THE SUBSTANCE directed by Coralie Fargeat ( USA, 2024)
I suppose the premise of this film is that women are pressurised into preserving a body shape and tone to the point that they are seen as worthless when deemed to be beyond their prime. Demi Moore is Elizabeth Sparkle, the presenter a morning TV exercise show – Pump It Up . A ruthless producer Harvey (Dennis Quaid) decides she is past it and is looking for someone younger.
Since all the male characters are either guileless nerds or manipulative lechers it begs the question as to why a woman as intelligent as Sparkle should feel pressurised into pleasing them.
After narrowly escaping serious injury in a car crash Sparkle is advised to take a supposedly miraculous product (‘Substance’) by a medic who looks so plastic that he hardly seems a good advertisement for this product. Without doing any further research she signs up for the treatment and is undeterred by having to collect the drugs in person from a shady back street address. Personally, I would at least have Googled it!
Ironically, Moore looks so well preserved and in such good shape that she seems to already have discovered her own personal wonder drug to stem the ravages of age. Nevertheless, she injects the liquid which results in a more youthful body double literally emerging from within.
The graphic birth scene is straight out of the Cronenberg playbook and the surreal atmosphere of the film owes a lot to David Lynch. However, French director Coralie Fargeat lacks the craft and vision of these mentors so the film merely descends into absurdist depths. The result is that any serious messages are lost. If there’s a feminist intent it drowns in a sea of blood and gore.
Out of Sparkle Margaret Qualley appears as Sue, a Barbie-like creation whose ‘perfect’ body compensates for her air-brain. For a film that assumes to criticise the patriarchal obsession with shape, tone and youthfulness, it crudely gratifies the male gaze by zooming in on her twerking ass in tight-fitting bikini. There’s a fine line between parodying body obsession and pandering to it which the film oversteps every time. Demi Moore’s committed performance is a small saving grace. A scene of her preparing to go out on a date and desperately applying make-up is brilliantly done. Her transformation from mature beauty into hideous hag is effectively rendered yet the story is ultimately a sensationalised parable with nothing substantial to say. With no moral code to steer it the director is reduced to a gross-out splatter-driven finale that emphasises its vacuous content.
Whatever happened to the idea of ageing gracefully?
Seeing Eraserhead in a small arts cinema in Birmingham soon after its UK release was a kind of epiphany. Everything I thought I knew about movies suddenly had to be reimagined.
David Cronberg is commonly regarded as (delete as appropriate) sick / inspired/ depraved /visionary /crazy. It’s probably safest to say he can be all of these things.
