A bright, showy, didactic, and generally well-reviewed body horror film about women, aging, and the hypersexualization of the female body, The Substance is the second feature from French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat (Revenge), who’s riding a wave of critical praise and showbiz hype since the film’s Cannes Film Festival debut in May. And I did appreciate her film’s attempts at humor and its bold formal flourishes, such as its eye-popping color scheme and its way of showing Los Angeles as an oddly empty city, a kind of blank canvas with nothing on it but the huge, blown-up images of the film’s main characters that morbidly obsess them. But having a filmmaker illustrate at great literal-minded length that there are nasty cultural attitudes toward aging women gets a weary “No shit, Sherlock” response from me.
“Body horror can be a really powerful weapon of expression for female directors,” said Fargeat, who used the filmmaking process to channel her own anxiety about turning forty.
At every age, we can find something wrong with ourselves, which can make us feel like monsters. . . . Your image defines you and your self-worth. But I thought that if I could create something meaningful about these issues, it could also serve as a form of liberation.
The Substance is about a celebrity aerobics instructor named Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) who stars in her own long-running TV fitness show. She’s fired on her fiftieth birthday by her grotesque TV producer boss, Harvey (Dennis Quaid). Desperate to hang on to her old life, she turns to a mysterious black-market drug called “the Substance” that provides her with a new and improved — that is, much younger — self called Sue (Margaret Qualley). Sue promptly auditions to be Elisabeth Sparkle’s replacement on the fitness show and gets hired by the fawning, pervy Harvey, whose name is clearly meant to evoke Harvey Weinstein.
Thereafter, according to the strict instructions that…
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Auteur: Eileen Jones
