The Substance review: Demi Moore is perfectly cast in ‘wild, wigged-out, satirical body-horror movie'


The Substance (18) ★★★★★
For much of the 90s Demi Moore was the biggest female box-office draw in Hollywood, with a run of hits that included Ghost, Disclosure and Indecent Proposal, and headline-grabbing paydays that reached a peak with the $12.5m she negotiated for the misbegotten 1996 comedy Striptease. That was still considerably less than Jim Carrey got for The Cable Guy the same year ($20m), but sexist double standards meant Moore’s commercial viability took an immediate and irreversible hit when Striptease didn’t perform as expected, while Carrey’s ascent continued unabated, despite his film flopping so badly Striptease ended up making twice as much as The Cable Guy at the box office. Add in the physical scrutiny Moore has received from the moment she broke through as part of the Brat Pack in the mid-1980s and you can see why French writer/director Coralie Fargeat thought her perfect casting for The Substance, a wild, wigged-out, satirical body-horror movie that takes a flamethrower to the misogynistic beauty standards of the entertainment industry – and has plenty of fun doing it.
Set within a garish, fetid vision of Hollywood that’s cartoonishly over-the-top, but is also, perhaps, a figurative reflection of the the extent to which the industry’s base contempt for women has helped distort society as a whole, it casts Moore as the improbably named Elisabeth Sparkles, a once in-demand Hollywood actress whose latter-day career as a Jane Fonda-esque exercise guru is on the point of collapse thanks to the whims of a repugnant media executive called – but of course – “Harvey” (he’s played with unfettered odiousness by Dennis Quaid).
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We already know her career’s in a moribund state thanks to Fargeat opening the film with a fascinating overhead montage shot of Elisabeth’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame falling into a state of disrepair. But after overhearing Harvey discussing on the phone (while urinating) that he plans to terminate her contract, Elisabeth is bluntly informed by him over a plate of slurped prawns that women over 50 have no value. This is how she’s fired. He gets distracted by a colleague; she’s left to process the fact that, in his view, she’s basically a messy carapace destined for the trash-heap, her youthful self long-since consumed, used up and exploited by a male-dominated industry.
It’s an intentionally gross image and foreshadows a lot of what is to come as Elisabeth finds herself – following a car crash – in a doctor’s office where a mysterious young intern slips her information about an experimental medical product that generates a younger, more beautiful, more perfect version of anyone who uses it. The delicious conceptual twist to this Dorian Gray-like premise, though, is that both versions share a consciousness and must alternate weeks in the world, which leads to all hell breaking loose when the new version, played by Margaret Qualley, starts stealing time from her older self (Moore).


Fargeat – who broke through a few years ago with the ultra-violent rape/revenge thriller Revenge – smartly keeps the mechanics of the eponymous serum simple: from the opening shot of an egg yolk doubling in real time to the nifty way she bakes the movie’s own trailer into the instruction video that comes with Elisabeth’s first delivery, we understand right away the rules of this heightened world and how everything works. This in turn lets Fargeat run wild with some truly outré ideas and images, starting with the first separation, which is entertainingly gory and nods to everything from Frankenstein and David Cronenberg’s version of The Fly to the original “chest-burster” scene from Ridley Scott’s Alien and the monster transformations in John Carpenter’s The Thing. Yet it’s so startlingly realised it in its own right – just check the close-ups on Elisabeth’s eyes as her double takes shape within her – that it becomes its own appalling thing of beauty, surpassed only by a later moment of gross-out brilliance not to be spoiled here.
The world Qualley’s character, who takes the name ‘Sue’, is birthed into is just as perverse. As she admires her taut body in the bathroom mirror of Elisabeth’s upscale apartment, then proceeds to take Elisabeth’s job with a pornier-themed fitness show of her own that has Harvey salivating to his shareholders, Fargeat appropriates the voyeuristic, salacious style of Carrie/Body Double-era Brian De Palma and Basic Instinct/Show Girls-era Paul Verhoeven, imbuing it with an added layer of irony to satirise the male gaze and show its destructive effect. Soon enough, Sue and Elisabeth are attempting to sabotage each other’s lives, All About Eve-style, as they compete with each other for time in the world, even though they’re the same person and need to live in balance. It’s a brutally frank metaphor for the way women internalise self-loathing and beat themselves up for not being able to live up to the impossible standards demanded by society, but its also about the unusually high toll women have to pay for choices and compromises made in their youth.
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Hide AdThat’s the substance in The Substance. It’s not subtle, but it’s not meant to be. With only her second feature, Fargeat is establishing herself as a maximalist filmmaker and she really goes for it, pushing things as far she can with an audacious, gag-inducing, Grand Guignol finale that’s oddly poignant thanks to committed performances from Qualley and, especially, Moore. At 61 she's taking big artistic risks – arguably the biggest of her career. That they pay off again and again makes this thrillingly sick and twisted film all the better.
The Substance is in cinemas from 20 September
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