A fading celebrity decides to use a black-market drug, a cell-replicating substance that temporarily creates a younger, better version of herself.
Once the existential clock has run out on one’s fame and celebrity, what is the toll? To go even further than that, is there a refund? Boiled down to its essence, these are the central questions of writer/director/co-editor Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance,” a showbiz satire with the courage of its convictions to go to some bleak and horrifying places to find its targets. For one, Demi Moore plays our protagonist, a once-promising, award-winning actress who received a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame. She now hosts workout videos for a wage that has almost assuredly not been fairly negotiated by her manager. It’s a canny bit of casting in that it requires Moore to have a morbid sense of humor about the trajectory of her own career, but the haunted quality of the character here goes deeper than simple meta-reference.
Through her performance, one can feel that Moore is, perhaps, both exercising some old acting muscles that have not been flexed in quite a long time (making the casting even more symbolic in nature, as well as a pretty funny joke) and exorcising some of the more listless projects since the peak of her early 1990s career hit the wall with a pair of misguided studio projects around halfway through that decade. Good roles came along, as they always do for any actor, but it’s been pretty rough going, to say the least. One can hope that a film as bold as this one might work to put Moore back on the map, but even if it doesn’t, one can also imagine that this will now be the performance to which she will, from now on, be attributed. It’s a win-win scenario either way.
The film begins with Moore’s Elisabeth Sparkle receiving that star on the famed sidewalk in an overhead shot that says much by barely showing us anything else. The plaque is set, polished, celebrated in a ceremony, and then ignored and forgotten under decades of walking feet, rolling wheels, and, finally, the ketchup of a triple-double cheeseburger dropped by some schmuck. Cutting unceremoniously from this image of past glory to the sickening color saturation of Elisabeth’s workout routine is almost as jarring as the introduction of her manager Harvey (Dennis Quaid), whom Fargeat and cinematographer Benjamin Kracun capture in a series of grotesque close-ups that seem to fold the camera back around the edges. He fires her – on her 50th birthday, no less – and on her way home, Elisabeth gets into a terrible car accident.
A nurse at the hospital passes her a thumb drive labeled “The Substance,” and what follows is occasionally too gross to specify. Let’s say it involves a series of injections allowing Elisabeth to meet the younger, ideal version of herself, named “Sue” and played by Margaret Qualley. It should be noted that Fargeat has crafted a work of body horror here in the Cronenbergian tradition of consistently upping the ante of bizarre physical transformations, but it should also be noted, in the tradition of that great director, that the filmmaker is constantly upping her ante of ideas, too. Perhaps the central idea – of delaying one’s own biological clock as a way of avoiding the most universal experience in all of reality – remains the same, but within that simple idea, Fargeat packs a whole lot of smaller concepts.
This is particularly true of the climax, which forks off into unexpected and cruel directions, even for this story, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Much of the film is devoted to the routine that develops between Elisabeth and “Sue,” the latter of whom is played by Qualley as a young woman who is fundamentally naïve (she was literally born yesterday at a certain point early in this arrangement) but able and willing to learn, to process, to grow, and to adapt. In other words, she’s just as intrinsically human as Elisabeth, without the burden of a world piling disappointments on top of each other as a way of playing a cosmic joke. The other part of this routine is, of course, the dynamic between these two women – whom the clinical voice on the other end of a telephone line keeps reminding each of them are actually one and the same.
The key to success for the two-who-are-one is to stick to a schedule of switching between the personas, and in case one was wondering whether this is where the body-horror aspects come in, one would be more correct than one could ever or would ever want to imagine. The process becomes grueling, mainly because it requires one persona to weaken the other in a way that won’t be revealed here. The reason for keeping that under wraps is borne of the same logic for not overtly discussing how “Sue” makes her first appearance. It’s not only about preserving a surprise. It’s also about remaining relatively family-friendly in one’s descriptions of a movie that is anything but.
For a while, it seems that Fargeat has crafted a work of satire that aims, in its often-disgusting ways, to be funny and acerbically pointed. To be clear, it never really loses those qualities because, at a certain point, it’s hard not to laugh at what occurs and how it’s furthering the film’s central thesis. At that same point, “The Substance” has shifted its goals and attitudes, though, with a type of violence that’s more horrifying and more direct than anything in the build-up to this climax. All the tension that develops through a series of decisions on one end of this existential arrangement comes to a head in a deliriously bloody payoff that goes so far over the top that it registers as quite deadly serious, indeed.
In Theaters Friday, September 20th
