Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance is not for the squeamish

Both horribly familiar and wonderfully shocking, The Substance, a body-horror film written and directed by Coralie Fargeat does a very traditional thing — turning the scramble for youth and beauty into a monster of immeasurable disgust and immorality — in a huge way. There is nothing minimal or restrained or overly clever here; nothing of the nuance in language or wit that makes its forerunner, The Picture of Dorian Gray, so haunting. This is a presentation of the horror of aging for the bombastic mash-up age, melding vampire, sci-fi, feminist tragicomedy and dystopian genres. It’s like a reverse Barbie but with lashings of Poor Things, Blonde, the uncomfortably up-close Marilyn Monroe biopic, and plenty more.

We are made lecherous voyeurs of these idealized female body parts, and end up ogling them

The story begins with Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), who has lost hers in a big way. She is a middle-aged morning TV aerobics star who was once the toast of Hollywood and she’s been sacked, in the crudest terms, on her fiftieth birthday for being too old. Strolling out of work in a daze, she is in a car accident. One of the (gorgeous) doctors who treats her slips her a USB drive entitled “The Substance” and a note: “It changed my life.” Desperate and depressed, Sparkle orders the product promoted on the drive. The next thing we know, she is injecting herself with a mysterious serum, triggering a process of duplication. As she lies lifeless on the floor, her younger, idealized self scrambles out of her spine. The two versions get a week-on, week-off schedule, which creates the core tension: the young, increasingly successful one, a starlet who calls herself Sue (Margaret Qualley), doesn’t want to switch back every seven days and begins literally sucking all the life out of Sparkle to go on in the youthful body for longer. By now she has chucked Sparkle’s body into a cupboard, where she becomes older and older with each ever-less-frequent re-activation.

The tension between the women builds to a bloody battle. Even through the experience of watching the blood and guts squelch and spew across the screen with mounting venom and velocity, there is an obvious playfulness which makes a nice counterbalance to the gore, in the best horror tradition.

There are some surprisingly tired tropes here, with a pre-MeToo Hollywood depicted through all-male management, casting — and, of course, open lechery. And while the drama of The Substance is based around a futuristic serum, it portrays a curiously dated landscape: Sparkle’s flat is an empty nest of 1980s carpeting and garish chandeliers, and the internet doesn’t exist. There are other feasibility issues which confuse the plot further, but the most obvious is that it hinges on two supposed opposites — Sparkle (old, plain and irrelevant) and Sue (young, perfect and an Insta-success). But they are not opposites.  Anyone that looks like Moore is doing pretty well at appearing youthful and beautiful.

Then there is Sparkle’s ambition, which is to be her own replacement on the morning fitness show. This leaves the emphasis on the broader, fuzzier motive: her desire to return to a tight, toned body and thus to regain the value and worth that age has stripped from her in a sexist Hollywood. And it is here, in the substantial screen time devoted to Sue’s perfect body, all flexing abs and thrusting breasts, that the presumed feminist intent of The Substance falls down. We are made lecherous voyeurs of these idealized female body parts and end up ogling them, wanting them, and thus understanding what Sparkle wanted to regain — even as her impulse, and the world that created it, is brutally sent up.

Still, there is great satisfaction in seeing a vivid schlockiness amplified to evoke the real-life horror and weirdness of having a body that eats, drinks, expels and ages in general, as well as the pressures facing women as they journey through time. Overall, it’s a treat — but it’s not for the squeamish.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.