The Substance (2024) - dir. Coralie Fargeat
“What the ever-living-FUCK did I just watch?” is almost certainly going to be your reaction coming out of this film. Truly, the less I tell you about this, the better. If you have seen the teasers or trailers and you think this movie is at ALL something you would enjoy, then I urge you to stop reading and just go see it. See it in a theater with a crowd of other people so you can look around afterwards at the open mouths and shell shocked expressions of your fellow theater goers as confirmation that, yes, you did just see what you think you saw.
But if you want at least a little knowledge–
This is less a story with characters and a plot than it is a modern fable. Its inhabitants aren’t fully human characters, they are archetypes, universal stand-ins for particular concepts. The dialogue they speak in no way resembles a thing one actual person would say to another. Rather, every line is a signifier, a declaration of principles or a moral proclamation. Things are distorted to the point of caricature, intentionally so. So be prepared for that.
Visually, Fargeat and her cinematographer and production designer are aiming VERY high, and with a surprising amount of success. Explicit calls to Kubrick (The long, color saturated hallways and Shining-esque carpet patterns), Lynch (unsettling closeups), Gilliam (a large portion of the film is shot through super-wide fisheye lenses, turning the the sets, and bodies inhabiting them, into funhouse distortions), and most of all, early David Cronenberg body horror. I cannot emphasize that last one enough. This film is about bodies, how we view them, what we demand of them, the standards we hold about them, and the truly unsettling things we are willing to do to them to uphold these ‘ideals’.
If you want a quick plot summary, I can give you one: Demi Moore plays Elizabeth Sparkle, a former ingenue now on the wrong side of 50, reduced to doing cheesecake 80’s-style workout videos where she plasticly smiles her way through telling her viewers to “Pump it up!” Dennis Quaid is her absolute sleazeball of a boss, a consumate chauvanist and vulgarian. When Elizabeth is unceremoniously dumped for being too old, she succumbs to the temptations of The Substance, which will create a newer, better version of herself. The only catch, she must trade off every seven days without fail, flipping her consciousness from old, current Elizabeth to the new, young, perky “Sue” (Marget Qualley). Naturally, rules are not followed, and truly horrific hilarity ensues.
For once, I don’t mean “hilarity ensues” ironically. The third act of the film will absolutely prove divisive. The film, depending on your feelings on the matter, either “descends” or “transcends” into grande guinol camp. I thought it was a fantastic moment. Others have said that was the point where the film lost them. Either way, it’s something to experience. I will be unsurprised if Moore gets an Oscar nom for her work. It’s absolutely raw and impossible to look away from.
This film is weird. Like, Yorgos Lanthimos at his most misanthropic. I can see a lot of people going in unprepared walking out. But I’m pretty sure I won’t see anything this exciting or new the rest of the year. This is a film that just went for it so hard that whether you end up liking the result or not (and to be very clear, I LOVED it), you have to feel a deep respect for its audacity and commitment.
Bra-FUCKING-vo!!!
