THE SUBSTANCE - Mark Reviews Movies

The Substance, Mubi

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 19, 2024

Trying to become famous and maintain celebrity isn't always pretty, and The Substance takes that reality to the extreme. Writer/director Coralie Fargeat's film is a gross, gooey, and grotesque fable about fame—the obsession with holding on to it, as well as the cost, to both body and mind, that often must be paid to do so. It doesn't have much to say, although the film is a bit more layered than its over-the-top surface might suggest. However, Fargeat makes the point clear with such style, passion, and control over the material's grisly effects that it's tough to shake and tougher to dismiss as just some kind of horror show.

Take the back story of our main character, which is a familiar one, to be sure, but that quality is irrelevant. Instead, it's the way Fargeat communicates the protagonist's history that's so ingenious. It's a seamless montage of the passage of time, focused exclusively on the character's literal star—the kind that adorns a famous path of walkways in Hollywood. We watch it be made and set in cement, and the camera remains fixed, too, at a specific height above the decorative plaque announcing that this woman is a movie star.

She's there for the celebration, and then, passers-by flock to it for a photo opportunity with this monument to their "favorite." An uncertain amount of time passes, and the admirers become fewer, until someone notes that he vaguely recalls the actress as being from that one movie. After all of that, somebody drops some food on the plaque and is more concerned about saving what he can of his meal than making a mess on someone's shrine to supposed immortality.

The sequence is striking, because it communicates everything we need to know about the career of the protagonist in a brief amount of time and with seemingly little effort. It's all right there about Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore, in a high-wire act of a performance that goes well beyond the real-world reflection of the casting) before we even get a good look at her.

When we do, she's recording the latest episode of aerobics workout TV show she hosts, and that seemingly completes the entire cycle of Elisabeth's story—from one of the most famous movie stars in the world to this. It'd be funny if it weren't so tragic, and it would be tragic if it weren't so damn funny.

Fargeat's control of tone here, blending Hollywood satire with personal heartbreak and a warped sense of humor with the genuinely unsettling imagery that eventually arrives in Elisabeth's story, is especially noteworthy. The whole of it creates a sort of cognitive dissonance, in which we don't know whether to laugh or feel for Elisabeth—and laugh or shudder at just how much torture the character must endure to taste that old piece of celebrity again. Fargeat allows herself the freedom to do both, while encouraging us to feel all of it.

There's not much to the plot, which is the right move here. This is, after all, the violent mashing of two common tales of Hollywood: the fall of one star and the birth of another. There is, indeed, a literal birthing scene soon enough, but first, Elisabeth must fall.

She's fired from the show—on her birthday, no less—by producer Harvey (Dennis Quaid, clearly having fun), who is shot at such severe angles and with lenses that warp the shape of his face that he looks as unnatural as his job and outlook are. Basically, he and many others in power believe Elisabeth has reached the end of her career, simply on account of her age—although he won't say as much or what she, who now makes a career of keeping her body in peak condition, has actually lost.

Adding injury to insult, she's involved in a car accident leaving the meeting. At the hospital, a nurse secretly passes her a flash drive with information about "the Substance," which promises to create a "better" version of a person, and a note claiming that it changed his life. When Elisabeth spots a casting call for her former job, she decides to try the Substance.

There are rules and procedures for Elisabeth to follow, as well as ones for Sue (Margaret Qualley, cleverly playing an empty vessel of sorts that's gradually filled with only the allure and rewards of fame), the "better" version of the fallen star. Yes, we'll skip how Sue comes into existence, because it's too disgusting to describe and so as not to ruin the surprise—except to re-assert that it is a kind of birth. Sue quickly takes over the life and career once had by Elisabeth, who's stuck in a sort of coma until Sue has to switch with her after seven days.

Those are the basics of the plot, which are very basic. That, though, allows Fargeat to toy with a heightened variety of a star-is-born narrative, while also viewing Elisabeth with some compassion for her desperation and humor for the extent of it. At its most subversive, the film prods at how women in the entertainment industry are selected for, exploited on account of, and casually disposed of after the supposed decline of their physical appearance (There's a lot of clinical nudity as Elisabeth and Sue perform the Substance's regimen, but the workout sequences are hyper-sexualized by way of ogling close-ups and camera angles).

As for the horror elements of the tale, they are impressively bizarre and disturbing, using makeup, prosthetics, and, eventually, animatronics to show the painful consequences, as well as the deteriorating effects, of the Substance, not to mention Sue's increasing desire to stay in control, on Elisabeth. Those practical effects reach a climax of ingenuity and repulsive creativity with the story's own peak, an ironic but inevitable turn of fortune, followed by an ill-considered act of pure despair.

We're repeatedly reminded throughout The Substance that Elisabeth is Sue and vice versa. Beneath the most overt trappings of the film's surface, then, is a pointed psychological study of fame and the lengths to which people will go to achieve and keep it. It's ugly, sad, and wickedly funny.

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