By Dolores Quintana
I saw The Substance and I was stunned. Coralie Fargeat’s second feature film felt like filmmaking as white-hot anger. It is an unrelenting body horror comedy that weaponizes the male gaze against itself. Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, and Dennis Quaid rage with unquenchable flames. Its cinematic cup overflows with a barrage of images and betrayal that will put your brain into overdrive.
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The film takes two beautiful women, the perfect images of men’s fantasies, and turns them inside out. Coralie Fargeat has already made one daring film, but she has taken it even further than in her feature film debut Revenge. She went even harder with this indictment of gender roles and expectations that trap women into lives spent in fear. No one is unscathed. Bubbling guts, birthing your own doppelganger, ripping flesh, a firehose of blood, and the most diabolical beauty aid known to man.
It is a bible that lays out how men determine the course of women’s lives through shame and dehumanization and, most importantly, how women cooperate with patriarchal control. The film seems to whisper in your ear that you don’t have to adhere to rules that do not benefit you and do not respect your needs as a human being. Like Furiosa before it, this film challenges you to claim your birthright, and self-determination, no matter what the price, because the price being exacted upon you now is not acceptable.
Demi Moore, as Elisabeth Sparkle, is an insecure woman who never claimed her own identity, Margaret Qualley, as the perky yet sinister pick me, Sue, and Dennis Quaid, as a soulless huckster, Harvey, led by his libido, are incredible at playing some of the most noxiously toxic characters in cinema. In short, I loved it.
Moore has given a performance that bristles with rage and shimmers with a plaintive vulnerability. It is the best performance of her career. Qualley, as Sue, had taken a giant leap ahead in her career with a determined and otherworldly performance that took control of a character that could easily have been one note.
Both women, as played by the actresses are multilayered and all too human. Brilliant. Quaid, playing one of the most loathsome men in film, is hilariously unaware of himself and the destruction he causes. Again, this is another career-best performance with the scene of him eating shrimp a completely fearless statement of a character. After that scene, there is no need for a cinematic info dump on the character. It’s all right there in his face.
One of the things that many films about women’s lot in life don’t do is that they don’t confront women’s collusion in their subjugation. While the deep dark comedy of The Substance burrows under the skin of the viewer shocking their systems with a sensory overload, Fargeat takes the tools of Hollywood and aims them directly at the system.
With the bright but hostile glamour, the camera glides around the body of Qualley, using the low angle butt shots that are familiar from the cinema of Michael Bay. It’s objectification turned inside out and Sue is thrilled to be a part of it, which tells you more about how the objectification of women is achieved.
Elisabeth, who is gorgeous and perfect but deemed “too old”, is used up by her producers until she’s no longer considered “hot.” She is treated like garbage by men who don’t understand or even like her. Men who openly have contempt for her. Sparkle has colluded in her lifelong shaming and eventual dismissal by focusing only on her looks and never building a life or identity for herself.
Once she no longer has her show, she returns to an empty home with no idea of who she is, desperate to reclaim her employer’s approval any way that she can. There are heartrending moments when she falls into the trap of watching home shopping channels and buying things she has no use for as a salve to her ego. I have seen people in my life do this and found it to be a terrifying fate.
The mysterious voice that sends Sparkle The Substance tells her everything she needs to know, but Elisabeth does not listen. Regaining the limelight is the only thing she has and the screaming black hole of need within her won’t allow her to simply take a moment to think about what’s best for her. She does not understand that the younger, “better” version of herself is feckless and selfish. Thus is tragedy wrought.
The style of the film is rock solid, with Sparkle’s bright yellow coat, red bottom Louboutin shoes, and Sue’s metallic pink workout outfit. It’s all the stuff of iconic cinema and Fargeat is well aware of its impact on viewers. Benjamin Kracun’s cinematography is pitiless yet gives us the eye candy that we crave. Fargeat and her crew have their cake and eat it too. Raffertie’s score, including THAT synth note, is like a shark swimming through shallow waters.
The Substance is one of 2024’s best films, both a cinematic dream and nightmare, that pushes the envelope way beyond the norm, and glories in its own audacity. It is a breathtaking and sumptuous work of art that screams in your face while blowing you a kiss.
