The Substance is the second film from writer/director Coralie Fargeat, and it is a marvel. A meticulously crafted piece of filmmaking, the movie is a frontal assault on Hollywood’s treatment of young women and done in a way where every single meticulously composed shot argues it’s rightfully angry premise.
The Substance has an advanced screening tomorrow, September 18, before opening on Friday, September 20th.
Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) has been the star of a popular exercise television series for years. And although her ratings are still very good, she is unceremoniously dumped by the network in favor of hiring a new, and much younger, host for the program. Soon after, Elisabeth becomes aware of a drug simply called “The Substance” which promises to deliver “the best version of yourself.” That best version manifests itself as a doppelganger who calls herself Sue (Margaret Qualley). who quickly secures for herself the role as the new host of Elisabeth’s old show. But there are very specific rules for using the Substance, and when Sue starts to break them, it has dire consequences for both her and Elisabeth.
The Substance is very obviously a story about societal pressure on women to maintain their appearance and how Hollywood commodifies looks over everything else. Of course, this is not the first instance of these themes being explored on the big screen. This is material we’ve seen dissected to various degrees in films as All About Eve, Death Becomes Her, Black Swan and The Neon Demon. And like we’ve seen in Death Becomes Her specifically, Fargeat externalizes those fears and insecurities as horrific, beauty-destroying physical manifestations in the best David Cronenberg body horror tradition.
But just because it has ideas that have been previously explored doesn’t mean that The Substance is in any way derivative for Fargeat, whose debut, 2017’s Revenge was highly lauded for its strong feminist spin on certain genre tropes. She attacks her storytelling with an assured gusto that moves the film along with a very deliberate visual style. Most shots are very carefully composed, often in a symmetrical manner. Superficially, a broad comparison could perhaps be made to the formal compositional style of Wes Anderson, but Fargeat is doing something far different. The artificiality of the shots is a comment on how constructed and unnatural the entertainment world can be, not just in the images that are created in front of the camera, but for what goes on behind the cameras as well. The camera switches primarily to handheld when it is time for the characters to go out into the real world beyond the artificiality of their luxuriously appointed apartments, television, studios, and executive offices.
Fargeat expands on that artificiality in a number of ways, starting with how she shoots her two leads. Her camera often lingers over first Elisabeth, and then Sue’s, body, emphasizing their own commodification. Overhead shots of the narrow shower at their apartment suggest a feeling of being imprisoned in their life due to just their physical beauty. Even a shot of Sue opening up and taking a sip from a can of Diet Coke – one of the few actual brand names seen in the film it should be noted – is done to evoke the lasciviousness of past “sex sells” soft drink commercials.
The performances here are uniformly excellent all around. Moore brings an anger that most likely draws on experiences she and other actresses of her generation and before have unfortunately gone through. There is a moment where Elisabeth, angry at Sue’s betrayal by not following the rules, is confronted with a decision as to whether to end her use of the Substance or continue. The frantic look of fear and anger on her face is heartbreaking and encapsulates the film’s overall thesis perfectly in that moment. While the mechanics of how much of an extension of Sue is from Elisabeth remains murky, Margaret Qualley plays that ambiguity as Sue embraces everything her youthful body can bring her while being revolted by the inevitability of what aging will do to her. Dennis Quaid walks a tightrope as network executive Harvey, named so no doubt in order to invoke disgraced Hollywood executive Harvey Weinstein. The character needs to be broadly cartoonish with an obvious fake sincerity and Quaid achieves that without ever pushing it over the top.
