Coralie Fargeat (2024)
Striking imagery and succinct storytelling get The Substance off to a strong, funny start. A close-up shows the contents of a syringe being injected into an egg yolk, which gives birth to a second yolk that sits alongside it. A star is put in place on Hollywood Boulevard, bearing the name Elisabeth Sparkle: a passage-of-time montage leaves the star showing signs of wear and tear; the montage culminates with a clumsy pedestrian dropping fast food on it. Cut to a TV studio, where an aerobics session is taking place. It’s fronted by aforementioned Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), flanked by other middle-aged women in leotards, all in quite good shape but none as good as Elisabeth. She ends the workout looking into the camera, promising viewers she’ll be working on the lateral abs next week and telling her audience to ‘Take care of yourself!’ She leaves the studio and heads down a long corridor, its walls adorned with portraits bearing witness to Elisabeth’s celeb longevity. Colleagues wish her happy birthday on her journey down the corridor towards the women’s restroom. It’s out of use so she pops her head round the door of the gents’, sees that it’s empty and slips into one of the cubicles.
Enter TV boss Harvey (Dennis Quaid), bawling into his mobile phone – about Elisabeth. He derides her age – today’s her fiftieth birthday – and says she’ll be getting the boot. Harvey exits the restroom and Elisabeth emerges from the cubicle in a changed frame of mind. Driving away from the TV studios and distracted by the sight of her image being removed from a roadside billboard, she crashes her car. In ER, a middle-aged hospital doctor (Tom Morton) assures her no bones are broken, that his wife’s a big fan of Elisabeth. He discharges her but when the doctor leaves the room, his assistant says there’s one further test to do. This young male nurse (Robin Greer) feels Elisabeth’s spine, murmuring that she’d be a ‘good candidate’. He confirms she can go home but not before slipping something into Elisabeth’s coat pocket – a USB stick, inside a piece of folded paper on which are written the words ‘It changed my life’.
For twenty minutes or so, Coralie Fargeat’s film is excellent – it’s a pity there are still two hours to go. Those opening visuals anticipate what’s coming in different ways. The egg yolks neatly summarise the main storyline: desperate for rejuvenation, Elisabeth Sparkle gets hold of a black-market drug that generates a younger version of herself. Perhaps the yolks’ colour foresees the golden-mustardy coat in whose pocket she finds the fateful message, and which she’ll wear off and on throughout the story. But that ketchup-drenched food slopping on her Walk of Fame star, along with the red walls and carpeting of the corridor beyond the TV studio, predict writer-director Fargeat’s bloodthirstiness. As the elixir’s dreadful consequences pile up, the film’s distinctive look – clinically sinister interiors, tilted camera angles – is subsumed in garish body horror. Once she injects herself with the single-shot serum, Elisabeth is – to put it mildly – never the same again, and the same goes for The Substance. From the point at which the protagonist’s convulsed body generates a new body via a deep red slit in her back, Fargeat is almost continuously upping the gruesome ante.
There’s no shortage of rules attaching to the life-changing drug. The original body is the matrix for its offspring; the new body requires a regular injection of ‘stabiliser fluid’ to guard against deterioration. The two bodies must alternate conscious existence for seven days at a time, the active body feeding the unconscious one intravenously during the latter’s week off. Any deviation from the schedule entails an irreversible physical consequence for the currently inactive body. When Elisabeth’s younger version, Sue (Margaret Qualley), brings a man (Oliver Lesage) home at the very end of a week’s stint and wants to prolong the bedroom experience, she takes an extra hit of stabiliser and exceeds the time limit (The Substance has echoes of Cinderella as well as Faust). The index finger on Elisabeth’s right hand immediately transforms into the finger of a wizened crone. Until now, Sue has, in two ways, been working out just as Elisabeth wanted. The network TV channel advertises for a new presenter, aged between eighteen and thirty, for the weekly fitness show. Sue wows at the audition, gets the job and proves an instant hit as the star of what used to be ‘Sparkle Your Life’ and is now ‘Pump It Up’. But Sue’s infringement of the rules is the turning point in Elisabeth’s relationship with her new self. Her pre-injection briefing pack contained a card instructing Elisabeth to ‘REMEMBER YOU ARE ONE’; Sue has decided to forget that.
