Director Coralie Fargeat looks at the beauty ideals that devour women skin and bone and deploys Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, and a vivid imagination to help her in her mission. It won't get more outrageous – or more intense and substantive, for that matter – than The Substance in the cinemas of Brussels this autumn.
Body horror film 'The substance' looks beyond appearances
There is no need to speculate where The Substance might be playing at your local cinema. It will be the theatre that people walk out of, unless they are running while screaming, vomiting, or fainting. Or at least, that is what the media are saying in places where the French director Coralie Fargeat's English-language film is already showing. Watching an exuberant bloodbath, a birth through the spinal cord, regurgitating a woman's breast, devouring a chicken leg by drilling it through your navel, or ten other grotesque tableaux does take strong constitution. But those stories about fainting viewers are in fact misleading. The Substance is a shocker but not a gratuitous one. The Substance has substance.
Fargeat makes her point virtuously, plastically, and hilariously in this feminist body horror film that won the Cannes Festival's screenplay award, and it is a point that concerns everyone. She depicts the insanity and desperation of the violence that insane beauty ideals inflict on women using plenty of humour, symbolism, and graphic violence.
'The Substance' is more raw, unpolished, nightmarish depiction of existential fears and accentuation of a grotesque, misogynistic, and cruel reality, more deliciously rancid body horror than political pamphlet or feminist essay
Film journalist
The French director debuted in 2017 with Revenge, a colourful, excessive rape-and- revenge film that gaped at a naked Kevin Janssens the way films for decades had been gaping at naked women. As she approached 40, she was overwhelmed by dark thoughts. Even though she studied political science as a feminist, she was crushed by the thought that her life was over because she would never again please, love, watch, or be admired. “I was absolutely convinced that I would be worth nothing once I had reached a certain age. Just as I was convinced that a younger I was worth nothing if I was not slim and had a perfect body. Insane, isn't it?” she writes in her director's statement.
Faustian sting
Every woman she knows has at some point struggled with an eating disorder or violated herself in some other way to meet the impossible ideal image of being perfect, sexy, smiling, thin, young, and beautiful. She has herself experienced frustration at every stage of life. First she was dissatisfied with breasts and buttocks, and when that phase was over, the first wrinkles started appearing. The question that never left her is, why is it that we live in a world that traps women in these thoughts?
Tyrannised, mocked, diluted, and destroyed; in 'The Substance', the female body is tested to the extreme.
The Substance recounts the annihilation of Elisabeth Sparkle, an aging Hollywood star who even ends up losing her fitness programme on television to younger talent. An undaunted portrayal with plenty of nude scenes, attention to her body and age, and a brutal transformation into a monstrous creature, place the jaded Demi Moore back in the limelight. The actress who, at the end of the last century, was Hollywood's number one thanks to films like Indecent Proposal, A Few Good Men, and Ghost would even have a chance at a first-time Oscar nomination. Her Elisabeth Sparkle grabs a Brat-coloured rejuvenating substance in the film.
Sue, played by the equally intrepid Margaret Qualley, is born from her spinal cord. Sue becomes a celebrity in no time with her body that lends itself perfectly to shameless hyper-sexualisation. The Faustian sting comes when Elisabeth and Sue must remember that they are one and the same and must switch bodies every other week or else face a gruesome acceleration of the ageing and deterioration process.
Filming for the body
Tyrannised, mocked, diluted, and destroyed; in The Substance, the female body is tested to the extreme. Fargeat thinks in symbols and sees this as an explicit depiction of the violence society inflicts on women by mercilessly discarding them once they no longer conform to absurd ideals of beauty.
Not that it lets you overthink it. The Substance is more raw, unpolished, nightmarish depiction of existential fears and accentuation of a grotesque, misogynistic, and cruel reality, more deliciously rancid body horror than political pamphlet or feminist essay. Fargeat does the opposite of what intellectual cinema does. “I film for the body, not for the head,” she told the Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant.
In doing so, she hints at Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, places herself in the tradition of body-horror legends David Cronenberg and John Carpenter, and steals stuff from Oscar Wilde's story The Picture of Dorian Gray with the provocative-satirical venom with which Paul Verhoeven made the infamous Showgirls pole-dance. But her look and drive are feminist.
Like a Julia Ducournau who won the Golden Palm with Titane or a Rose Glass who grotesquely derailed her erotic queer noir Love Lies Bleeding, Fargeat finds freedom in the horror genre to go full-on for artistic expression. Through disturbing entertainment, ambiguous fun, and lustful excess, she also makes a political and personal statement about the extremity with which women's bodies are viewed or no longer viewed.
Whether you dare to face the gore or not, this is one of the films of the autumn.
The Substance can be seen at cinemas from today
Read more about: Film , The substance , Demi Moore , Margaret Qualley , Coralie Fargeat , Body horror , beauty ideals
