"The Substance"

  ☆☆☆☆ 

The Substance is demented, completely unhinged, and insanely grotesque, and those among its best qualities. It's a satire, and a good one, but it's also—maybe even primarily—a body-horror movie, a film that in many scenes directly recalls and references David Cronenberg's 1986 masterpiece of body horror The Fly. I suppose what you will make of The Substance depends in large part on your feelings about The Fly, since much of The Substance makes The Fly look like a G-rated Disney movie.

The Substance, which also recalls a lot of Kubrick, is written and directed by French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat, and few filmmakers dare as much as she does in this film, which, it cannot be stated enough, is not for the squeamish. When I saw The Substance, some audience members got all the way to about the two hour mark of this 140-minute film and then decided they had seen enough. It's that kind of movie. You may decide you've seen enough long before that, or you may decide that too much is never enough—which certainly would seem to be Fargeat's attitude.

In The Substance, Demi Moore, an actress who became known in her 20s and is now in her 60s, plays a celebrity named Elisabeth Sparkle who became known in her youth and is now far from young. As The Substance begins, nobody comments on how ravishing she looks (which she does), or how extraordinarily well she has aged (which she has), they just know she's old. So they fire her.

At the same time, she encounters a mysterious come-on for a substance called, well, The Substance. She watches a slick advertisement for a neon-green liquid that makes some mighty big promises. There appear to be two customers for The Substance, and you may wonder how something like this, which couldn't have been cheap to develop, much less market, manages to keep going with just two customers. It's better not to ask. It's better not to ask about most things in The Substance—inner logic is not one of the movie's strong points, nor does it need to be.

The Substance also doesn't have much in the way of instructions. Like Apple products, it's one of those IYKYK sort of things, and apparently Elisabeth figures it out, because as soon as she injects herself with The Substance, out pops (and, boy, does it pop) another version of herself: young, big-breasted, tight-assed, effortlessly beautiful. But, as the people behind The Substance keep explaining, it's not a separate person: There is only one. Elisabeth has been divided. But her other half, a perky ingenue known as Sue, sees herself as something wholly separate. And there's the rub.

One of them, at least. The other is that The Substance comes with a few rules. Chief among them is: Never, ever feed them after midni— wait, wrong horror-comedy. It's that the two halves of Elisabeth must switch every seven days. If Sue doesn't give up her sexy body and newfound fame in the seven days, well ... something will happen.

And it does. With increasingly horrifying results, most of which are also painfully, awfully funny. The Substance really does excel as satire of the highest sort: It's genuinely funny, even while being utterly absorbing and fantastically unpredictable. As the movie careens around its steep, dizzying track, it threatens to go off the rails, but Fargeat keeps it going even as she forces the audience to watch through closed eyes or through their fingers. (I don't know that I've ever really, actually watched a movie through my fingers ... until now. The Substance offers moments that go beyond mere cringe.)

Just when you think it can't get any more outrageous, Fargeat offers a surprise. It's one that almost works, even when, with unexpected glee, the movie layers in Bernard Hermann's love theme from Vertigo. The whole thing comes so close to perfection that its penultimate scene falls unexpectedly flat. It's the one moment that Fargeat ought to pull back but doesn't. Yet the whole thing recovers for one of the most bizarre and unforgettable final shots in movie history.

Anchoring it all are Demi Moore, who gives herself entirely to the role, and Margaret Qualley as her literal other half. Individually and together, they make The Substance work, even in its wildest and most impossible moments. They and the film are fearless, and if fearlessness takes it into territory it can't quite make work, that's more than all right: Few films are as bold, as interesting, and as full-bore bonkers as The Substance.

Viewed September 22, 2024 — AMC Century City 15

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