The Substance (Fargeat, 2024)

Written by Tom Augustine.

As I ploughed my way through Whānau Mārama: New Zealand International Film Festival for 2024, some twenty-five films, I came to terms with a feeling I’ve been having for the past few years when it comes to the art to which I respond: I’m dead tired of subtlety. Or rather, subtlety as it manifests in the modern cinema we consider to be the most artistically viable – so much of it feels polite, and not in service of a greater cinematic intention, but rather a qualifier that allows for filmmakers to appear artful without putting anything true on the line. That’s not to say there isn’t great, subtle art being made – Janet Planet comes to mind – but there’s a certain aesthetic tendency with so much of what we’re seeing on the indie/arthouse scene that could do with a brighter, louder coat of paint. Coralie Fargeat, the French auteur behind the stunning body horror The Substance (NZIFF’s closing night film, now opening wide), doesn’t have that problem. Like her previous film, the feral rape revenge film aptly titled Revenge, Fargeat isn’t in search of nuance or even thematic depth with the films that she makes. Her films have their intentions smeared across the screen in blood and gore, in a manner that seems to go against every traditional barometer for quality art – and yet, goddamn does it work. 

Fargeat’s films are best read as primal screams – utterances of abject rage that transcend our attempts to give them polite definitions. In The Substance, this means that we are treated to the extremes of the human form, arriving at a monstrosity so heinous that it is impossible to call it anything but a reflection of ourselves. In her late forties, the themes and ideas at play in The Substance are clearly close in Fargeat’s mind – not the nightmare of ageing, specifically, but the nightmare of the pursuit of beauty and youthfulness above all else, in the service of a predatory system that exists only to consume and dispose. Purposefully broad, the ideas at play here feel almost quaint in the discourse-heavy digital era of 2024 – that the beauty industry and the lustful, leering patriarchy of Hollywood are detrimental to a woman’s self-image and self-worth – but are no less true for the fact that we’ve been mulling them over in our minds for years now. Bluntness is the name of the game here, and there are few parameters of realism erected around its story. The evil producer in charge of it all (played by Trump supporter Dennis Quaid) is named Harvey, after all. 

Demi Moore, an actress whose own ability to combat the slow creep of ageing has been celebrated broadly (remember Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle?) plays Elisabeth Sparkle (again, this is a film that constantly indicates what it’s trying to do), a fading fitness icon with a televised exercise show that seems to be inspired by Jane Fonda’s workout tapes. When she overhears that the monstrous producer Harvey plans to trade her out for a younger model, she finds herself drawn into a shadowy rabbit hole by a black market organisation touting The Substance, an injectable that offers a second chance at youth. How does that manifest when Sparkle takes The Substance? Well, a younger version of herself, played by current It-Girl Margaret Qualley, bursts out of her spine in graphically hideous fashion. The Substance has created two from one, with the company underlining the importance of the fact that they are still a sole entity and need to act accordingly. One week, the older Elisabeth owns the body, the week after, the younger Elisabeth. It’s a gory scientific miracle that naturally finds its fatal limitations in the application of human vanity and ego. The younger Elisabeth, who rebrands herself as ‘Sue’ and immediately assumes the role the older Elisabeth once had, begins to resent her tethering to the older Elisabeth, spending more and more time in her youthful body. Terrible things begin to happen to the body left in stasis, feeding through a tube in a compartment Sue builds in the bathroom of her glitzy Hollywood Hills apartment – terrible things that will begin to make themselves known in the most visceral fashion imaginable.

Lurid, vicious, utterly unapologetic, Coralie Fargeat’s Cannes body-horror sensation is a film that goes gangbusters in spite (or because) of all the things it does that it probably shouldn’t do. In many ways, it is the definitive film of 2024.

So, no, The Substance is not subtle – far from it – but it is one of the most single handedly entertaining pieces of body horror ever put to the screen, a gloriously nasty exercise in bold, semi-Kubrickian escalation, overseen by a filmmaker in complete command of their craft. That such a director coats her film in references – to Carrie, Jekyll & Hyde, 2001: A Space Odyssey, the films of David Cronenberg, The Shining and so on – is a feature, not a bug, repurposing these aggressively cinematic images to serve her own purpose. The film is at once astonishingly gross and yet uproariously funny. I approached the film extremely tentatively, knowing my penchant for squeamishness with the stories of fainting and vomiting in the aisles out of Cannes buzzing about my head, but left positively high on the level of transgression, ambition and pure, unapologetic excess that The Substance batters you with for more than two hours. It only works because of the skill Fargeat demonstrates, wrangling the chaos about her with a deftness that only really becomes clear after the grand guignol of violence and abasement comes to an end. As the pair caught in this mortal struggle, Moore and Qualley are excellent – the former playing hauntingly, fascinatingly subdued in a film that practically thrums with noise, the latter a soulless object of slobbery sex-appeal, shark-like in her resolve to survive and thrive at all costs. 

It all culminates in a sequence that ratchets the excess well-past eleven, a finale that recalls the ending of Carrie, naturally, but also Inglourious Basterds’ fiery, theatre-set cataclysm. Watching with a large audience is a must, as Fargeat unleashes a shock-and-awe offensive that ultimately serves to underline the molten rage burning within the filmmaker herself. It’s a tale as old as time – the older woman, once young, tight and lithe, is no longer of use, cast aside to gather dust. One imagines within each of these women a hurricane rages. With The Substance, Fargeat opens that cavity wide and lets the carnage eclipse everything else. Like those women, the viscerality of The Substance is something that the polite among us would rather be pushed aside, kept dormant in a box labelled ‘genre’. Thank goodness for The Substance, a film that drowns the attitudes of the polite in a foul mix of bodily fluids.

The Substance is in cinemas now.

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