“The Substance” is Coralie Fargeat’s sophomore feature following her 2017 thriller “Revenge.” The film premiered at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival on May 19, winning Best Screenplay. The film has won more awards since its debut, notably a Golden Globe win for star Demi Moore.
In a land not too far from our skincare-obsessed, heavily Botoxed world, Elisabeth Sparkle (Moore) takes The Substance. Knowing nothing about this black market drug aside from an anonymous advertiser’s promise of a “younger, more beautiful” version of herself, 50-year-old Elisabeth is determined to undergo this transformation and save her fading television career. When she brutally births her youthful counterpart, Sue (Margaret Qualley), the two are instructed to swap bodies every week. This twisted game of relay takes a turn when Sue overstays her seven-day welcome, causing Elisabeth’s body to age rapidly. As Sue grows more attached to her life as a beloved starlet and Elisabeth festers in mounting self-disgust, the two must contend with the fact that they share a mind. Thus, the hectic horror spiral of feminist auteur Fargeat’s “The Substance” is set in motion.
Moore is indeed a ferocious force responsible for driving the film forward, and she commits fervently to the intensity and desperation of a woman whose sense of worth hinges on swiftly deteriorating flesh. A standout scene follows Elisabeth as she gets ready in the mirror for a date, obsessively tweaking her makeup until her dissatisfaction with her looks crescendos into an attack on her own skin so animalistic that she appears to be trying to rip off her face. It is a rare moment of emotional vulnerability amidst the film’s relentless mayhem, brought resonantly to life by Moore’s stunning performance.
The velocity of this film is equally owed to the boldness of its sound designers, cinematographer, and director. Unsettling fish-eye lenses introduce each character, sickening squelching sounds punctuate innumerable scenes, an electronic score provides a feverish pulse, and the prosthetics team takes it all to a level so audacious that they cannot be duly praised without spoilers.
“The Substance”’s ruthless viscerality is an artistic achievement unto itself. This perhaps compensates for — or at the very least distracts from— the film’s great weakness: it centers around an issue it never meaningfully explores. It is a metaphorical story of our cultural fear of aging, particularly in women, that consequently demands its characters to be little more than the ideas they represent. There are the seeds of a cautionary tale about the dangers of obsession with youth and beauty wherein the dangers in question are turning old and ugly. Instead, the film largely becomes an outlandish and thorny gorefest that, once the shock wears off, fails to get under the skin in any lasting way.
If Fargeat’s demented story has proved one thing, it is that the contemporary cosmetics industry is a realm rife with material for horror films. As ingenious as this one’s style is, here’s hoping the next has a bit more … what’s the word?