The Substance
MUBI
During its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, something fascinating occurred regarding the critical response to Coralie Fargeat’s latest movie, The Substance. On the one hand, predominantly white men lapped the movie up, calling it an instant classic, a smart subversion of the body horror genre, and a whip-smart takedown of the patriarchal society’s obsession with female beauty, body standards, and their image. On the other hand, women came out of the movie with a completely different perspective on it, stating that it is an appalling way to discuss and analyze the female body without saying anything beyond the surface-level observations it makes with little to no care packaged inside a profoundly offensive and mean-spirited satire.
This type of gender divide amongst critics hasn’t been seen since Emerald Fennell’s horrendous Promising Young Woman, in which men hailed it as a “feminist masterpiece,” while women pointed out how ridiculously inert and triggering a movie it actually is, especially when marketed as being ‘empowering. Though the reception of Fargeat’s follow-up to 2017’s Revenge seems to have improved upon its Cannes premiere, particularly at the Toronto International Film Festival, there’s something deeply insidious about men controlling the consensus narrative about a film directed by – and starring – women, about tangible problems they face daily.
Of course, that’s not to say that men don’t have experiences with how their female family members, friends, or significant others have dealt with misogynist issues on their bodies and age. However, they pale in comparison to the lived-in experiences that women have dealt with, being demeaned by men who only care about their age and look beyond anything else. That’s why the male perspective on this movie is completely irrelevant because it inevitably adopts a reading on Fargeat’s thesis that will only be pertinent for perhaps a tenth of what it showcases and discusses on screen. Many may dub this statement as being hypocritical, as the critic writing this review is indeed a man. However, it should take one to call out how shortsighted and deeply icky the entire male reception of a movie dealing with subjects they will never encounter, even as they grow old, is.
There’s a completely different standard of how society perceives the male and female body as they age. A 70-year-old misogynist pervert (played by Dennis Quaid, replacing Ray Liotta who was initially slated to portray the character but passed away before filming began) dictating a fitness show that puts a woman front and center only spells bad news, but it’s an interesting way in how Fargeat immediately posits the different standards between men and women. Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) has just hit 50 – a milestone, really. Her show is successful and maintains consistent ratings, but, as her boss, Harvey (yes, this movie is extremely unsubtle, which is part of how it operates), says to her, “At 50, well, it stops.”
What stops? Her job and, by extension, her life. Sparkle’s stardom was already dwindling in Hollywood (Fargeat introduces this aspect by her cracked star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame as people forget who she was), and she’s now promptly fired from her show on her birthday. The next day, a casting call for “the next Elizabeth Sparkle” is inserted in the newspaper, which deeply infuriates her. Already, this contrast in how the male-dominated society views a woman’s body is ripe enough for an exploration of how truly out of whack this patriarchal world truly is. No one questions an aging man with deeply conservative, perverse thoughts on society running a female-dominated television program, while a perfectly healthy, impossibly beautiful woman who teaches people at any age to stay healthy is quickly removed from her job because she reached the “best before” birthday of 50.
It’s clearer-than-clear that women aren’t held to the same body standards as men, and Fargeat does not hold anything back in that regard. One does need to recognize how messed up many people still believe profoundly sexist ideals on what a woman should achieve in this world and are unwilling to progress to accept them as equal. Hell, Harvey himself believes they belong in the kitchen as he gives Elisabeth a French cuisine cookbook for her goodbye present.
But Fargeat’s commentary stops there. Instead, she will repeat the same idea over and over again in 140 minutes through different aesthetic variations on identical themes, the use of superimposed flashbacks every ten or so minutes (just so the audience gets it a little more), and body horror that attempts to transcend the work of David Cronenberg. However, unlike Cronenberg, Fargeat is pitifully uninterested in exploring the central idea she introduces in the first five minutes of her film with body horror. She instead uses it to get as much shock out of the audience as possible so they can forget the film’s screenwriting ineptitudes and nonsensical story that makes far less coherence as it strolls along. As a result, The Substance seems in desperate need of what its title promises, offering a half-baked satire that’s often funny and squelching in extreme gore but has none of the weight needed to sustain an almost two-and-a-half-hour-long feature-length movie.
The idea Fargeat introduces in her movie has been treated time and time again in cinema, but not in the way she wants to examine it. That makes the initial premise tantalizing. However, there are easily forgiven plot holes as to why Elisabeth suddenly wants to inject herself with an unknown substance to split herself with a younger, more beautiful part of her named Sue (Margaret Qualley) inside a shady building with a garage door that can’t even open itself fully and is operated by an organization in which no one knows the identity of the individual who created the drug. But people do blindly use Ozempic as an anti-aging weight loss drug, so Fargeat has that going for her.
Still, it’s hard to suspend disbelief at Elisabeth willingly wanting to inject herself with such a product, even after losing everything. But there otherwise wouldn’t be a movie if she hadn’t done so, and it does have to get to the ‘gnarly’ part to warrant people calling it CRAZY! (WHOA, HER TEETH FELL OFF, THIS MOVIE’S SO CRAZY!) Admittedly, this is the most impressive aspect of The Substance. Whenever a critic tells Film Twitter that “it pushes the boundaries of gore,” it’s usually quite tame and well within the acceptable norms of how violence should be depicted in the film. Of course, our tolerance to blood and guts varies, but it’s never pushing any buttons or reaching disturbing levels like in Srđan Spasojević’s A Serbian Film or, more disconcertingly, Satoru Ogura’s Guinea Pig: Devil’s Experiment.
