TIFF ’24: The Substance

***/****
starring Margaret Qualley, Demi Moore, Dennis Quaid, Hugo Diego Garcia
written and directed by Coralie Fargeat

by Walter Chaw Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance starts as David Cronenberg’s The Star before transitioning into Frank Henenlotter’s Black Swan. Toss in a pinch of Paul Verhoeven as well. Yet even at that, the picture suffers not for a lack of conviction but for a lack of breadth. The Substance carries a message warranting righteousness, no doubt, lamenting how women, especially in Hollywood, are valued for their sexuality and little else and how this trope eventually metastasizes within the victim as self-hatred and self-harm. But once eloquently expressed in the first (mesmerizing) 20 minutes, The Substance, in its dedicated mashing of its single outrage button, misses a few opportunities to broaden its scope, losing sight of its high concept. At least with Revenge, Fargeat’s straight-line rape-revenge flick (which ends with the pulverizing shotgunning of one antagonist’s scrotum), there’s no elaborate pretense it will engage in a broader dissection of male sexual violence. Its eventual bloodbath is less liberating and uncompromising than it is a shrine to the tradition forged by genre predecessors like I Spit on Your Grave and Ms. 45. Fargeat seems like a genuinely gifted filmmaker with a sense of humour skating on the outer edges of good taste. She wears her influences on her sleeve. She is, in other words, awesome, but her films so far are largely just slick celebrations of her Letterboxd favourites.

The Substance, for all its obvious and voluminous charms, is more numbing–more obvious–than transcendent. Fargeat is having a blast rolling around in gallons of KY, sheep guts, and stage blood, and the gore in the film is exultant and delirious, though I recognize every reference here, from Rob Bottin’s work on The Thing to Screaming Mad George’s landmark gags in Brian Yuzna’s Society; from the giant green hypodermics of Re-Animator to the body transformations of Chris Walas’s work on Cronenberg’s The Fly to, finally, a spot-on celebration of Emil’s explosive fate from RoboCop (another Bottin effect). Even its satire of workout videos riffs on spandex-ed Jamie Lee Curtis’s legendary gyrations in James Bridges’s Perfect. I’m delighted to see these atrocities again, reenacted with brio by Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley, but not as astonished as I was the first time I saw them. The substance of The Substance is how aging megastar Elisabeth “Lizzie” Sparkle (aging superstar Demi Moore), after too long on the bench and a humbling/humiliating lunch with her disgusting agent, Harvey (Dennis Quaid), gets into a terrible car accident, after which she’s solicited by a mysterious company offering a kind of literal rebirth through their mysterious product, “The Substance.” The easy way to read this is that Lizzie’s miraculous “not a scratch on you!” escape from her wreck is her “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” making the rest of The Substance her dream of relevance in the eyeblink before death. Turns out, it doesn’t really matter if any of it’s real or not. Lizzie orders up some of the Substance, opens a mysterious box containing a few simple rules, and dutifully injects herself with it.

Is it explicitly an Ozempic allegory? I mean, sure, but moreover, it’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray by way of EC Comics. Pitof’s Catwoman did something similar with Sharon Stone in the Demi Moore role–so did Robert Zemeckis’s Death Becomes Her and Terence Fisher’s The Man Who Could Cheat Death, whose plot also involves regular injections of green goop extracted from the glands of others. The Substance causes Lizzie’s body to, Greek Goddess-like, expel a full-grown, presumably younger version of herself (Margaret Qualley) who insists on being known as “Sue.” There’s a list of interesting films featuring full-grown baby births, too, for the record, and this is a good one. As far as body violations and mutilations go, The Substance can already be called a classic and, if you’re wired right, a rollicking good time. The drug’s caveat, of course, is that Lizzie is now presumably split into two consciousnesses, and the one cannot exist concurrently with the other. That is, until they can. The requirement of the treatment is that Lizzie and Sue take turns, one week at a time, existing as the “alpha” in the world. What I couldn’t track is why no one recognizes Sue as a clone of 29-year-old Demi Moore. This wouldn’t be much of a problem if Lizzie weren’t supposed to be so famous that a casting call in the Trades asks for a “new Elisabeth Sparkle!” When the literal “new” Lizzie Sparkle appears on the scene, why isn’t everyone looking at each other like, “Holy shit, she looks exactly like Lizzie Sparkle circa St. Elmo’s Fire!”? I also couldn’t track why the two can’t remember each other’s behaviour when they take their weekly turns as the “alpha” if, as the Substance constantly reminds, they “both are one.” I get that this is a parable about a woman divided between her sense of self and how society values her, but the film is immediately more interested in its subtext than its text.

I love the opening with Lizzie receiving a star on the Walk of Fame, and I love that Fargeat uses it as a device for the passage of time and relevance. It makes sense to open and close on this image; if one were to carve out the Walk of Fame stuff, it would be the best ten-minute short of the year, and it tells the entire story of the film. That’s good and bad, since there are two full hours in between that are fun but don’t bring much else to the table. Moore is spectacular if ultimately a distraction. This is her Sunset Blvd., minus the buffer of 74 years to soften the shock of seeing a superstar in her dotage essentially playing herself now, ignored and all but forgotten. Is it Fargeat’s point that no one recognizes Sue as young Lizzie because everything must pass and no one’s fame lasts forever? I know that for me, it was a shock thinking about how I will need to explain to everyone under 20 how absolutely huge Demi Moore was for people of my generation while searching for a modern analogue I won’t be able to come up with because I have aged out of the modern cultural conversation. I didn’t love how The Substance eventually demeans itself with jokes about chicken drumsticks and fake-out dream sequences–how it, itself, begins, perilously, to equate a woman’s value with her appearance and mix its metaphors during the protracted finale simply because Fargeat wanted the opportunity to play out Cronenberg’s The Fly according to Brundlefly’s dream of a nuclear family rather than Veronica’s. I don’t blame her for wanting to do that, mind, but what satisfies the viscera doesn’t always quiet the voices in my head. Possibly that’s a me problem. Programme: Midnight Madness