Coralie Fargeat – The Substance (2024)

Alissa Wilkinson wrote:
‘The Substance’ Review: An Indecent Disclosure
Demi Moore stars in an absurdly gory tale of an aging actress who discovers a deadly cure for obscurity.

In Vladimir Nabokov’s 1930 novel “The Eye,” a sad-sack Russian tutor living in Berlin dies by suicide, and then spends the rest of the book skulking around the living — watching, obsessing over their lives. He eventually realizes something bleak: Most of us see ourselves only through the eyes of others, through the stories we think they make up about us from the glimpses they get of our lives. “I do not exist,” the narrator writes near the end of the book. “There exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me.”

Something of “The Eye” lurks in “The Substance,” Coralie Fargeat’s mirror-haunted gory fable about fame, self-hatred and the terror that accompanies an identity constructed on the backs of other people’s stares. Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), the aging star at the center of the narrative, is very much alive, but she might as well be dead when the story starts. A career spent in front of cameras — first as a celebrated actress, and then as a celebrity fitness instructor on a show called “Sparkle Your Life with Elisabeth”— abruptly ends when an executive (Dennis Quaid) decides she’s too old to be worthy of being seen. He gets to decide if anyone wants to look at her, and if he turns the cameras away, does she even exist?

That executive is loud and disgusting and named Harvey, which should tell you a little about the subtlety of this movie, which is to say it has none, and doesn’t particularly want any. He, like most of the movie, is deliberately way, way over the top. “After 50, it stops,” he tells her, through mouthfuls of mayonnaise-coated shrimp, by way of explaining why she’s no longer attractive. Then he sputters when she asks what “it” is.

There are mirrors everywhere in Elisabeth’s world: literal mirrors and polished doorknobs, but also pictures of her in the hallways at the studio and a giant portrait at her house, so that her younger body and face are always looking back at her. Everywhere she looks, there she is, or was — lithe, toned, smiling broadly. Elisabeth is still gorgeous by any sane person’s reckoning (and Moore is in her early 60s), but surrounded constantly by a version of herself with a little more collagen, she is being slowly driven mad.

Relatable, really. We all see too much of ourselves. Ancient women had pools of water into which they could peer, but our ancestors didn’t have scads of selfies lurking in their pockets. They weren’t tagged in unflattering photos snapped by friends. They didn’t have to look at their own faces on Zoom all day.

Our brains haven’t evolved to bear the burden of that kind of self-consciousness. And appearance-altering medical interventions — drugs, procedures, a shot of this, a laser of that — are more accessible than ever. As we stare into these mirrors, we know we could just fork over some money and stop thinking about “it” at all. We’re more able than ever to create an ideal version of ourselves, which is to say the one we think other people want to look at.

This state of affairs has collectively freaked us out, and that includes Elisabeth. She feels her entire existence slipping from her grasp when a few dozen roses and a perfunctory notecard thanking her for her years at the studio arrive at her apartment. (“You were amazing!” the card reads — emphasis on “were.”) But then, she discovers a way to change her life entirely. A stranger quietly tells her about a mysterious treatment called The Substance, which comes in a box full of syringes and liquids. Once administered, The Substance promises that “a better version of yourself” will emerge.

It turns out that’s very literal. Alone in her capacious, tiled bathroom, Elisabeth gives birth (through her back) to a glamorous, nubile younger self (Margaret Qualley), who names herself Sue and auditions for Elisabeth’s former slot on TV. She gets it, of course, because Harvey can barely hold himself back when he sees her shiny pink leotard, her smile, her perfectly rounded rear. The upgraded new show is called “Pump It Up With Sue,” and it is a magnificent hit.

This is a triumph, of a kind, for Elisabeth. But things soon turn twisted. Elisabeth and Sue “are one,” as The Substance’s instructional materials continually remind them, or maybe I should say her. They’re supposed to switch every seven days, but being in Sue’s body garners adoration. So she spends longer as Sue, and Elisabeth starts to wither.

Be warned: This is a very gory and often bombastic movie. The logic is also not airtight, especially when it comes to whether, and how, Sue and Elisabeth share a consciousness. (There’s a fascinating dissertation in here somewhere about theories of mind-body dualism.) It’s all metaphor, though, not in the least bit meant for a literal analysis. That’s an awkward thing to mix into a movie that turns every subtext into text, which means its constant hammering of its points starts to feel patronizing, as if we might not get it. But it’s also quite funny, and the worse things become for Elisabeth, the harder it is not to giggle with glee. By the end, things have become monstrous and mad.

Fargeat and her cinematographer, Benjamin Kracun, apply a deliberately cranked up aesthetic to “The Substance,” which seems to exist outside of space and time. The world in which Elisabeth Sparkle lives feels like a hallucination of Los Angeles, one with Brutalist architecture and almost no people. There’s only one show business studio, apparently, and its interiors feel ripped from the 1980s, while Elisabeth’s apartment was clearly decorated in the 1990s. Yet Sue texts on a smartphone. The point is not hard to guess at, especially with Moore in the lead role, an icon of that era who was often cast in movies as a sexpot.

But “The Substance” is also interested in — perhaps more than anything — what has often been termed the “male gaze,” though that phrase feels reductionist now. The camera here openly ogles Qualley’s body, running slowly up and down her frame, clad and lit in a sharp, shiny way that feels reminiscent mostly of porn. It goes on forever, and it’s uncomfortable, and that is obviously the point. We’ve seen scores of actresses — and, lately, actors — shot this way. But the heightening and exaggerating turns it satirical, the better to remind us what the movies have done to our perceptions of what a body should be.

In the end that’s what “The Substance” does best: not just remind us about the absurd standards for female beauty and the destructive power of celebrity, but turn the mirror back on us. The sharpest critique isn’t about bodies, but about the way we’ve trained ourselves to look at those bodies, and the effect that has on our own. The movie is, appropriately enough, a mirror, and our discomfort reveals our own hidden biases and fears about ourselves. Being older, being famous, being seen, being loved, being usurped by someone younger and hotter — it’s all here. Nothing like a mirror to remind you what lurks beneath.

The Substance
Rated R for guts and gore and nudity galore. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes. In theaters.

Director Coralie Fargeat
Writer Coralie Fargeat
Stars Margaret Qualley, Demi Moore, Dennis Quaid, Hugo Diego Garcia, Oscar Lesage
Rating R
Running Time 2h 21m
Genres Drama, Horror

The.Substance.2024.720p.MUBI.WEB-DL.DDP5.1.H.264-DETAiL.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	2 h 21 min
Size: 	4.47 GiB
Video
Codec: 	h264
Resolution: 	1280x640 
Aspect ratio:  	2.000
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	4 197 kb/s
BPP: 	0.213
Audio
#1:  	English 5.1ch E-AC-3 @ 320 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/BC1563C747DF06D/The.Substance.2024.720p.MUBI.WEB-DL.DDP5.1.H.264-DETAiL.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English, English SDH, German, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Turkish