THE SUBSTANCE (2024) is a blistering, electrifying, jaw-dropping body-horror masterpiece
Not for the faint of heart, nor weak of stomach, Coralie Fargeat's ferocious, incendiary satire is one of the best films of the decade.
“You will not be disappointed. She’s my most beautiful creation. I have shaped her for success.”
I could feel my face was frozen in an involuntary rictus expression of gobsmacked, elated astonishment throughout the last ten-to-fifteen (transcendentally insane) minutes of The Substance.
Eyebrows stuck raised halfway up my forehead, eyes widened and barely blinking in transfixed awe, my jaw ajar with the corners of my mouth curled upwards in grossed-out glee at the monumental audaciousness of what writer/director Coralie Fargeat was making me - and the rest of the audience around me - witness with our very own eyes.
The only thing better than the ending? The entirety of everything that came before, combined with the ending, altogether gifting audiences (with stomachs strong enough to handle its onslaught of grisly grotesqueries) one of the best films of the year. Nay, the decade.
I can scarcely believe that in the year of our lord 2024, a movie such as this has been made, unleashed like a live grenade thrown into cinemas, and left to explode the minds of everyone who beholds its blood-drenched beastly beauty. To think that the film industry can still produce a film that is this brash, this punk, this outrageous, this righteously angry, this unapologetically disgusting, this fabulously farcical, this deliriously demented, this viscerally squelchy, and this monstrously entertaining, renews one’s faith in the future of modern cinema to perhaps avoid the fate of complete corporate mainstream sanitisation, homogenisation, and infantilisation. For if the extremely adults-only, 80’s-style splatterpunk gorefests of Terrifier 3 and The Substance can not only both be in cinemas at the same time, but can also both actually thrive and succeed, then maybe the road ahead on the cinematic landscape will be a little brighter after all.
Not to mention that The Substance singlehandedly proves that the legacy of such practical makeup effects legends of body horror as Rob Bottin, Rick Baker, Dick Smith, Chris Walas, Greg Nicotero, Tom Savini, and Screaming Mad George, is alive and well, roaring back to gloopy, gory, glorious life, and then some.
Fargeat’s intensely stylised direction is a feast for the senses, the cinematography all garish wide angles and vibrant colour, the editing razor sharp, and the sound design an immersive, exhilarating aural treat, in tandem with the stupendous score from Raffertie.
Unfortunately, on the acting side of things, one has to begrudgingly admit that Trump-supporting dickhead Dennis Quaid delivers a perfectly calibrated caricaturing performance of barnstorming belligerence as Elisabeth/Sue’s hideous misogynist producer, Harvey.
Here he plays a guy who surely had to have been modelled on Harvey Weinstein (because The Substance is many things, and subtle is not one of them, intentionally so), and since Quaid already played Ronald Reagan in conservative Christian propagandist biopic Reagan earlier this year, Quaid’s 2024 has seen him now basically play two of the most evil men who’ve ever lived! But alas, only in this film does he know he’s playing a villain.
Forget about him, though, because the MVPs of the film we can unanimously agree are Demi Moore as Elisabeth Sparkle, and Margaret Qualley as the Substance-induced idealised version of herself, Sue. Both women give everything they have to their roles, baring it all physically and psychologically to embody with emotional truth the fucked up mother-daughter/Jekyll and Hyde dynamic they portray within the fantastical premise of the film. In a way, the conflict waged between these symbiotic younger and older versions of the same person, playing a vicious tug of war for dominance and survival over the other, is not too dissimilar to the battle between Young Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Old Joe (Bruce Willis) in Rian Johnson’s Looper.
As The Substance descends deeper into madness alongside them, and their bodies are subjected to increasingly twisted reflections of their inner self-image as addiction and self-destruction take hold, Moore and Qualley are freed further and further from the male gaze’s imposing restrictions (both those in reality, and the only-slightly-exaggerated parody of it Fargeat expertly emulates) of what they can be, how they can act, and what they can look like, throwing themselves with furious aplomb into monstrousness. The dedication from both women is tremendous in depicting this brutal, externalised internal conflict between a woman’s self-image and deteriorating mental health, versus the crushingly impossible beauty standards set by a world that prioritises youth, slimness, sex appeal, and the overall narrow margins of desirability set by men, for men, stoking and weaponising vanity and insecurity as a means of control.
Fargeat is rightfully pissed off on behalf of all women who’ve ever been made to feel wrong in their own skin, and this movie is her way of spitting in the faces of all those who enforce such toxic ideals.
It’s Barbie meets The Fly meets Seconds meets Society = The Substance.
HOLY FUCK, I LOVE THIS FILM!
Almost as much as Coralie Fargeat loves macro-lensed extreme closeup insert shots, and also, butts. Between the plentiful adorations of derrieres seen in both Revenge and The Substance, the woman’s love of butts might be starting to rival that of Tinto Brass!
(Just kidding. Nobody has ever loved ass like Brass…)
I hated it as passionately as you loved it, Jack. The heaviest-handed satire in the history of satire. Good thing Quaid chewed every trace of scenery, as we might otherwise not have deduced that his sort of person is monstrous. And it seemed to take 12 hours to end. I must have thought to myself, "OK, we get it. Uncle!" a dozen times in the last 45 minutes. In fairness, my wife loved it.
Saw this film last month and still thinking about it. Great review!