Home » Features » Coralie Fargeat's The Substance Injects A Welcome Shot In The Arm Of Body Horror

Features

Coralie Fargeat's The Substance Injects A Welcome Shot In The Arm Of Body Horror

Forget Botox, Restylane and Ozempic. Coralie Fargeat's <em>The Substance</em> presents the most radical antidote to the inescapable horror of ageing.

Prahlad+Srihari

Nov 01, 2024

Still from The Substance.

ONE OF THE MOST agonising scenes in The Substance has no blood, no guts, no gore. The violence, if anything, is psychological. Fading Hollywood star Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) is getting ready for a date with an old classmate. She does her hair, puts on a red dress and wears red lipstick to match. But she just cannot get herself to leave the house. Each time she prepares to leave, there is always something in her line of sight that goads her into turning back. Looming just outside her window is an oversized billboard of her hot young replacement Sue (Margaret Qualley), staring back with a snooty expression that seems to taunt, “Is that really the best you can look?” More doubts creep in when Elisabeth catches her warped reflection on the polished doorknob of the front door. Distraught, she rushes back to the bathroom mirror to adjust her outfit and reapply her make-up. What would have once been a simple pre-date ritual sets off an obsessive spiral. As Elizabeth frets over flaws visible only to her, we see a woman who has internalised society’s beauty ideals so deeply she is overcome with self-hatred. So disgusted is she by the person looking back at her in the mirror that she angrily smears the lipstick across her face in defeat. So crippled is she by shame that she decides to stay home.

Watching Moore double back again and again to the mirror reminds us the reflection we see of ourselves is a mosaic of perceptions and expectations. Being a star doesn’t rid the critical inner voice that tells Elisabeth she is not pretty enough, thin enough, or good enough. The discomfort she feels in her own skin is a symptom of a media-ingrained cultural pathology that fetishizes the young female form while demonising the old. No amount of prestige or glamour can insulate an ageing actress from the sociocultural pressures that shape desirability and in turn bankability. With her second feature, Coralie Fargeat taps into the pressure women in particular feel to look eternally young. The grotesque extremes to which the beauty industry exploits women’s insecurities and the grotesque extremes to which insecure women go to restore youth form the subcutaneous tissue of Fargeat’s body horror sensation.

Forget Botox, Restylane and Ozempic. The Substance presents the most radical antidote to the inescapable horror of ageing. Or so it seems to Elizabeth, who suffers the ravages of time much like her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (as depicted in an opening montage.) On her 50th birthday, she is dumped from the daytime fitness show she has been hosting for years. Just when she fears she has lost all her currency, her purpose and her identity, a mysterious black-market drug offers her a chance to turn back the biological clock. Soon after injecting herself with “the substance,” a younger version of herself emerges from her spinal column in a gnarly birth sequence. Fifty is the new 25. Literally. Calling herself Sue, the new Elisabeth is fitter, perkier and “better” in all the ways she wishes. But there is a caveat: although the two have separate bodies, both can’t function at the same time; while one of them is awake, the other hibernates in a coma-like state; every seven days, the two must switch. Without exception. Disturb the balance and there is a heavy price to pay.

Complications arise with the recklessness of youth. Once she gets a taste of fame, Sue begins to get sloppy with the deadline. She stretches her stay beyond a week, hiding Elisabeth away like Dorian Gray did his portrait. The balance is violated. The price of each delay is paid by Elisabeth whose body becomes so decrepit she withdraws further and further from the world outside. Instead of teaming up to co-exist, the two sabotage each other, seeing the other as competition in a battle for survival. The resulting monstrous nightmare confronts a society whose prescriptive beauty norms have scarred women into becoming their own worst enemy.

Dipping into her own star persona, Moore fearlessly commits to the role of an actress refusing to accept the fate of planned obsolescence thrust upon her. This defiant refusal to become invisible lends a sympathetic air to Elisabeth, a middle-aged has-been finding a warped avenue within reach so she isn’t cast aside just because she doesn’t fit the Hollywood-standard mould. Moore’s character is at once a product and synecdoche of an industry that conditions women to fixate on perceived flaws to the point of self-destruction.

As with her debut feature Revenge Fargeat indulges, even exaggerates, the sexualising gaze that permeates media to implicate us all. Close-ups feast on provocative shots of Sue posing in tennis skirts and gyrating in pink leotards. The camera in workout videos zooms in on her butt, legs and chest — each disembodied part sold as fan service to the viewers. But there is an insistent sense of manufactured artificiality to these images. Fargeat captures Elisabeth in the same manner as she does Sue to remind us both are simply two women at different stages of decay. As Elisabeth becomes more haggard, the camera lingers on her sagging breasts, her wiry hair and her shrivelled finger, evoking a crone-like figure right out of a fairy tale.

Indeed, the men in the film don’t fare any better, with many framed in such a way as to fill us with sheer disgust. Harvey (Dennis Quaid), the winkingly named studio exec who fires Elisabeth for Sue, is made to appear more obnoxious by fish-eye-lensed close-ups of his lecherous smile and his mouth loudly chewing on shrimp. But by setting up easy punches against a caricaturish gaggle of suits who say and do all the wrong things, the film simply confirms rather than challenges a patriarchal structure that equates a woman’s value with her beauty. Had the film more surgically channelled the rage of women straitjacketed by the whims of narrow-minded men, the satire could have been as acidic as the horror is bloody.

The Substance, which won Best Screenplay at the 77th Cannes Film Festival, had its India premiere at this year's MAMI Mumbai Film Festival as part of the World Cinema section. The film will be available for streaming on MUBI from 31 October.