‘The Substance’ Is The Ultimate Pulpy Body-Horror Nightmare

You can’t escape from yourself. That’s the forehead-slapping moral of bifurcating body-horror freakout The Substance, a fractured fairy tale that revels in the repulsive. Subtle, this is not. Nor is it realistic. The Substance is cartoonish in its intentions and exaggerated in its execution, so gleefully untethered from sanity that it defies you to question its feverish surrealism—you only have to stomach its scarlet-showering grindhouse machinations. If beauty is skin deep, then The Substance literally peels back that layer to show how much ugliness really cuts to the bone. 

Genre fans will embrace this proudly visceral cautionary myth; more than a few will be put off by the carnal carnival it offers. Brace for blood, lesions, pus, vomit, tears, slime, splitting eyeballs, and a finger-length fish hook needle to sew up a a spine-length wound. Plus syringe injection after syringe injection. And that’s not even the first half of the movie. 

THE SUBSTANCE ★★★★ (4/5 stars)
Directed by: Coralie Fargeat 
Written by: Coralie Fargeat
Starring: Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, Dennis Quaid
Running time: 140 mins

Those, too, who like their feminist statements anchored in reality will be sorely disappointed. The Substance lives in a world of its own geographic, temporal, emotional and psychological invention, set in a surprisingly pedestrian-friendly Los Angeles where your apartment is just a short jaunt not only from your studio gig but also from the Hollywood Walk of Fame. 

That, by the way, is where you’ll find the cracked sidewalk star for Elisabeth Sprinkle (Demi Moore), Oscar-winning actress and aging spandex exercise guru with a long-in-the-tooth TV show who just overheard her beet-faced, bloviating network boss Harvey (Dennis Quaid) crowing that her days are numbered. “We need her young,” he yells into a cell phone, cock in hand as he pisses into a urinal. “We need her hot. We need her new.”  

Worse still: it’s her 50^th birthday. And right after taping her latest morning aerobics episode, right after her boss fires her over lunch, right after watching her face ripped off a billboard, the distracted diva gets into an unbelievably brutal car crash that sends her straight to the E.R. And she’s apparently fine—no scratches. “You’re a good candidate,” murmurs a suspicious male nurse, pinching the flesh on her spinal cord. 

Lo and behold, when she walks out of the hospital, there’s a flash drive in her pocket wrapped in a hand-written note. “This changed my life,” it reads, as alluring as the “Drink Me” label from Alice in Wonderland. And on the flash drive, two boldfaced words: THE SUBSTANCE.

 Its monkey’s-paw promise is a better/stronger/faster version of yourself. The fountain of youth, updated for our Big Pharma times. One dose unlocks a person’s DNA, literally gene-splitting someone into two distinct beings—one the same age, one much younger. Except separation is an illusion, because you need to take turns, switching consciousness every week like clockwork—no exceptions. YOU ARE ONE, the mysterious bio-tech company insists. “Everything comes from you,” a narrator intones during the instructional video on the drive. “Everything is you. You just have to share.” But the vain don’t share well with others.

In a sketchy unmanned storage facility with a dodgy alleyway entrance, Elisabeth retrieves a plain brown box of drugs that contains spartan step-by-step instructions for self-administering. Imagine if IKEA merged with CVS and you’ll get the jist of it. She casts the pharmaceutical spell and magically—violently—births a fully-grown woman Athena-like out of her back. 

This nubile twentysomething calls herself Sue (Margaret Qualley), and she promptly auditions for the same aerobics TV show, gets the gig, transforms it into a techno-twerk workout, and becomes an overnight sensation. Emphasis on overnight, since this all happens within the first week of her existence. Her success is addictive, of course, and inevitably she wants to delay switching control back to Elisabeth. Each time one of them switches, by the way, the other’s inert body must be given an IV drip of food to stay healthy. Because you need to take care of yourself! YOU ARE ONE. 

But of course the pair don’t. Each resents the other, each gradually starts to abuse the other, and the whole Dorian Gray duality goes sideways fast. “Respect the balance and you won’t have any more inconveniences,” an anonymous voice drones when Elisabeth calls for help. Meanwhile, an old, haunted man at a diner spots Elisabeth and looks at her with forlorn eyes. “Has she started eating away at you?” he moans. 

Writer-director Coralie Fargeat is far more interested in sensory experiences than logical integrity. The Substance only works on its own terms, and you have to accept its preposterous premise, especially when it goes from simply nuts to full-on batshit crazy. Fargeat wants her beauty-is-a-beast fable to be all funhouse mirrors—amped-up sound effects, elongated hallways, gaudy entertainment executives, troll-like hags with withered limbs, and so so many close-up shots of taut butts. It’s a fantasy-turned-nightmare that owes a deep debt to David Cronenberg’s pulpy existential ruminations but blazes a new vision for femme phantasms. Long live the new flesh, even if it means creating the Monstro Elisasue.