What didn’t Demi Moore do with or to or about her body onscreen in the ’90s? She sold it in Indecent Proposal and bared it in Striptease and tortured it in G.I. Jane. With her husky voice, occasional severity, and aversion to flowing tresses, her career was an argument for just how sexy you had to be to diverge even mildly from any perky feminine ideal, and her pregnant Vanity Fair cover can make you wish that “iconic” still retained any meaning.
Moore was highly paid and regularly pilloried for that, and her career sputtered by the end of the decade with less to show for all her exposure than there should have been. When she returned for Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle in 2003 she was explicitly cast as last year’s model, her hard-bodied echo of a past age seeking revenge on the sunshiny Cali surfer girl Cameron Diaz.
Without this shared cultural knowledge of Moore’s life and career, The Substance, Coralie Fargeat’s absurdist experiment in gory meta-hagsploitation, is a fairly limp if expressively graphic satire of impossible female body standards. Moore’s presence, and her performance, give the film its moments of depth—moments Fargeat doesn’t always seem particularly interested in.
The setup is very Outer Limits (‘90s reboot): After an aging, discarded star (Moore) injects herself with a black-market serum that looks like radioactive pee, she mitoses into the “ideal version of herself,” a perky-butted and gleam-smiled Margaret Qualley who calls herself Sue. (You could say The Substance picks up where Full Throttle left off.) A longtime host of a TV aerobics show, Moore’s Elisabeth is quickly All About Eve’d by her eminently fuckable replicant, who becomes America’s scantily leotarded darling.
What’s the catch? Each woman gets to remain conscious for exactly a week apiece, spending each alternate week as a nude, comatose lump ingesting bagged nutrients. And as Elisabeth begins to sulk through her allotment of days and Sue wants more time to shine, rules are inevitably bent, with increasingly disastrous results.
There’s a conceptual coup here: If internalized female self-loathing could be externalized, its embodiment certainly would be a pitiless judge that would want to destroy its host. But the excess of metaphors this scenario breeds are never quite developed. “You are one,” the man on the other end of the hotline to The Substance’s mysterious manufacturers keeps telling Elisabeth, the voice of god as a disembodied customer service rep.
But while the two-women-who-are-one-woman have a physical bond, they don’t seem to share a consciousness, since when each awakens she’s shocked by the other’s recent behavior. And the bond between them is not of solidarity, but of limited, shared resources. The Substance envisions female success as a zero sum game, where any woman’s gain is another woman’s loss.
You gotta wonder, then, what was Elisabeth even thinking she’d get out of this? Maybe a clue is that Sue emerges from within the childless Elisabeth (and quite gruesomely at that); the older woman lives vicariously through the younger, like a parent with a child, while also resenting her offspring’s freedom and power. Like so many Frankensteins (and ordinary moms) before her, what she imagined as a spiritual prosthesis turned out to be a demon with its own priorities.
Had The Substance snuck up on us as Blumhouse-generated cineplex schlock, it might be fun to ferret out such subtexts. Instead, it arrives with the imprimatur of Cannes and Mubi, and Fargeat is constantly reminding us that she knows what a good movie is. There are nods to Vertigo and 2001, and Dennis Quaid’s sexist industry exec (named Harvey, heh) is consistently shot through in closeup fisheye, for an effect that’s perhaps a nod to James Wong Howe’s in-their-face cinematography for Seconds (an earlier story of a failed second chance at life) but just as much recalls a David Lee Roth video.
Fargeat is in this for the flinch-worthy moments: needles puncturing puss-oozing sores, or Sue slowly mending Elizabeth’s gashed back, stitch by painful stitch, or Quaid crunching down shrimp in deafening surround sound with his mouth open. The film is lacquered with a glossy advertorial look that’s satirical, sure, but also an (often unearned) marker of style. And it feels distracted, chasing after each plot thread regardless of its significance. The Substance often seems to employ a female-not-necessarily-feminist variation on Darren Aronofsky’s sensationalist drive to center women only to humiliate and terrorize them. Maybe it’s just as well that Fargeat doesn’t give us too much time to ponder.
But wait—there’s Moore. When she stands nude in front of a mirror, it’s hard not to recall the four decades of scrutiny she’s endured, from herself and others. And it’s hard not to join her character’s search for flaws in what is, by any standard, a remarkable 61-year-old body that has been preserved by any means necessary. (As though to prove how good she looks, she plays a woman who’s just turned 50.) The film’s most affecting and horrifying scene arrives when Elisabeth, desperate for connection, makes a date with an adoring schlub from high school, but can’t leave the house because she can’t stop seeing her imperfections, no matter how she dresses or accessorizes or makes up her face.
In comparison, the subtlety-free finale, which fire-hoses blood at the patriarchy and anyone else in proximity, will either have you pumping your fist at its audacity or rolling your eyes at what a cop out it is. For better or for worse, what Fargeat is “trying to say” and her grisly overindulgence are inseparable. It’s as though she wants to dismantle the master’s house by dropping another master’s house on top of it, implying that sexism is so entrenched and deranging that it can only be addressed with even more derangement. If this campy cataclysm thrills women, who am I as a man to deny their catharsis? But I was numb long before The Substance ended—and The Substance takes a long time to end.
Still, if Fargeat can feel glib about exploitation and cynical about women, there is something bracing about its rejection of the dubious promises of body horror. Another predecessor Fargeat hints at is David Cronenberg, and The Substance may work best as a riposte to his fascination with the possibilities of post-human evolution. Meet the New Flesh, Fargeat seems to say, same as the Old Flesh.
GRADE: B-
The Substance is now playing in area theaters.
