Hal Kitchen
Great art, especially great horror, is elusive. That isn’t to say that The Substance is not great art just because it’s not elusive, only to say that it I looked for elusiveness and did not find it. Each of these last few years, the Cannes Film Festival has delivered a classic new body horror (Titane, Crimes of the Future…) and though the godfather of the genre had his latest premiere at the festival this year it was not the toast of the festival. Because Cronenberg himself was out-Cronenberged by the hot young French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat and her new film, The Substance.
The debt The Substance owes to Cronenberg’s (and Brian Yuzna’s) most seminal work of the ’80s and ’90s is clear in tone, aesthetic and narrative, but Fargeat approaches the genre as she did her breakthrough revenge thriller…Revenge. Her surrealism is not deadpan, it’s all excess, which is the word of the hour with The Substance. It is not a subtle film, nor is it an original one. In fact the word I keep coming back to (besides “excess”) is “basic”. The Substance takes foundational ideas about genre and about feminism and “pumps them up”, so they sound out louder and burn hotter. It puts one most in mind of The Outside—Ana Lily Amirpour’s contribution to Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities anthology series—remade with a larger budget and starrier location. It is not the work of a genius but of an audacious and uncompromising voice nonetheless, something it makes clear from its first moments introducing us to Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore).
Once a beloved screen ingenue, Elizabeth has been reduced to ending her fiftieth year with the loss of the morning fitness show that had sustained her, as her odious producer (a hilariously grotesque Dennis Quaid) plans on replacing her with someone younger. At rock bottom, she is offered salvation when a stranger tips her off about “the substance”, a Mephistopelian elixir that will create a second younger “more perfect” Elizabeth body (Margaret Qualley) which she can periodically inhabit, as long as she never deviates from the very clear instructions. But the longer she remains as her younger self, the more fractured and combative the two Elizabeths become. It’s basically The Portrait of Dorian Gray from the point of view of the painting. You’re stuck withering like an unwatered lily while she’s out there living it up and being adored. A cunning concept and one that Fargeat mines for all its worth and also…quite honestly, a little more besides. There are a few darlings here that I think might’ve been better killed off. Fun ideas though they are, they do rather harm the cohesion and progression of the story as it drags on for two hours and twenty minutes (which is incidentally, more than twenty minutes longer than Cronenberg’s longest film, despite not containing twenty minutes more ideas than those ever did). The last forty minutes at least are an exercise in “and then what if…” writing, capping off a film that already hews overly towards repetition. Neither the wild excesses of the ending nor the predictable mid-section are damning in themselves, but they do compound one another. Again, excessive.
It is also—and I admit perhaps this would not have dominated my impression of the film quite so much had I not watched with an audience predominantly made up of elderly women—rather shamelessly ageist, no? Horror movies lately have been full of repulsive depictions of elderly women like in X and Barbarian, but surely this is the worst offender. I couldn’t help but think of the older women in the audience and how they must feel watching a body not too far removed from their own portrayed with such abhorrence and disgust. I wouldn’t go so far as to agree with the reviews I’ve seen that accuse the film of outright replicating the same misogyny it purports to critique, but I cannot blame anyone for getting that impression. This film does seem to truly loathe the aging process and no, there’s nothing fun about getting old, but this film is so literal and crass about it that it was genuinely uncomfortable and not in a rewarding and challenging way but a disrespectful one.
For as absurd as it gets, The Substance is most successful when it is more succinct and keeps things simple. The best and certainly scariest scene in the whole film is also the most real and relatable, as Elizabeth gets ready for a date but continues delaying, making and remaking herself up, unable to find a version of herself she doesn’t loathe. There’s no blood or viscera and yet it is far and away the most intense scene, vividly portraying the reality of body dysphoria in a way that’s instantly and innately recognizable and genuinely heartbreaking. And it works because Elizabeth is still clearly beautiful, but through Fargeat’s camera we can see why she thinks she’s not. But as the film goes on, the ability to see Elizabeth’s inner beauty shrinks away, and the film settles into laughing at her and loses the very compassion that is the essence of that horror. The absurdity that follows becomes a nihilistic guffaw at our own preposterous obsession with self image and by the time the final scene dragged itself onscreen I was about ready for Graham Chapman’s Army General from Monty Python to walk on and say “Right! That’s enough of that! Far too silly!”
As I’ve said, there’s much worth celebrating about The Substance. Moore and Quaid are giving the performances of a lifetime and Fargeat’s high-impact style is undeniably compelling, if sometimes in a coke-ad kind of way. I just much preferred the earlier parts of the film and felt the sincerity Moore brought to the film was sorely lacking throughout Qualley’s segments, which were all style and no…you know. And before anyone says “style IS substance”, I know. But…I’ve increasingly felt as if many films these days privilege big attention-getting set pieces over anything genuinely idea-driven, challenging or rewarding. Big bold “subtext is for cowards” moments that I sometimes love, but which often come at the expense of an experience I can get at all invested in or intellectually stimulated by, and such was the case with The Substance. I get why it has been so celebrated, but I have to admit, I find myself less excited by it the longer I consider it.