Fargeat’s gore comes fairly close to the boundary-pushing experience one may feel while watching those two films. While not quite as horrifying, it also reaches levels one has never thought possible in the prism of mainstream cinema, with sequences so nauseating it almost made this critic pass out. At first, there’s innate fascination in seeing Elisabeth separate into Sue, and how Fargeat begins to focus on the older parts of Elisabeth’s body when Sue begins to lose control and use The Substance not as it is prescribed (a perfect balance of seven days, it says. But who respects the rules in movies?) But as it becomes more comedic and Elisabeth transforms into a monster that looks like Pearl from Ti West’s X had a baby with Kuato from Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall, it begins to lose sight of what it ultimately wants to be about.
The film is divided into three parts: first, it introduces Elisabeth, then spends time with Sue, and finally, the monster comes to life in more horrifying ways than one. Being old equates to turning into a hag, Fargeat says, or a monster to be laughed at by your younger peers. It’s such a shallow-minded, insulting viewpoint—no wonder some have called her social commentary ageist and distasteful, and rightfully so! It wants to loudly denounce the hypersexualization of women through non-stop extreme close-ups that gawk at Margaret Qualley’s private parts (“Des culs! Des culs! Des culs!”, as was written in the Cahiers du Cinéma’s analysis of the film during its Cannes premiere) but actively becomes complicit in it by doing the very thing it condemns.
Worse yet, Fargeat never challenges the male gaze she constantly imitates throughout the movie, never confronting the misogynist stereotypes she bathes in for two-and-a-half hours in favor of replacing it with the female gaze. Had the movie done so, Fargeat would’ve reclaimed the male-dominated narrative that not only plagues this film industry but cinema’s continuous treatment of women through men’s perverted lens. But she seems deathly afraid of breaking the stereotypes of the past and paving a new way forward, not only for body horror but in how women should be depicted on screen, especially (and importantly) by women who understand the experience with their bodies better than any men who depicted so on screen.
The first two parts of the movie are incredibly repetitive, but moments of inspiration are enough to keep us going, such as its uncomfortable fish-eyed presentation of Harvey and his male executives, or the cathartic transformation Elisabeth encounters when she ‘gives birth’ to Sue. That’s where the body horror reaches a fascinating paroxysm that’s not too violent but thrilling enough to make us want to see what happens next. As it becomes more violent, it also gets more caricatural and cartoonish, ultimately diluting the emotional impact it would have if Fargeat had kept her violence within a realistic look and feel and not this heightened dreamlike parody that made every subsequent directorial choice more tedious than the last.
Moore is also exceptional in a sequence in which she constantly rearranges herself in front of a mirror before going out, attempting to find the courage to leave the confines of her apartment while applying makeup on her face to appear more ‘beautiful.’ It’s the most poignant moment of the movie that singularly deepens Fargeat’s central thesis through a towering display of microphysiognomy by one of our greatest working actresses. It’s all in her devastated eyes as she looks at her body, unable to wrestle with the idea that she now has far less time and, worse so, far less youth in her than she did just ten years ago. She gracefully embraces her age until her insecurities come to light through the deeply misogynist comments she receives from Harvey and the countless men she’s met in her life.
Fargeat smartly moves away from a dialogue-heavy character piece and instead focuses on the most primal forms of acting, which reveals a far more intriguing character in Elisabeth Sparkle than any line of dialogue spoken by Moore ever does. For a while, it’s the best performance of her career, one worthy of all the praise she has been receiving ever since its Cannes premiere, always restrained in her physical and psychological composure until her catharsis is too powerful to bear and she experiences the most profound form of psychological release possible. But when Fargeat goes full hagsploitation and turns Sparkle into the monster, the emotional nuances found in her initial approach to the character are immediately lost in a deeply offensive ending that, instead of sympathizing with Elisabeth’s plight and unfortunate dark path, treats her with contempt and disgust.
This is the cardinal mistake that sank any attempt of goodwill in the social commentary of Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman and is the sole reason why The Substance’s critique is shallow, myopic, and trite. How is the audience supposed to feel for Elisabeth when the filmmaker actively hates her and never once treats the protagonist with the compassion she deserves? There’s no ‘whip-smart’ takedown of patriarchal ideals here, especially when the faux-empowerment perpetuated by Fargeat in her first two parts never coalesce into anything meaningful when she goes full New Extremity in her silly final act that not only repulsively cites Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, but Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, introducing the ‘monster’ through the sounds of Also sprach Zarathustra for cheap comedic (and bloody) thrills.
Completely losing itself, Fargeat forgets the core of what made the initial moments of The Substance so important, for not only men to look at themselves and ask how this society is deeply screwed up but for women to feel seen having likely experienced attempts to meet the unattainable standards set by men and observing a part of themselves in Elisabeth’s struggles. This is at the heart of The Substance and should’ve been the guiding force for deepening its central message. Unfortunately, Fargeat is more concerned about shocking the audience than saying something meaningful about a subject of great urgency.
There’s very little style (it’s all shot and edited through the Yassified prism of a TikTok influencer video) and not enough substance to warrant sitting through this excruciating 140-minute horror movie with the depth of an inflatable swimming pool that thinks it has something going for, but is actually an unfun, vacuous circle that gets boring after five minutes. Worse so, it may be the most regressive movie released this decade since Promising Young Woman. Don’t be fooled by the gore; this one’s got no teeth.