Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance” opens as if the screen itself was dipped in a hallucinogenic cocktail, one with an aftertaste of bile and eyeliner, and I found myself reeling, delighted, and (let’s not be coy) more than a little queasy. This is the promise and peril of modern body horror: when it’s any good, you come away not only a little sick to your stomach but a little troubled in your soul.
Fargeat, whose film stalked out of Cannes dripping with both buzz and the sort of post-screening nausea festivalgoers like to call “visceral,” knows exactly what world she’s rendering. “The Substance” is a lacquered grotesque, spilling over with violence, spectacle, and satiric venom, all in service of the grand old tale of beauty in decline, and the fatally lucrative temptation to decompose in reverse.
We follow Demi Moore’s Elisabeth Sparkle, an actress clinging to her faded starlet mythos with bloody nails. The Hollywood machine has always run on youthful flesh ground down to bone, but here, Fargeat lets us taste the poison in the beauty cream, quite literally. Elisabeth finds herself injected into a nightmarish scenario: there’s now a literal “substance” that allows her to ooze off her wrinkles like turning down a well-lit hallway and walking out a decade younger. The kicker? The drug doesn’t just slough off the years; it births an actual, bounding, maniacal version of her younger self.
It’s as if Luis Buñuel and David Cronenberg had a lovechild and raised her on “Death Becomes Her” and those TV acne cream commercials that haunt you at 3 a.m. The premise sets us up for satire and body horror, but it delivers them at such velocity and volume that the tone veers precariously between pointed and preposterous. By the time Margaret Qualley’s young Sue is licking her superhuman wounds and hurling herself through the plot with crazed abandon, I wasn’t sure if I was watching mythic tragedy or a glam-rock wrestling match, and, to be honest, I was happy with both.
The ending becomes a sort of deranged pageant, in which bodies and identities are chewed up in a blender of sex, age, ambition, envy, and all the sticky detritus that bubbles up from the muck of pop culture’s beauty myth. At a certain point it’s less “third act” than operatic primal scream, like being buried in a vault with the world’s last copy of Vogue and nothing but metal to blast through your demise.
Demi Moore is in her element: fierce, fragile, angry, and just a little sad, she gives us a character who realizes she is more cosmetic than person but won’t give up the fight, even as her skin (sometimes literally) slips off. Margaret Qualley as the “improved” double, Sue, is all elastic bravado and twitching narcissistic exuberance, the mirror image nobody asked for, but, this movie suggests, it’s probably coming for us all.
Dennis Quaid, smirking and slick, is perfect as the kind of industry lizard who believes Botox is a sacrament. He doesn’t have to act; he just has to be there, letting his own face’s history do the talking. While the script isn’t deeply invested in character development (it’s the body that evolves, not the soul), there’s enough chemistry, by which I mean unease, rivalry, and hysterical loathing, between the leads that the drama sings even as it stings.
What Fargeat brings is style, real style, the kind you notice before you notice anything else. She moves the camera like a hungry insect, zooming in so close you might as well be licking the collagen from these women’s pores. The visuals are both outrageous and exquisite, lurid, luscious, and full of the kind of uncensored, in-your-face transformations that make you hyper-aware of your own rapidly decaying flesh. There’s a sort of visual gluttony at work; you laugh, you wince, you squirm, but mostly you marvel at her nerve.
And if you think the retching is only in your gut, the sound design slaps you out of your seat. Everything in this film is conducted at high volume, squelching, pounding, and pulsating along to a soundtrack that meshes nightclub throb with the eerie beep of a cosmetic surgeon’s alarm clock.
But here’s the trick: beneath all these fever pitches and surface-level neuroses, the film has, of all things, a heart. Fargeat plays the game of beauty with a straight face but subverts the deck, reminding us at every turn that these standards aren’t just cruel, they’re actually insane. The nudity is excessive, yes, but it’s also curiously innocent: the horror isn’t sexual but existential, the real terror is not in being naked, but in being seen.
Does the movie go off the rails? Of course it does. That’s the point. The story is a kind of hysterical parable about self-perfection, self-obliteration, and the way society devours any woman foolish enough to let her edges show. The result is a movie that isn’t just horror, or comedy, or even pure sensation, it’s a collage of everything we fear, envy, and secretly desire about our own vanishing bodies.
If you can’t stomach exposed viscera or the idea that your favorite youthful face may, tomorrow, be up for auction in some cosmetic surgeon’s back alley, “The Substance” is not for you. But for the rest of us, who crave movies that shock, unsettle, and, God bless them, entertain, Fargeat’s film is a glorious, slippery excess. It’s not just good: it’s a glorious, ugly, unfashionably honest howl into the void. And you can’t say that about most horror films, or most beauty products, either.
Go now and see what’s under your own skin. You may not like it, but you won’t be able to look away.
