at least.  The Substance evokes a feeling that I don't think has a name, because it only comes up in fevered fantasies.  I've been told straight to my face I'm reading this movie wrong (yet it is an inestimably generous gesture Fargeat makes with our brief glimpse of a male Substance user), but if so, we may still agree that it's great, for any number of other reasons besides the impossible way it hates practically everything—men, women, aging, youth, life, death, the delight of beauty, the emptiness of its absence—and understands it all anyway.  They say that comedy should be relatable; it's the funniest movie I've seen in an age.

Score: 10/10