Balancing genre gross-outs, critical acclaim and awards attention, The Substance and its 21,000 litres of fake blood stream out of your screen just in time for the Oscars next month. Amelia Berry details just what makes it sparkle so substantially.
Is The Substance the gnarliest film ever nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards? Well, it’s got pretty good competition from The Exorcist, but certainly few films in recent memory have managed to garner such high calibre awards recognition (it took home Best Screenplay at Cannes!) while still being such skin-crawling, gross-out fun.
Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) is getting older. Once an A-list Hollywood actress, since her star faded Sparkle has been hosting a popular aerobics show on TV. Think Jane Fonda in the 1980s. Suddenly, on her fiftieth birthday, she’s called in for a meeting with her producer Harvey (Dennis Quaid). She’s fired. Too old.
Distraught, desperate, and directionless, Sparkle answers a mysterious advertisement for something called ‘The Substance’. “Have you ever dreamt of a better version of yourself? Younger… More beautiful… More perfect?”
Trudging to a sketchy warehouse, Sparkle makes her deal with the devil and signs up for a subscription to The Substance—temporarily allowing her to ‘become’ a younger, more beautiful, more perfect version of herself. The only catch? Every seven days she must switch back. Without exception. It’s a harder promise to keep than you might expect.
Soon, Elisabeth Sparkle finds herself in a grotesque struggle for control of her life and her body… with herself.
Part high-concept sci-fi, part surrealistic fairy-tale, and part body-horror blood fest, The Substance feels like a throwback to a kind of classic horror we don’t see enough of these days. If you’re a fan of Troma’s Toxic Avenger or cult ’80s exploitation classics like Frankenhooker or Re-Animator then you’ll feel right at home with The Substance’s pitch-black humour, over-the-top gore, and its off-kilter, unreal world. Thank god for puppets, goo, and fake blood.
Of course, those are some pretty niche properties, and The Substance owes a large part of its much broader appeal to a breathtaking central performance by Demi Moore. Earning her a Golden Globe win and an Oscars nom for Best Actress, Moore goes from haughty to desperate to demonic over the course of the picture—all of it underpinned by a deep existential sadness. There’s a scene of Moore putting on (and taking off lipstick) that is so heartbreaking it will haunt you long after the movie is over.
“What really struck me was the harsh violence against oneself. It’s not what’s being done to you, it’s what we do to ourselves,” Moore said in a recent Guardian interview, “there’s a depth to the exploration of our psyches, our inner dialogue, that body horror seems to amplify.”
Supporting Moore’s raw and heartfelt lead are Dennis Quaid as sleazy TV exec Harvey and Margaret Qualley as Elisabeth’s ‘other self’, simply named Sue. Decked out in prosthetics and padding for hyperreal hotness, Qualley is mesmerisingly manic. Petulant and driven by a kind of lunatic determination, it’s a very different kind of role than we’ve seen Qualley in before.
Dennis Quaid, on the other hand, is flat-out disgusting as Harvey. The epitome of the obnoxious, patronising, man in power (you know the type), he manages to deliver one of the most unpleasant and difficult-to-watch scenes in the movie just by eating shrimp. And this is a movie that used 21,000 litres of fake blood.
Writer/director Coralie Fargeat makes great use of her limited cast and the film’s handful of locations, focussing on crafting iconic, recurring images.
Elisabeth’s sun-faded portrait behind shattered glass, her oversized coat in sunflower yellow, the acid green ‘substance’ itself sitting ominously in its syringe—if it didn’t quite have the impact of Brat green, it definitely spawned the best piece of film merch this side of the jacket from Drive.
The hallways of the TV studio Elisabeth works at are carpeted like the hotel in Kubrick’s The Shining—but lined in dozens of near-identical promo photos of Ms Sparkle. Clean, bright, and grounded in just enough reality to be properly disorientating, it’s moments like this that have made The Substance really take hold of something in the popular imagination.
Speaking about the film to IndieWire, Fargeat said “The movie is about women’s bodies, and to me, I couldn’t find a better way than body horror to show the violence that we can do to ourselves. That was the real metaphor. There is symbolism to play with that flesh: ‘This is what we have inside. There is the white, lovely smile. And behind this, it’s a whole other world. I’m going to show you the inside world. And yes, it’s that violence, it’s that bloody, it’s that uncomfortable, and it can be that fucked up.”
And yes, watching The Substance can be an uncomfortable experience. Some of it is terrifying and a lot of it pretty damn disgusting. But outside of all the blood and food and people being split open, there’s something darkly familiar at the heart of Fargeat’s film.
That feeling of losing control of your appearance, your body. The self-loathing, the impossible standards of a sick society, the longing to be yourself but… well… better! Younger. More beautiful. More perfect. There are few of us who haven’t felt that or felt the pressure to be that.
That feeling… The Substance takes it and explodes it in a cathartic fountain of blood and guts and fingernails. The best horror can make feeling bad feel real good—Coralie Fargeat’s body-horror thriller takes ageing, self-loathing, and dysmorphia and remakes it into a neon thrill ride complete with motorcycles and topless dancers. It seems about time for a gross Best Picture, don’t you think?
