MubiNobody who watches this twisted Demi Moore movie a couple of particular anti-ageing remedy will overlook it. However is it a feminist masterpiece or shallow, misogynistic and exploitative?
In The Substance, the much-discussed, opulently stylised and lavishly gory gonzo horror from French director, Coralie Fargeat, a disembodied voice enjoying over a advertising and marketing video for a tenebrous new magnificence product asks: “Have you ever ever dreamt of a greater model of your self – youthful, extra lovely, extra excellent?” It is a query which captures Fargeat’s intent – to discover, by the medium of blood-spatter, thrills and a splash of sci-fi, what occurs when this want to suit the mould of magnificence requirements will get out of hand.
The movie begins as celeb aerobics teacher Elisabeth (Demi Moore) turns 50 and, deemed too wrinkled by tv executives to proceed presenting, is knowledgeable she will probably be ousted from her daytime slot in favour of a youthful, prettier star. Cue the entry of “The Substance”, a suspicious inexperienced serum which a shady medical firm is looking for check topics for. It guarantees to create a “youthful, extra lovely” model of oneself. And so, Elisabeth’s alternative, Sue (Margaret Qualley), is spawned, rising from Elisabeth’s backbone in a ugly twist.
Whereas its premise might inject one thing new into the combination, Fargeat’s chosen theme of the worry round getting older is already well-trodden floor. Suppose Margo Channing (Bette Davis), whose profession is susceptible to being snatched by her youthful assistant (Anne Baxter) in All About Eve (1950), or Veronica Ghent (Alice Krige) in 2021’s She Will, an getting older Hollywood star with a vengeful spirit. The Substance has additionally earned comparisons to Dying Turns into Her (1992), the place an getting older actress performed by Meryl Streep drinks a potion which bequeaths her everlasting youth.
A director who goes OTT
But it surely’s not a lot Fargeat’s subject material as her remedy of it that’s irking some critics. The Substance is the follow-up to Fargeat’s Revenge (2017), an equally brazen, pulpy and blood-drenched rape-revenge thriller – a grisly sub-genre that has been infamous for its extreme portrayals of girls struggling. One in all its defining works, I Spit on Your Grave (1978), was launched within the wake of the rise of the anti-rape motion within the US, when feminists started to talk out about sexual violence as an endemic social downside, however infamously contained a protracted, 10-minute-long rape scene that many have thought of heinously exploitative.
Fargeat’s tackle the style took an ogling digital camera to the physique of its protagonist Jennifer (Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz) to ironise the way in which by which males sexualise ladies. This objectifying eye returns in Fargeat’s second movie to dwelling in on Qualley’s scantily dressed physique. Whereas Fargeat’s debut aimed to subvert this gaze within the movie’s second half, when a muck-covered Jennifer miraculously returns from the useless to enact revenge on her abusers, for some the persevering with photographs of Qualley do not do the identical job. “I assumed they actually overdid it,” critic Hilary A White tells the BBC. “The digital camera is basically leering at her. I am unsure sufficient ironic distance is established between the message of the movie and these fixed sweaty, up-close physique photographs of the youthful star.”
The road between subversion of and concession to misogyny is just not straightforward to demarcate. Comparable accusations have been levelled at Revenge – Slate critic Lena Wilson claimed in her review that “although the movie makes a valiant effort to subvert a sexist system by shrouding itself in French artwork movie trappings and pseudo-empowering femininity, it in the end falls prey to its exploitative roots”. The movie’s detractors didn’t have an excessive amount of of an general influence on its essential reception, nevertheless: it has scored a stable 88% on Rotten Tomatoes at time of publication.
MubiThe Substance falls right into a camp that is named “physique horror”, outlined by fleshly mutations, mutilations and copious quantities of blood. Its recognition is commonly attributed to the Canadian king of horror David Cronenberg, however in recent times feminine and non-binary filmmakers like Titane director Julia Ducournau, Rose Glass, Amanda Nell Eu and Laura Moss have pushed the style in new instructions. Physique horror has supplied these administrators alternatives to probe subjects resembling coming-of-age, feminine want and gender fluidity, and, within the case of Glass’s Love Lies Bleeding, to experience patriarchy-smashing violence. Critic Katie Rife describes the motion as “a nascent wave of aggressive, stylized ladies style administrators” who deal in “in-your-face feminist metaphor”.
“The Substance is just not a delicate movie,” Rife tells the. “I personally get a kick out of that form of aggressive, hyper-stylisation, however I’d say that there are individuals who do not notably like being pummelled with extreme model.”
This ugly surplus – reasonably than hammering her message dwelling – arguably obscures Fargeat’s that means. One of many phrases and situations of utilizing the substance is that Elisabeth and Sue should swap locations each seven days. When this “stability” begins to go awry can be when the physique horror units in. White explains: “I discovered that the very credible and really severe points that it was so successfully satirising within the opening hour all acquired smothered on this bathe of blood and viscera within the closing 20 minutes – monstrous physique horror prosthetics coming at us from all angles.”
Does it demonise ageing?
Additional, the movie’s depiction of ageing ladies has additionally stoked a decades-old debate about depictions of older ladies onscreen. There is a lengthy lineage of movies, categorised as “psycho-biddy” or “hagsploitation” cinema, by which ladies, regarded by Hollywood to be previous their prime, are portrayed as grotesque and spiral into insanity and homicide. Billy Wilder’s Sundown Boulevard (1950), by which Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) is a discarded former Hollywood icon pushed to violence, supplied the archetype, with later horror movies like The Nanny (1965) and Strait-Jacket (1964) demonising older ladies in additional clearly lurid methods. Rife believes The Substance’s use of hagsploitation tropes, dramatically remodeling Moore’s physique with visible results, is laced with irony. “This is an enormous tongue-in-cheek aspect to the entire thing. One thing that [Fargeat] stated within the Q&A at Toronto Worldwide Movie Competition was that what she advised the actors was, when the characters lastly like themselves, is once they change into a monster – and I believe that could be very key to the purpose of the movie.”
MubiMaybe on the crux of the controversy round The Substance is the movie’s purported shallowness. As Hannah Sturdy puts it in her Little White Lies overview: “in regurgitating outdated speaking factors about Hollywood’s obsession with magnificence and its worry of ageing, The Substance turns into a sterile facsimile of Hollywood itself”. Rife believes the movie has “severe and legitimate” factors to make in regards to the magnificence trade and the titular substance’s parallels to mass-marketed medicine resembling Ozempic and Botox foisted on ladies – however she would not deny its superficiality. “As an expression of rage, [it’s lack of substance] would not harm the movie in any respect,” Rife says. “It would not actually harm the film as a visceral, cathartic expertise, which I believe is its major worth.”
The query many will ask is: does the movie perpetuate the concept that magnificence and youth are society’s most prized property, similtaneously notionally attacking such values? “With something that’s at face worth glamorous and opulent and plush and splendid that has a darkish underbelly, it is the calibration,” White provides. “It is how one can discover that stability between the protagonist it and being seduced by it, whereas, on the identical time, having sufficient of the curtain pulled again to indicate the monster that is lurking behind it.”
On whether or not The Substance strikes this stability, it appears the jury’s nonetheless out. Whether or not it is a triumph of feminist rage, a chunk of pure leisure or a facile catastrophe – that is one thing viewers should see for themselves.
The Substance is out in US and UK cinemas now
