Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance” is the greatest feat in body horror in maybe decades.
Perhaps the most obvious comparison when discussing the French filmmaker’s sophomore feature is David Cronenberg’s 1986 classic “The Fly,” which saw a scientist played by Jeff Goldblum tragically fused with a fly by the teleportation device he’s developed.
But it also brings to mind a bevy of other bizarre horror gems, from Brian Yuzna’s 1989 camp cult classic “Society,” which satirically skewers class dynamics, to Hong Kong filmmaker Fruit Chan’s notorious 2004 shocker “Dumplings,” about an actress who resorts to consuming black-market dumplings containing a nauseating ingredient that’s said to promote youthfulness.
A blunt critique of female beauty standards, “The Substance” stars Demi Moore as aging celebrity Elizabeth Sparkle, a once-successful actress who has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame but now leads a TV workout program. When she learns that she’s going to be replaced by someone younger by an executive not so subtly named Harvey (Dennis Quaid in a performance that’s hammier than his character’s pig-like behavior), Sparkle turns to the mysterious product The Substance, which promises through cell replication to quite literally create a younger, “better” version of herself. The catch: Each body can only sustain itself for seven days at a time, requiring her to swap consciousness between the two weekly — no exceptions. But as Sparkle becomes a little too attached to the life she leads as the mononymously known rising star Sue (Margaret Qualley), she begins to experience side effects.
“The Substance” is gleefully satirical, painting a world so colorfully, comically stylized that it can even turn something like a character talking while eating into its own form of gore. A sort of body-horror epic at 140 minutes, it takes its time to fully reveal its cards, though a propulsive electronic score by British composer Raffertie and a smattering of gross-out moments keep the first two hours moving along as it builds to a payoff so satisfyingly extreme as to quell any concerns of exaggerated acclaim. Moore and Qualley boldly go along for the ride, showing a willingness to push the limits as far as the roles require.
Ending on a full-circle visual so winkingly obvious as to wonder why it hadn’t been expected, “The Substance” is by no means subtle in its commentary. Fargeat boils the film’s, ahem, substance down to its simplest ideas, in turn leaning so heavily into its more heightened qualities as to satisfy even fans of pure, nasty genre. The result is a film that stacks up against some of the more memorably unsettling moments in body-horror history while simultaneously being able to laugh at its own absurdity.
“The Substance” opens in theaters on Friday, Sept. 20.
