Shocking, bold, the way more movies should be

By the end of “The Substance”, you don’t know whether to cry, recoil in horror, or vomit, but one thing is for sure, writer-director Coralie Fargeat keeps you invested. Here is a body horror flick that makes you wonder when the hell the last time you saw a really good one really was? It reminds us of Cronenberg, of great body transformation pictures; it’s absolutely disgusting, and rather than preachiness, that establishes the point here.


You’re also going to have a really hard time getting Demi Moore out of your head once this one ends. This should be the horror performance that absolutely gets Oscar voters to break. It’s a damn good one that breaks your heart as much as it makes your entire body cringe just looking at it.


She plays a character named Elisabeth Sparkle, a one-time movie star and Oscar winner who has moved on to hosting a fitness morning show. But her lecherous boss (Dennis Quaid) has deemed her too old for even that, leaving her a crying, drunken mess in her apartment with no family, friends, and now, motivation to live.


Hope arrives when she’s given a thumb drive mentioning the substance, a medical kit that comes with several large, intimidating needles, in addition to tubes, syringes, and some nasty, gooey food to be fed through I.V. It’s a program to create a whole new self, one which it promises will still be her, just younger. Essentially, their brains will still be the same.


I won’t go into how the new self comes about. I’m not sure if it’s in the trailers or not but I felt it best to experience it knowing as little as possible. As body horror, it’s gonna go down as a classic set piece- one that reminds of “An American Werewolf in London”, Invasion of the Body Snatchers”, and the alien birth from “Alien”. Basically, it’s wild.
But if how painful this scene plays out doesn’t seem like a huge catch, there’s more. Elisabeth will emerge as a new, hot young thing named Sue (Margaret Qualley), but she can only do so for a week at a time, feeding off the other’s spinal fluid. And if you’re thinking why doesn’t she just suck old Elisabeth dry to stay young? Well, then you have a pretty good idea where this is going?


A rivalry grows between the two women, one which sees the young, vivacious Qualley trying to stay as conceited as possible and the older Moore consistently paying the price for it. At first, it’s just comparing herself to the younger girl and feeling like a loser for it. But Fargeat gets far bolder, audacious, and gross- body aging make-up, deformities, sores, boils, pus, this movie goes all out, its repulsiveness will either delight you or make you lose your lunch.


But Fargeat doesn’t stop there. She has made a movie that looks so uncomfortable for the characters in it that we understand them just from the visuals. For Elisabeth, her white tile bathroom where much of this medical desperation is taking place begins to feel like a walls-closing-in prison. For Sue, the way she’s shot, she’s less a person and more of an autonomous bimbo. She’s a body, but there is a dead-eyed hollowness behind the eyes which makes it less sexy and more of a soulless object. She’s like a beer commercial except she makes your skin crawl. And much of the building owned by the Quaid character feels like a Kubrick film- The Shining and “Clockwork Orange” especially. Very chilly and uninviting- a perfect way to introduce someone who turns out to be a very boorish, unpleasant man. And if that doesn’ turn you off from him, a scene where he’s eating shrimp with a camera right up in his face tells us all we need to know of Fargeat’s impressions of this man.


He’s great at playing it but the film’s rooting interest comes down to Moore and Qualley, who each do a great job here. Moore is fearless, never falling into a trap of having to try and explain herself. We can see it on her face- the feeling that this is it for her, that she’s unlovable any other way, and ultimately we see how these feelings recklessly cause havoc on her life and drive her to a point of lunacy. And Qualley, like I mentioned, is very disturbing, playing an object who’s way too self-aware that being an object is what’s getting her attention.


After a while she becomes almost parasitic as do many of the other characters in the film, and there is great subtext to Elisabeth continuing to let them do it. There’s shame that a woman who looks like Moore can still be shunned for her looks and this movie has that voice; but is so much more aggressive with its anger over that than just doing any moralizing. No one escapes this movie unscathed, including Elisabeth, and that goes double for the ending which is the most shockingly gruesome thing I can remember in recent memory.


“The Substance” is just a great movie in total command of itself. It knows who and what its targets are and holds nothing back in the shocking nightmares it visits upon them. The effort is uncomfortable but bold, and it’s hard to both look away or not s