The Substance review: A film that understands escalation like none other in 2024 so far!

In this review, aryantalksfilm aka Aryan Vyas pens down his pensive thoughts on Coralie Fargeat's highly-acclaimed film, The Substance!

In the past few years, we've seen innumerable spins on the ridiculous body standards that entertainment industries and showbiz culture indoctrinate into the very celebrities we worship. Filmmakers then come up with quirky, reverse-engineered stories to showcase themes encompassing female sexuality while often scrutinizing the male gaze. But rarely do most studios allow the artistic leeway to deconstruct and inform the inherent issues they so vehemently reject they promote.

And there comes in The Substance, writer and director Coralie Fargeat's audacious second feature that won the Screenplay award at the Cannes Film Festival this year. A film that externalizes the self-loathing while rendering the internal catalyst of the ultra misogynistic machinery into external devices. The telescopic lens it holds up to beauty standards in our modern world gets channelled into a squashy spectacle that's as aplomb in its form as it is in its structure. The kind of writing that doesn't try to fix the male gaze nor places its women to transcend it. The fact that it's Mubi's most extensive rollout and one of the most profitable films of the year only makes its success more resounding.

The film follows Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), a fading Hollywood star now reduced to hosting obsolete exercise programs for television. When she is fired from even that position in favour of a younger 'replacement', Elizabeth receives an anonymous offer to sample a black market drug: The Substance. A cell-replicating formula that temporarily creates a younger, better version of oneself, the offer promises to restore her youth in a rather unprecedented way.

This inevitably leads to the birth of Sue (Margaret Qualley) - in a gush-feeling, bone-crackling sequence that has to be seen to be believed. Soaked into nascent sweetness, innocence and the living embodiment of beauty standards, she begins navigating her potential. But as weeks go by, we learn that Sue isn’t what she appears to be. The innocence implied earlier soon morphs into a strong-willed desire to become the dominant personality in the symbiotic relationship she shares with the matrix. Persistent on holding onto her overnight fame and celebration by the glitz and glamorous side of the business, she increasingly becomes adamant about not having to switch with her other self every seven days. Thus, rebelling against the rules that would entail serious consequences for the self, she goes around slowly decomposing herself as well as Elizabeth.

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There is a scene early on in the film where we see the male television executive, Harvey (Denis Quaid), hog onto prawns in a restaurant while talking with Elizabeth. A male chauvinist pig whose character doesn't leave any room for interpretation in drawing parallels to a certain movie mogul who's currently serving time in prison, Harvey is the kind of figure the film doesn't acknowledge to give a dimension to. Ditto for the other male characters, who aren't treated with caricaturish quirks; they are caricatures in the realest sense. 

On the face of it, it can read as an astute statement on the cannibalistic nature of the consumerist society. Concurrently, however, the very distinction echoes the movie's ultimate and unwavering theme: what the male gaze does to women and how it forces them to believe in a manufactured reality. This subsequently becomes the very construct that aids to the ultra-heightened tone of the story. More importantly, in terms of the narrative, this is what allows for the actual embodiment of youth to unleash against them in Qualley's Sue.

But leaving this movie to such a peripheral reading would be reductionist to the seamless filmmaking it enthrals you with. For instance, rewatching the film allows for more careful observations of how differently Elizabeth and Sue are framed throughout despite being variations of a singular matrix. While we witness Sue through reflections and cameras as the story progresses, Elizabeth is often shown in a very self-critical way. The same kind of subjectivity seeps through the exceptionally effective body-horror moments. Not despite that, but because of that reason, the most harrowing out of those remains the scene where we watch Elizabeth dress up for a potential date in front of her bathroom mirror. You can view it as a fight between the id and the ego or a grotesque exploration of the seven deadly sins. But all the other readings of the film, then, become secondary to this craftsmanship!

And yet, underneath its risqué and temerarious tone, The Substance leaves one with a wave of poignancy that washes over you. It fundamentally frames female self-destruction at the bidding of institutional pressures, often imposed by imbecile men. It's not about beauty standards or self-worth, but about what the frustrations toward those standards can look like. With her paramount vision, Coralie Fargeat with Revenge and now this film has proven herself as a director to keep an eye on constantly. The command she's shown in amplifying every element in the filmmaking toolbox has now not only given us one of the most unforgettable movie-watching experiences of the year but arguably one of the greatest body horror films ever made!

The Substance had its Indian premiere at the MAMI Mumbai Film Festival this year! 

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