Writer/director Coralie Fargeat knows you know this about fables. Expects you to know it as you will be straining with everything you have to tell someone on the screen not to do that one thing. The point is not what happens up there but in how much she can play around with the elements and give us something to think about. Play she does and makes us live through some grimace-inducing squirmy and squelchy body horror until we are compelled to consider what her story is about beyond the template.
Fargeat is happy to be plain with her messaging. Perhaps that should be bold, not happy. The opening sequence shows a raw egg yolk producing another after an injection. Then we get a montage of Elizabeth celebrating her star on the walk of fame (after an intriguing scene of how they are constructed) which progresses through the years with signifiers like autumn leaves, snowfalls, tourists walking over it, murmuring guesses as to who she was, and some slob slipping his mega burger on to it. Cut to Elizabeth now, leading a troupe of tv dancers in her workout show.
Afterwards, being forced into using the gents, she overhears the tv tycoon screaming into his phone about someone like her, past prime and past prime time. Soon after, he seems on the pop of firing her over lunch (never have prawns been less appetising) but, getting to an awkward bit, he flees the scene and kicks it down the road. Soon after (I'm leaving a lot out) she recovers from an auto crash and, during a creepy examination by a ethereally beautiful young male nurse, she is left with a usb stick upon which is branded The Substance. This leads to the situation you can get from watching the trailer in which her younger self seems to have taken over her gig with the workout show.
As this film does keep to its fairy tale lane, it might seem pointless to avoid spoilers but there are many on screen which I will not detail. The glee of this testing film lies in the articulated anger that Fargeat hurls at cultural standards of beauty that both recoil in disgust at women aging and harshly judge any attempt to reverse the process. The woman who brought us the searing Revenge has learned, like the heroine of that story, how to fashion assault weapons from the pieces of beauty culture. There are many white knuckle suspensions and even more eye popping body horror showcases. Before you cry Cronenberg, they all learn from that experience that each, even the most showy, must take its place in a storyline. The scenes can go longer than they should but nothing you see here does not advance the tale.
On Cronenberg, if you have seen a few of his early ones in order of their release you'll notice the improvement in them when he starts hiring stronger actors. Demi Moore's performance as Elizabeth will be called brave for her permission to be shown old. We do get closeups of porous cheeks, wrinkles and sags but the bravery we see is not in this candour (pushed by make up and prosthetics, btw) but in the acutely observed and expressed sustained rage of her character as she comes to understand the resonance of her decision and how the regime that made it feel necessary remains unmoved in the face of her disaster. It is brave because it is strong.
Margaret Qualley gets the nepo baby taunt as the daughter of Andie McDowell but I've not known her to appear anything but committed to her roles (even when, in Poor Things, this is reduced to her getting hit in the head by basketballs). She emerges as Sue an apparent clone of the younger Elizabeth, a reset, ditching all the waste and keeping the good stuff. However, Qualley plays her for all the shallowness allowed her by her youth and beauty and a burgeoning rage from Elizabeth's experience to remind us where she's from.
Is Dennis Quaid's disgusting tv boss with his crassness and misogyny, a feminist's stereotype? He's more of a caricatured industry mover, holding nothing of value for longer than it sells, knowing that even his ugliness can be thrown around to herald his power. Quaid is having a ball with him.
Finally, Fargeat is happy to pay tribute to the influences that led her to this point. These are not nudges and winks (as in the constant barrage of them in Alien Romulus) but marks of tribute. 2001 gets a moment in the climax as do The Elephant Man, Eraserhead and Society, among others. None of these distract even if you do recognise them, the power of the story roaring to its close overwhelms them as cute moments and we're carried along. One thing I found interesting about the score, now I think about it, is how strong the electronics were for almost the whole running time before it changed to an orchestral pallet towards the end. Just another detail on a ride that might make us scream while we're on it but will keep us thinking after the credits.
The Substance is currently on general release.
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