Even in what might appear to be a woman’s world – a morning workout show on television – it is a man, a particularly toxic one at that, who calls the shots. What does the programme’s popular host do when her male boss shows her the door on her 50th birthday without so much as a by-your-leave? She rebels. And there is hell to pay.
The TV network honcho, Harvey (Dennis Quaid, doing everything to render the character as an unbridled, abhorrent caricature), delivers the bad news to Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore as we have never seen her before) while polishing off a bowlful of shrimps.
The man’s all-devouring disdain – ‘this is network TV, not charity,” he quips – for a past-her-prime star borders on the obnoxious. His curt, half-hearted thank you note ends with “you were amazing”, the emphasis being on WERE.
Elisabeth Sparkle, who has a much trampled-on star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, is turned in a matter of hours into a relic of the past. “Renewal is inevitable,” says Harvey. “(But) at 50, it stops.” The network seeks renewal.
Elisabeth, too, is determined not to be left out of whatever the hell Harvey means by regeneration. She gives it a shot. Literally. As the world collapses in a heap around her, she procures a tantalising but dangerous cell-replicating potion peddled by a lab that promises to help her create “a better, younger and more perfect” version of herself.
But there is, as she and the film’s audience realise quickly, there is a heavy price to pay for that desperate lunge at the possibility of age reversal.
The pitch-dark feminist allegory, now streaming in India on MUBI, is awash with a riot of disparate colours, including whites and greys that reflect Elisabeth’s fading stardom.
The Substance is as harrowing as it is electrifying in its savage takedown of showbiz where women have unrealistic notions and standards of beauty and saleability thrust upon them by decision-makers who cannot see beyond their noses and their bottomlines.
The process that Elisabeth Sparkle submits herself to unleashes a messy chain of events that turns into a battle of attrition between her and her enhanced Other Self, Sue (Margaret Qualley). Her periorbital dark circles and the hint of wrinkles on her face that are alarmingly magnified in the mirror are replaced by the unblemished skin of her alter ego.
The “substance” is a one-way street to disaster for her, her “other self” that is engendered by the grey-market drug and the television network that rode on the popularity of her show for years but has no need for her any longer.
Combining the pulpy with the polemical, and the sharply pointed with the fiercely pugnacious, The Substance, written, co-produced and directed by Coralie Fargeat, is a powerful parable that pulls no punches.
Subtlety is not the film’s strong suit, which is only to be expected from a body-horror excursion that is intent on knocking the stuffings out of the genre and reimagining it in a fresh but scalding light.
Like a runaway excavator out to flatten everything in its path, The Substance absolutely bursts through the gates of a putrid domain guarded by myopic, insensitive men drunk on power.
The film not only serves up an audacious idea on a raw platter designed with great imagination and diligence, it also takes it mutiny against the established skewed gender dynamics to its very limits. Sound effects and visual sleights heighten the horror.
The Substance isn’t interested in jump scares although the film abounds in sequences that might discomfit the squeamish – bodies are pierced with needles, flesh is penetrated with bare hands and fingers and human entrails crawl out of stomachs.
The shocks that The Substance delivers stem from the sheer absurdity of the commercial principles that drive the entertainment industry and the lopsided ecosystem it engenders.
A wild and wacky game unfolds between Elisabeth and Sue and between the two – there is no she and I, you are one, a disembodied voice repeatedly reminds them – and the network that the younger woman finds her way into as Elisabeth’s replacement.
In a not-so-innocuous passage leading up to a bizarre, boundary-breaking climax, Harvey, unaware of all that has transpired since he fired her, introduces Elisabeth, now no longer the woman that had all of of Los Angeles in thrall, to “the shareholders”, all of them greying White men.
That one fleeting moment says as much as the many infinitely more dramatic, violent and bloody sequences do. The Substance is filmed in a manner that sustains the impression of a bubble that is a prick away from bursting.
In a domain where women are reduced to commodities and compelled to dance to the tunes of their puppet-masters, Elisabeth is a creature in a fishbowl placed under the harsh glare of a spotlight.
The casting is bold and salutary. Sexagenarian Demi Moore convincingly slips into the skin and sinews of 50-yer-old Elisabeth Sparkle. Margaret Qualley, exactly half Moore’s age in real life, nails Sue without missing a beat.
Demi Moore projects Elisabeth as a woman who walks through a vertical trap door into a surreal, subterranean universe where the more she seeks to wrest back control of her life the more she descends into a bottomless chute.
As she becomes a mere number and falls prey to a barely tested procedure that can only be stopped but not reversed, the actor puts her body (all of it and then some) and soul into the performance.
Moore’s Elisabeth in situated in the realms of the hyper-real even as she steps into a zone where everything is completely and fantastically unhinged. Margaret Qualley, playing the perfect foil, looms over the action just as much as the character’s advent does over Elisabeth.
The Substance won the Best Screenplay Award at the 77th Cannes Film Festival this year, but there is much more to the film than Fargeat’s trenchant writing.
Benjamin Kracun’s cinematography, the editing (by Fargeat herself along with Jerome Eltabet and Valentin Feron), the make-up effects by Perre-Olivier Persin and the music by Raffertie all contribute handsomely to the film.
Revolting yet riveting, The Substance ends where even a David Cronenberg might not have gone. The phenomenally inventive and outrageously flashy fable is as insanely entertaining as it is stupefyingly sobering.
