Director: Coralie Fargeat
Cast: Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, Dennis Quaid
Rating: (R16)
★★+
By AMASIO JUTEL
It’s ironic that a film titled The Substance (Rialto) would have little of it. Coralie Fargeat’s latest is a film scared of having a critical thought for fear of being panned for the nuance better films have dared to take on.
Fargeat’s body horror stars Demi Moore as Elizabeth Sparkle, an ageing movie star struggling to find work, and Margaret Qualley as Sue, the younger, more glamorous counterpart who emerges after Elizabeth undergoes a mysterious treatment known as "the substance". The two women grapple with the duality of life as female stars in Hollywood — exploited for their youth and beauty yet discarded as they age.
The film’s themes, which take on Hollywood’s problem with older women, patriarchal beauty standards, and the self-inflicted damage of self-image, are not dealt with intelligently. Better film-makers who comment on similar themes use the camera as a tool to reflexively ask the viewer to question the perversity of looking and contributing to this exploitative industry. While the casting away of older women in popular entertainment continues to be relevant, the critique comes off rather simple.
Instead of using the tools of film-making to smartly enhance the critique, Fargeat stylises it, which is certainly a choice, but not a new or engaging one. This ends up being to the detriment of the message, and, for as good as Moore and Qualley are as performers, this kind of one-dimensional writing unfortunately leaves them kind of flat.
This lack of cinematic subtext is mirrored at the basic storytelling level, which isn’t to say that the themes are not important, it is that they are explained, not explored. This format doesn’t sustain for two and a half hours, let alone beyond the first act.
The film’s greatest strength is its cinematic direction. The shortage of subtext enhances the effectiveness of the stunt work, where nauseating and cartoonish practical effect usage with blood and guts bombastically comes to the fore.
While flawed, the final set piece of the film is the most rewarding, coming at the end of an overbaked run-time. At the culmination of the film, the camera shoots the "monster" in such a way that audiences are encouraged to laugh and point fingers, undermining the film’s commentary on the gross and exploitative social expectations around women’s bodies.
The lack of subtlety is not the problem; the problem is a lack of depth. The thinly conceived onslaught of gross-out imagery — much like violently smashing action figures into each other — is a wonder for the eyes, but not for the mind.
The world of the film is half-baked, inconsistent, and fails to interrogate the one plot point that makes it at all interesting: the substance itself. With glaringly open holes in the screenplay, The Substance is a middling Black Mirror episode with grossness turned up to the max and a bloated run-time to go with it.
