Review: The Substance

Director:  Coralie Fargeat

Stars:  Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, Dennis Quaid

In Coralie Fargeat’s hot and rancid 2017 flick Revenge, wannabe starlet Jen (Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz) just wants to get to LA. “Why?” asks one of the sleazoid men who will go on to become her rapist. Because “everything is possible there.” Jen is the only member of the cast of Revenge to make it out of that movie alive and, presumably, on her way to Tinseltown to fill her heart’s desire.

The Substance suggests the trip wouldn’t have been worth everything Jen went through. Grown from the cells of Fargeat’s far-superior 2014 short Reality+, The Substance is a crudely hewn, deliberately simplistic depiction of Hollywood; a satire for those who found Kubrick’s take on A Clockwork Orange a bit too subtle. Fargeat’s targets are different to those found in Anthony Burgess’ sci-fi novella of course. Here she takes aim – reasonably! – at chauvinistic beauty standards and our cultural obsession with youth, concocting a Jekyll and Hyde story that ultimately works against her by exaggerating the very stigmas she’s rallying against. It’s a dire misfire, painfully labored and utterly exhausting, with all the nuance of a ’90s Jonas Åkerlund music video.

Demi Moore plays fading aerobics TV presenter Elisabeth Sparkle (that name feels like the first of many on-the-nose red flags), once an Oscar winner, now on the fast track to obscurity. Her obnoxious agent Harvey (Dennis Quaid, jabbering like a gibbon) is eager to replace her. Before he can, Elisabeth replaces herself. Working from a tip passed to her covertly by a youthful hospital nurse, she discovers ‘The Substance’ – a faceless corporation that cryptically promises to generate her perfect self. With basically nothing to go on, Elisabeth puts her trust in the elaborate system of self-administered medical packages and lo, Sue (Margaret Qualley) is born – a tighter, perkier, younger version of herself ready to take her place in the limelight.  But only for seven days at a time.

While the garishness of The Substance persistently asks us to abandon logic or common sense and follow Fargeat down the rabbit hole, its difficult to swallow this much shit so fast. Very few of the movie’s mechanics hold water. Elisabeth and Sue are supposedly The Same Person (we’re told this many times over), yet they cannot be conscious together, have no memory of one another’s actions, and share little in terms of character traits. The shady company’s modus seems deeply flawed, the ongoing seven-day switcheroo between Elisabeth and Sue immediately unsustainable, and the idea of a superstar morning show aerobics instructor just doesn’t connect with our lived-in experience of reality. Nothing is reasoned. It just exists in service of Fargeat’s forward moving hyperreality. Fine. So be it.

Except Fargeat’s camera leers all over Qualley. It’s (all too clearly) an effort to satirise misogynistic depictions of women in media, but the sledgehammer approach gives rise to its own problems. Implemented to such a laborious, repetitive degree, its tough to separate her gaze from the one she’s supposedly mocking. It’s as though Fargeat has only just found out about the Eric Prydz “Call On Me” video (which celebrated it’s 20th anniversary this week, by the way) and considers it the height of satire.

Adding insult to injury is the movie’s full-bore assault on the aged, disabled and infirm. While Sue ‘sparkles’ with supple radiance, Elisabeth is quickly turned into a garish hag for us to reel and shrink from, a self-shunning glutton who we’re pressured to perceive as pitiful and grotesque. The Substance blithely conflates age and eating disorders with fragility, and this is emblematic of the lack of depth or consideration playing across the board here. All negative concepts from Fargeat’s mood board are simply magnified, not scrutinised. There’s no empathy – or basic sense of character – to either of Fargeat’s woefully simplistic extremes. And on and on it goes…

Revenge showed that Fargeat has a strong instinct for a commanding frame. She’s digested the source materials and is incredibly adept at constructing hyper-stylised genre facsimiles. The problem – which The Substance really exemplifies – is that her takes on the edgelordish or extreme feel like hollow replicas of more politically charged originals. The wave of French Extreme Cinema that typified the ’00s felt a thousand times more transgressive than anything Fargeat hurls toward the camera in the frankly tiresome 40-minute circus act that ends The Substance. Tilting garishly at The Elephant Man and Mulholland Drive doesn’t make you David Lynch. One high-wire sequence even seems to be asking us to think of Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls – as though Fargeat’s intent is to borrow that film’s dissonant sense of camp extravagance – but it doesn’t tessellate with the warped void of her carnival act; a blow-out that keeps refusing to end. The great comedian Stewart Lee revitalised his career with routines that pushed jokes to exhaustion before that very fatigue brought them back around in a wave of euphoric delirium. This seems to be what Fargeat is going for with the ending of The Substance, but it isn’t achieved.

And it isn’t achieved because we’ve no skin in the game. Vacuous ciphers living in a hollowed-out world that feels less substantive than Greta Gerwig’s Barbieland, there are barely any people in Fargeat’s Hollywood and none of them act as anchor for the movie, not even Moore’s pantomime witch Elisabeth. Her despair at losing recognition and the beauty she was once prized for does register – that’s something we can connect to – but she becomes exiled by the machinations of a story that doesn’t treat anything realistically.

Treat with suspicion anyone whispering the name Cronenberg in connection with The Substance. The grotty practical effects work of The Fly is an aesthetic association, but there’s none of the Canadian master’s erudite thought to be found here. Hell, it’s not even up to the standards of family heirs Brandon and Caitlin. While Fargeat goes to great pains to show she can mount a slick production, The Substance is both unruly in length and pitifully thin. Full of holes and abhorrently leering, it’s Best Screenplay win at Cannes this year is, frankly, baffling.

It’s bracing and thrilling when you see a filmmaker take a big swing. They can be exhilarating, and they shake us out of the doldrums. More big swings, please. But the trouble with big swings is there’s always a risk of losing control and spinning inelegantly on the spot, a flailing mess without clear direction. Casual viewers will leave this one perplexed, mumbling about it all being ‘a bit weird’, ‘one of those fucked-up movies’ that ‘gets a bit silly’ and then immediately move on with their lives. Meanwhile, those looking for genuine nourishment or food for thought may find themselves simply starved.

Unfortunately, this one’s insubstantial in the extreme. A deeply unsatisfying chore.