The trouble is, so does Coralie Fargeat. Horror movies don’t demand conventional realism but they do need to make sense within the world the film-maker has created. Elisabeth lives in her vast Los Angeles apartment with only photographs and awards she once won for company; she has no friends or family; we accept her complete social isolation as an expression of the utter loneliness of the fading star. What’s not acceptable is that Fargeat doesn’t address the nature of Elisabeth-Sue’s supposedly shared consciousness. It’s hard not to be struck, even in the early stages of Sue’s existence, by her lack of personality – either distinct from or clearly reflecting Elisabeth’s: Sue is simply an icon of flawless youth. (You may find yourself wondering too why Elisabeth’s middle-aged fan base is happy with this junior replacement – and with ‘Pump It Up’’s correspondingly youthful support troupe – or how many of Sue’s contemporaries would be glued, even on their phones, to a daytime keep-fit show.) Fargeat’s indifference to the partnership’s mentality is an elephant in the room once conflict develops between the older and younger woman – as Elisabeth becomes a bitter recluse and Sue determined to break the rules to enjoy her success, making Elisabeth more decrepit each time that she does. Instead, Fargeat contrives to make the pair simultaneously conscious so that they can physically fight. By now, Elisabeth is a cadaverous hunchback but she slugs it out with Sue. There’s a lot of bashing of heads on a tiled bathroom floor.
Fargeat must be well aware that plenty of people will be happy to take just what they want from The Substance. There’s one chunk of the audience predisposed to receive it as a searing indictment of Hollywood’s and the wider media’s standards of beauty and demands for how women must look. Another target group is eager for non-stop horror spectacle, and they’re very well catered for. Some of the critical plaudits for the movie hail it as ‘gloriously gruesome’, and so on: the relentless OTT quality seems to be mistaken for genuine wit. Fargeat has been complimented even by hard-to-please Armond White. In the latest edition of his notorious annual ‘better than’ list, White commends The Substance because ‘Coralie Fargeat gives the Me Too movement the outrageous treatment it deserves’. Fargeat may be surprised to learn this is what she was doing and it’s true that White’s judgments are increasingly deranged. (Trump’s return to power, which White celebrated back in November, seems to have left him madder than before, in both senses of the word.) Even so, an Armond White endorsement is evidence of just how far you can get manipulating themes as politically suggestive as those of The Substance.
As well as skewering the age-and-beauty culture of Hollywood etc, Fargeat seems to imply that this is rooted in mercenary misogyny and exploitation, thus opening the door to a more broadly ‘feminist’ interpretation of her film, though this isn’t entirely straightforward for her. Fargeat’s camera displays and inspects the naked bodies of Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley enough to make you wonder again if the female gaze in cinema is really so unexceptionable (see note on Eva Husson’s Mothering Sunday (2021)). But Fargeat keeps the feminist door open – or seems to think she does – through the way in which she presents the male characters in the story, who are mostly vile or pathetic or both.
Their chief representative, of course, is rebarbative media bigshot Harvey (a loaded name) who, after getting rid of Elisabeth, gives her a cookery book to occupy her retirement and Sue the plum job of hosting the TV channel’s upcoming New Year’s Eve extravaganza. Other men are also worth noting. There’s awkward, milquetoast Fred (Edward Hamilton Clark), who bumps into Elisabeth just after she gets the push, reminds her they were in tenth grade together, tells her he still thinks she’s the most beautiful girl in the world. There’s the dimwit neighbour (Gore Abrams) whose face lights up when Sue rather than Elisabeth answers his ring on her doorbell: he tells Sue to let him know of any jobs she wants doing and that he’s got ‘a big hammer’. There’s Sue’s hunk boyfriend (Hugo Diego Garcia), who flees the apartment in terror after catching sight of geriatric, deformed Elisabeth in the bathroom. There’s a decaying old man (Christian Erickson) in a diner, revealed to be the original of the male nurse who slipped Elisabeth the USB stick. There’s a pair of casting directors (Daniel Knight and Jonathon Carley), who audition and bitch about applicants for ‘Pump It Up’. A more ominous man-in-charge takes the form of just a voice (belonging to Yann Bean), which answers Elisabeth’s and, in due course, Sue’s desperate calls to the Substance helpline and which is – from their point of view – dispassionately unhelpful.
