It’s no secret that women are held to a higher standard than men – nowhere is this more evident than in Hollywood, where to visibly age, gain weight or not fit the very narrow prevailing beauty standard is to be deemed worthless. There are plenty of films that wrestle with this issue – Sunset Boulevard, All About Eve, Black Swan, Inland Empire and The Neon Demon are just a handful – so it’s a saturated field, and filmmakers need a novel idea if they’re going to stand out from the crowd.
To her credit, writer-director Coralie Fargeat has one of those. Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) is an ageing celebrity fitness instructor who decides to take a chance on a mysterious medical procedure after she’s unceremoniously fired due to her age. The Substance promises to create “a better version of yourself” – and so, after collecting her mail-order package, Elisabeth injects herself with a suspect yellow fluid and “Sue” (Margaret Qualley) slithers forth from a large incision on her back.
The pair are instructed by the otherwise-anonymous company to follow a certain set of rules. Only one of the pair can be conscious at a time (while the other lies on the bathroom floor with a feeding tube plugged in) and they have to switch every week to avoid irreversible side effects. To ‘stabilise’ the process, Sue must inject herself with Elisabeth’s spinal fluid every day. The two are supposedly one, but they’re also completely separate, not sharing each other’s thoughts, emotions or memories.
Fargeat shoots Qualley in the same manner she shot Matilda Lutz in Revenge, with slow panning close-ups over her scantily clad body. The camera is leery, obsessive, hypersexual – “Younger, more beautiful, more perfect” than the body that birthed her, it makes sense that Sue would be keen to flaunt her assets. But it’s less clear why Fargeat herself is so intent on highlighting Qualley’s undeniable beauty in a film supposedly critiquing the film industry’s obsession with it. If Fargeat’s intention is to make the audience complicit, she replicates the history of horror’s exploitation of women’s bodies rather than subverts it.
Moore goes for Most Acting rather than Best Acting as Elisabeth, while Qualley has something of Patrick Bateman in her dead-eyed, narcissistic gym bunny. We don’t learn anything about either character beyond the most cursory details, and Fargeat keeps the world around them generic. In stripping all personality and specificity from the world and characters, it’s hard to have any substantial investment in what’s happening.
In regurgitating old talking points about Hollywood’s obsession with beauty and its fear of ageing, The Substance becomes a sterile facsimile of Hollywood itself, refusing to add anything new to the conversation before going for broke in a third act it hasn’t come close to earning.
Yet more than anything it feels deeply depressing – a reminder of how society denigrates anyone who challenges the standards pushed by pop culture. But replicating images doesn’t make them implicitly subversive, and The Substance’s presentation is as shallow as the very thing it’s critiquing. There’s no compassion, and certainly no catharsis – just more hagsploitation and a sense of déjà vu.
ANTICIPATION.
Body horror with a Hollywood slant? Yes please! 4
ENJOYMENT.
Places the blame for impossible beauty standards squarely at women’s feet. 2
IN RETROSPECT.
A sour, cruel film with nothing novel to say. 2
Directed by
Coralie Fargeat
Starring
Margaret Qualley, Demi Moore, Dennis Quaid
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