by Anthony O'Connor
Worth: $18.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, Dennis Quaid, Hugo Diego Garcia, Phillip Schurer, Joseph Balderrama
Intro:
… a darkly satirical body horror masterpiece. A horny, hideous, slime slicked nightmare ride through phobia, loathing and fleshy indignities you won't believe you’re seeing.
You are not ready for The Substance. You think you are, but you’re not.
No matter how many horror movies you’ve watched, how sick you reckon your sense of humour is, even if you believe Salò is the perfect film for a romantic date…
… You are not ready for The Substance.
From French director Coralie Fargeat (Revenge), The Substance is the story of Hollywood actress Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), a once promising thespian who in recent years has been relegated to hosting a morning aerobics show. On her 50th birthday, Elisabeth is fired by sleazy producer Harvey (Dennis Quaid), and she immediately begins to spiral. A chance meeting with an unusually attractive male nurse puts her in touch with a shady company that offers The Substance: a glowing green goo that, once injected, will allow her to become the “best version” of herself.
Needless to say, Elisabeth goes for it.
After a distinctly Cronenbergian sequence, Sue (Margaret Qualley) is born, and she’s everything Elisabeth could have hoped for. Young, fresh faced, firm of breast and buttock, possessed of a dazzling smile and dripping with charm. The one catch is that Elisabeth can only occupy Sue for seven days at a time, then she needs to let her clone body rest for a week. One week on, one week off – like custody. At first, this seems a reasonable price to pay, but as Sue’s life and career starts to peak, she begins to resent her older, wrinklier self.
And then shit starts getting weird. And you are not ready for it.
On paper, The Substance sounds like a pretty standard modern fable. A quasi-feminist riff on The Picture of Dorian Gray with some splattery practical effects. And while that’s accurate, it also ignores the sheer impact of this bloody film. For a start, you have a fearless, career-best performance from Demi Moore – herself a beautiful actress whose dramatic chops have been ignored for too long – sinking further and further into a desperate but deeply relatable madness. You’ve also got Margaret Qualley who once again proves to have impeccable taste in the roles she selects, imbuing Sue with a kind of ecstatic, needy glee and a ruthlessness to hold onto her second chance at being beautiful and beloved.
However, the real star of The Substance is the direction from Coralie Fargeat. Her visual chutzpah, vivid recreation of Hollywood as a youth-obsessed talent abattoir and unflinchingly disturbing sequences of bodily destruction, combine for 140 minutes of jaw dropping, unrelenting insanity.
Put simply, The Substance is a darkly satirical body horror masterpiece. A horny, hideous, slime slicked nightmare ride through phobia, loathing and fleshy indignities you won’t believe you’re seeing. You’ll feel pummelled, cored out, transformed and expelled like a partially digested nugget of something meaty. With its heightened tone, over-the-top dialogue, abrasive score and themes underlined with all the subtlety of a twelve car pile up, it certainly won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. But if you’d like to see a film that feels like the collective spirits of David Cronenberg, Frank Henenlotter and Brian Yuzna being channelled together and blasted at your slack, uncomprehending face for two and half hours, then you need to inject The Substance fair into your moist, disgusting viewing orifices.
And hold on tight.
