When I saw Coralie Fargeat’s first feature Revenge (2017) soon after it came out, I remember liking--not loving--it, but also feeling a peculiar, detached respect. The movie is unbelievable, but in a good way. If the characters bled that much in real life there would be no more fluid in their bodies. They would be dead. And yet they continue running around in a circular, primal frenzy. When I heard that Fargeat directed The Substance (2024) starring Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley, I wondered if the new movie could top the slippery crimson chaos of Revenge. Indeed, without giving too much away, by the final scenes it delivers.
Moore plays Elisabeth Sparkle, a famous actress-turned-aerobics host, who decides to try a strange, black market drug that teases a vivacious fountain of youth. She is motivated more by the pressures of the entertainment industry, but as we see, her own vanity plays a part as well. The Substance turns into a contemporary Jekyll and Hyde story, with Qualley’s character Sue becoming Elisabeth’s unhinged, youthful counterpart. The movie is highly insular, and like Revenge, unreal in just enough of a way that we can empathize from a detached, dreamy theater seat. It is a movie that addresses the abuse and hypocrisy of an industry maintained by sexism and ageism, with a supporting cast of one-dimensional, male caricatures. But Fargeat’s feminism is apparently by way of Tinto Brass, with her camera fixated on Qualley’s rear end, if only in counterpoint to the abject posterior of an aging, monstrous star.
Like the story of Jekyll and Hyde, The Substance is a metaphor for drug addiction, just as much as a commentary on gender and beauty standards. Here the drug is youth and sexual desirability, but once the balance is tipped, the opposite arc leads to grotesque scenes that reference Kubrick, Brian Yuzna’s Society (1989), and even Basketcase (1982). With Demi Moore’s performance that is aided by increasing crone makeup and gross bodily disturbances, The Substance brings to mind another recent film that used aging bodies as points of terror--Ti West’s X (2022). My biggest complaint about the oldsploitation of X is how it was essentially making aging bodies into a grotesque spectacle, rather than using it as some kind of transformational satire. Fargeat does a more effective job with The Substance, in that the swift progression of a decaying body is horrifying, while also stopping to consider the culture that is responsible for this shame and anger related to our inevitably withering selves.