Armond White’s list rates The Substance ‘better than’ Wicked and Emilia Pérez, in which ‘hacks John M Chu and Jacques Audiard both exploit ethnic and trans feminism in two perfect parallels of stupid ineptitude’. Yet Fargeat’s and Audiard’s films have a fair bit in common: reckless momentum, automatic misandry, and a lead actress whose impact in the role she’s playing derives more from who she is – or, at least, from her public persona – than from characterisation. Harvey, as he splashes noisily into the restroom urinal, rubbishes Elisabeth’s star reputation – ‘Oscar winner my ass! When was that? Like, in the 30s – for King Kong?!’ Demi Moore isn’t an Oscar winner; in fact, she’d never been nominated for an Academy Award – until The Substance. She is, however, sixty-one and doesn’t look it: the demands that Coralie Fargeat makes of her clearly demonstrate how good a body Moore still has. (How much actress and director see the irony of this, given the film’s subject matter, is less clear.) Nevertheless, Moore’s own star has fallen a long way since she was Hollywood’s highest-paid actress in the 1990s – so The Substance has comeback power, too, enough perhaps for Moore to win the Oscar. She gives a good performance (it’s certainly better than Karla Sofia Gascón’s in Emilia Pérez) but it’s inevitably limited, since Elisabeth Sparkle is a woman almost always in extremis. There are highlights – as when Elisabeth stands at the mirror, preparing for a date with poor old Fred that never happens: Moore applies make-up then removes it, applies it again then wipes it off more aggressively, making herself look as bad as she can. But this is a performance – like so much else in The Substance – in block capitals.
Margaret Qualley, subject to even closer physical inspection by the camera, does as well as can be expected with her underwritten role. It’s not until the New Year’s Eve TV show – the film’s climactic bloodbath – that Sue seems to have something close to independent life, and then only briefly. The night before, she runs out of the stabiliser fluid that she’s squandered: the helpline tells Sue she must revert to Elisabeth if she’s to get a new supply (but why?) Elisabeth, now hideously aged, orders a serum with which to terminate Sue. She can’t go through with it because she can’t kick the habit of wanting the star status that Sue now enjoys – this was just about the only time I felt that Fargeat conveyed some idea of Elisabeth’s partaking in Sue’s existence, rather than observing it enviously. This triggers (but how?) the fight to the death between the two of them. Sue wins but, deprived of Elisabeth, finds her own body deteriorating rapidly in the minutes before the TV show starts. She injects herself with some of Elisabeth’s leftover activator serum, which creates a hideous mutated body, introduced by a title card as ‘MONSTRO ELISASUE’.
At first glance, you think the Elephant Woman; then you realise some of the body parts are in unexpected places. The nasty casting directors derided the girl immediately before Sue in the ‘Pump It Up’ auditions as, ‘Great dancer … Too bad her boobs aren’t in the middle of her face instead of that nose’. That’s just where Monstro Elisasue’s boobs are – one of them anyway. She wears as a mask a cutout of Elisabeth’s face but removes it as the show gets underway: all hell breaks loose in the TV studio (without, it seems, the plug being pulled on the live broadcast). The audience bays for blood – ‘Kill the monster, kill the monster!’ One man decapitates Monstro but to no avail: she instantly grows another, more deformed head; when her arm breaks, it’s enough to soak her assailant and most of the rest of the audience in blood. Monstro manages to escape but, in the street outside, explodes into a heap of viscera. Elisabeth’s original face emerges from the gory rubble and finds its way to her Hollywood Boulevard star. The face breaks into a ready-when-you-are-Mr-DeMille grin before melting into a bloody puddle.
Coralie Fargeat won the screenplay award at Cannes last year for The Substance. If she wins other such prizes, it will be reward for an ingenious idea rather than for a script that’s properly worked through. Late on in the film, Fargeat seems to be catering to yet another constituency – the self-congratulatory spotters of references to other movies. The film’s original music is by Raffertie but at one point Fargeat plays a bit of Bernard Herrmann’s score for Vertigo – perhaps the most famous cinema treatment of twinned women (and an unusually complicated instance of the male gaze). The Herrmann melody sparked appreciative laughter in the Prince Charles Cinema where I saw The Substance – as did Fargeat’s quick burst of Also Sprach Zarathustra aka 2001: A Space Odyssey. I’m afraid I didn’t get the relevance of this, except that the best male voice in Kubrick’s film belongs to HAL and the most interesting male voice in The Substance (the helpline voice) sounds like a computer, too.
13 February 2025
