As a boy I read that women’s cinema, when it arrived, would be indirect and nuanced, characterized by slow pans and gentle tilts, sensitive to personality and the texture of existence. Whoever wrote that, I wish her luck with The Substance. This black comedy finds writer-director Coralie Fargeat practicing the cinema of the hammerlock. The point is to reach overload and then pass it, and the movie does this without inflicting numbness. Each new horror startles the audience all over again. The movie’s built around a series of special effects, a chain of them. All involve the body: convulsing, splitting, decaying, shambling, scuttling, transmogrifying. The first effect is shocking, the second is disgusting. The 11th and 12th are so horrible they’ll yank your psyche out of its socket.
There isn’t a lot of brilliance in movies, but the monstrosities here are brilliantly conceived and executed. Fargeat thought them up, with Pierre Olivier Persin and Stéphanie Guillon taking the lead in devising prosthetics and makeup. (Persin estimates that only 20 percent of the work is digital, the rest by hand.) The Substance demonstrates that a film with a simple mind can still display genius in the right places. The audience I saw it with laughed again and again, not at the movie but in appreciation of it; they loved the ingenious cruelty and how it kept winding about the characters and drawing tight. When the lights went up people applauded, and knots of friends sat happily talking about the high points as the credits went by.
Underlying the effects and tying them together is a story that’s as dumb but effective as an anxiety dream. Demi Moore plays a TV personality who’s out of a job now that she’s 50. She takes a mysterious product meant to remedy that terrible thing called age. But the substance doesn’t make her young. Instead she hives out of her body (the first special effect) a pert young beauty played by Margaret Qualley. This is supposed to be Moore’s character when young, but the two share no memories and feel no loyalty to each other. The girl heads out to lead her life, which means partying like hell and taking over the old self’s TV career. Meanwhile Moore still leads the life of the late middle aged—in fact the life of the elderly. The young self brushes off the protocol for safe use of the drug, with consequences that show up as rapid and grotesque aging (the second special effect) vividly inflicted on the old self’s body. The girl’s selfishness is using up the woman’s life. Mothers and daughters may see parallels here. “You wouldn’t exist without me,” declares a witch-like Moore, vengefully stirring a pot in the kitchen.
Disaster’s on the way, and then more disaster, and then more. Nothing matters but squeezing a response out of the audience, so the cinema of hammerlock tends to be so single-minded that it’s daffy. In The Substance we get giant slam closeups of red lips against chilly cans of Diet Coke, of moon-sized Alka-Seltzer tablets that explode into rushing walls of bubbles. The cutting up of what’s on view, the jumping from closeup to closeup, isn’t just intense; it adds to the movie’s unrelenting, even sweaty, sense of claustrophobia and isolation. Sometimes the film’s interiors look like 2001, as when we see the room where customers pick up the mystery elixir: white floor, walls, and ceiling. Moore’s character has a bathroom that goes it many times better: nothing but white tiles separated by stark black lines, apparently going off forever, and again that’s floor, walls, and ceiling. More often the movie looks like a video for a goofy but ill-natured pop band in 1985. The streets of LA are empty, unless you count palm trees shot from way at the bottom. Aside from the two leads, the very few characters tend to be men who talk by sticking their face into the camera lens. At network headquarters you see a long orange corridor, with a tiny man in a patterned suit twitching and jitterbugging at the far end; that’s Dennis Quaid, Moore’s dreadful boss, on his way to tell her to take her stuff and go.
Hollywood’s produced plenty of comic book movies. Having thrown in with Fargeat and her French team, it’s added to its much smaller list of bande dessinée movies. Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element went in for a sci-fi playfulness that piled baroque detail atop a complete indifference toward scientific plausibility. Fargeat’s The Substance goes in for satire via parable so stripped down its world is flamboyantly simple-minded. Hollywood movies try to cover up their dumbness with a real-life feel. They want to get their lingo correct, and the giant closeups are of actors wrestling out raw humungous emotions. Regular-size closeups tend to be of heavily set-decorated tableaux that look like a real instrument panel or the bedside of a real invalid. All this is especially so for statement movies, and The Substance proudly lunges into the big, big topics of age and self-delusion and women’s unhappy place in our society. But it doesn’t try for seriousness via realism or even pseudo-realism.
After a while you kind of wish it did. “The ratings were 42, now they’re 216!” crows the network boss. Well, 216 of what, sir? As one understands it, ratings are percentages. The Substance is the kind of movie, and this is definitely not American, where someone will put up a billboard with nothing but a girl’s picture and the giant words NEW SHOW COMING SOON. Way to build awareness. Bare breasts on an American network show, people looking for work by checking the classified ads in the paper—come now. For that matter, why doesn’t Demi Moore’s character have a personal assistant? Or an agent and manager? Or, given that we’re told she’s an Oscar winner, why doesn’t she have a Lifetime talk show or a recurring role on an HBO prestige drama or at least a one-woman concert performance that goes on tour? Instead she’s sweating her ass leading the exercise segment on a morning show, and with that gone she’s washed up. And somehow the company that produces the terrible drug won’t deliver at home but still has 24-hour customer service.
These thoughts add up to some impatience during the middle of what is a very long movie (two hours, 20 minutes). But they retreat when the effects show up, and during the film’s climax they go into hiding. In the meantime the cast has to perform in between camera tricks. Qualley’s good but her high points come in response to the effects; she’s providing a greatly improved version of the 1950s starlet screaming at the swamp creature. Quaid’s just a stooge for the fish-eye lens and the closeups of his glycerined, stubbled mouth closing about shrimp. Moore gets to provide a real performance, one that features the film’s only highlight that’s shot straight. Getting ready to go out, she puts on her makeup and then her nerve breaks; she smears the makeup off, puts it back on, smears it off, and winds up paralyzed. She’s seen her young self and she knows she’s old, and now she’ll never go on another date.
The man waiting for Moore’s character, the man she can’t face, is a likable nebbish who thinks our lady looks just fine. The problem is that she doesn’t; as they say in women’s studies, those internalized beauty standards have got her bad. It’s no accident that the film’s moment of standout drama hinges on a problem one notch more complicated than a homely man drooling into a lens. Pauline Kael remarked that some film about psychoanalysis made Spellbound look like it was shot with Freud on the set. I suspect that The Substance, from a feminist angle, makes Barbie look like Susan Faludi was the producer and Ellen Willis came in to do punch-ups. “Pretty girls ought to smile,” says Dennis Quaid’s character, sailing out cinema’s flagship cliché for women’s issues. The pressing social problem on view is simply that men leer after the young and hot. “Amirite, ladies” is the film’s prevailing level.
Again, audience response is key. Look at those men leering into the fish-eye; it’s nice and simple and communicates. Also, look at the two stars with their clothes off, because that communicates too. Watching Demi Moore’s tits and ass, I figured the film wouldn’t let us see her co-star’s fresh young bod. But there’s naked Margaret Qualley while the camera checks her out nice and slow. The Substance is a new sort of date film. Female leads and uh-duh feminism for the girls, tits and ass for the guys, and excruciating shock effects as an unlikely common ground. That last item makes me think women are tougher these days. Or they’ll take shock if it’s in the interest of gender right-thinking.
The above sounds cynical. But magic doesn’t need honesty or deep ideas. The magic here is real and it’s wrapped about emotions and concerns as simple and thick as one of those cables that lie sunken in our subconscious. The Substance takes hold of you and turns you inside out. If that’s the kind of movie a woman makes, then fine.