Review: ‘The Substance’ Focuses on Surfaces – Both Smooth and Wrinkled – The Village Voice

A look-at-me bid for outrageousness that fairly oozes with unironic vanity, Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance does whatever it can to make news: weenie-roast Hollywood’s swinging-dick youth-lust, strip both Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley down with a frequency that would make any contemporary male filmmaker nervous, go uber-gross with post-Cronenbergian body horror. It’s quite a show, if ultimately, and even predictably, light on ideas. Crucially, like any tasteless, bloodthirsty satire, Fargeat’s movie runs the risk of becoming what it’s lampooning — and Fargeat, a fundamentally unserious filmmaker who works only in the key of Too Much, eventually walks into her own line of fire. The Substance tries so hard to be vicious it ends up mocking itself, when it’s not overshooting its elephantine targets altogether.

The initial context is everything: Moore essentially plays herself, an aging ex-star on the verge of being shunted aside entirely by a patriarchal, crassly beauty-focused industry, personified by Dennis Quaid as a leering, rooster-like studio executive. You can’t help but sympathize — after the late ’90s, Hollywood essentially dropped Moore like a hot rock, at least as a bankable lead, and you can imagine that she took up Fargeat’s offer, and all of the nakedness it requires, as an act of vengeance. (She still looks great, no matter how claustrophobically close to her wrinkles the camera gets.) Moore’s bitter angst is real enough, but we quickly understand the kind of movie she’s in and we begin to fear for her, not for suffering career obsolescence in an age when actors still get leads deep into their 70s, but for needing to be subjected to roles like this, and to have her own plight as a 60-something woman in Hollywood exploited and turned into a gross joke.

You’re pelted with wet towels of messaging.

The rib-tickling begins once Moore’s beleaguered beauty gets pushed to the wall and desperately takes up an anonymous offer: the titular miracle drug, which is free (she finds it by way of mysterious phone calls, codes, and pass keys), and which has such an extravagant battery of maintenance rules that we can easily see calamity approaching like a runaway truck. The surprise is that Moore’s Elizabeth Sparkle (not kidding) isn’t rejuvenated — squishy-bloody spoiler — but instead essentially gives birth, through her spinal column, to a fresh new naked self (a dizzyingly dewy Qualley). So now there are two of her; each lies comatose (and naked) for seven days while the other is out and about, so of course during her awake time, Qualley’s Sue auditions for and lands the show her older half had been fired from.

It has to be decades since I’ve seen a movie this fixated with T&A, naked and otherwise — vast chunks of the 2-hour-and-20-minute film revel in Qualley’s exultantly naked/semi-naked youth and Moore’s naked/semi-naked relative agedness, as if Fargeat is almost daring us to call foul. Surfaces, surfaces: The relentless focus on appearances at the expense of anything else, however apt, grows tiresome. Fargeat’s overdone indulgence in flesh might’ve seemed to her to be part of the film’s point, but the eventual takeaway for us, scene by scene, is not the filmmaker’s passionate wit or nerve but her frenzied worry that we’ll be unimpressed by her effort. Which in itself ensures that we will be.

It doesn’t help that, for all her zest and energy, Fargeat gets fundamental things wrong: Every detail in her ideas of Hollywood (she’s French) feels weirdly dated, from the ’80s-style aerobics TV show both Elizabeth and Sue host to Quaid’s caricatured magnate, whose cretinous behavior feels pre-#MeToo, even pre-Weinstein. (He’s photographed, even while he’s eating, in fish-eye close-ups so awful he could use them as exhibits in a defamation lawsuit.) The dialogue is often laughably tone-deaf, every character is a cartoon save for Moore’s grave matron (even so, we never learn anything about her life), and the supposedly star-making New Year’s Eve show in the film’s climax incongruously features bare-breasted dancers. Meanwhile, you’re pelted with wet towels of messaging: When, in the first act, the card on a bouquet of flowers to Elizabeth declares “YOU WERE GREAT!,” Fargeat can’t resist cutting to a close-up of “WERE.”

The ostensibly real world Fargeat is critiquing is far less convincing even than the inevitable biophysical fuck-ups that start to snowball for Elizabeth — beginning auspiciously with a single finger that ages decades — once the drug’s rules are disobeyed. Bodily fluids of all kinds and colors gout and spew, and bodies themselves go wrong. Exhausted though you may be by the sophomoric hyperbole, this is the film’s true roller coaster, even if it does leave the story’s, and Moore’s, sexism-polluted dilemma in the dust. By the end, for better or worse (I can’t decide), you’re pretty much looking at a new Frank Henenlotter horror-burlesque, like a bigger-budget Basket Case 4. Even so, no one, I’m sure, would want to give up the rather spectacular final image, of a Hollywood Walk of Fame sidewalk star defiled by, shall we say, gasping narcissism.

Every time Elizabeth calls the drug’s secret and unhelpful helpline, it warns her, “Remember, you are one.” Not two — and if you ponder the film through the haze of crudeness and prosthetic gook, it seems far less about youth-philia, strictly speaking, or even the stridently youth- and beauty-obsessed pop culture, than about a conjectural Jekyll-Hyde combat between your stupid young vain self and the obsolete codger you’ve become. Both selves are quickly fed up with the other’s self-absorption (and housekeeping), and neither can slow the passing of days. Still, Fargeat could’ve gotten there in half the running time and a fraction of the food fight. ❖

Michael Atkinson has been writing for the Village Voice since 1994. His latest book is the new edition of his BFI tract on David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.