“The Substance” turns the obsession with beauty and youth into a battlefield. In the middle of it all: Demi Moore in one of her most memorable roles.
A fantasy image in a snow globe remains of the glory of the past. The rain of gold glitters and flutters around in it and whizzes across the entire screen in close-up. A little later, the object flies against the wall, onto the poster of the former ideal body. Crash, splinters, the dream is shattered. It is a central image that the author and director Coralie Fargeat (“Revenge”) chooses to explain her main character. A striking image, certainly, but everything in this film is striking. It becomes clear after just a few minutes that “The Substance” is not a film of subtle hints and nuances. That is not what this is about at all. Coralie Fargeat has one or two theses, a central image for them, and then happily tries out how she can get the most entertainment and spectacle out of them. She hits the audience with her criticism of the competition for youth and beauty with full force.
The image mentioned is that of the split woman. In this film, Demi Moore plays the ageing Hollywood diva and aerobics icon Elisabeth Sparkle, who suddenly fears that she will have to make way for the youth in the entertainment industry. A new wonder drug promises to save her. Once injected, “the substance” is supposed to bring a younger, better, more beautiful self into the world. So Elisabeth injects the poisonous green goo into her veins, whereupon her younger counterpart (Margaret Qualley) bursts out of her back. This birth sequence alone, which is staged with twitching limbs, vomit, flickering, garish strobe effects, bursting skin, all kinds of fake blood and gruesome close-ups – the wound on the back has to be stitched up – makes it clear what “The Substance” is really about. It is a game with emotions, a brutal physical theater in front of the camera.
“The Substance” is sensational body horror
So it is of little use to try to focus primarily on the content of this film and to see its impressive practical effects as an extra, because these effects are the entire film. The director’s criticism, which is quickly seen through, is intended to be experienced physically rather than intellectually. “The Substance” is conceived phenomenologically through and through. It plays with the immediately perceptible, with provocative, repulsive, artificial, affecting surfaces, impressions and appearances that are intended to enter into a dialogue with one’s own body.
Fargeat stages a continuous stream of body horror, accompanied by loud, bass-heavy droning sounds. Highly performative and aggressive in some moments, silly and wacky in others. Phantom pain, disgust, nausea, and shock are provoked by many images that begin with injections and wounds and later extend to excreted chicken legs, torn out teeth and fingernails, living decomposition, and a completely unrestrained bloodbath in the finale. Of course, this has a lot to do with individual pain and disgust limits. That is what makes “The Substance” so difficult to criticize. But regardless of whether you want to throw up or close your eyes in disgust in your cinema seat: here a director has a merciless, radical vision that may be naive and narrowly constructed, but fervently exploits its cinematic means.
Trash in the best sense
“The Substance” is trash in the best and most positive sense. One must always be careful with this description, because it usually only marks deviations from conventions and makes hasty denigrations. But it is a perfect fit for Fargeat’s film, because it has exactly the prerequisite of not appearing all that clever, sometimes even quite banal, but then finds exaggerations with such infectious joy and attempts to achieve such unrestrained and sensational excess, pure expenditure and waste (of resources, food, cinematic tricks, time, bodies) that one can hardly experience on such a scale in the cinema these days. And beneath all the tastelessness, certain truths lurk.
How accurate “The Substance’s” criticism of body image, beauty standards and age discrimination is is something that can and should be debated. The film seems to have hit a sore spot one way or another, if you read some of the reviews that have been written about it since its world premiere in Cannes. A lot has certainly happened in terms of representation, especially in societies that are already aging. However, citing older Hollywood stars or other celebrities of advanced age as a fig leaf and counter-argument in order to relativize the criticism of the film does not seem very convincing. The competition for ideas of the flawless, the youthful, the beautiful, the attractive and thus supposedly more economically productive continues unabated in many public areas.
A satire about the hunt for the flawless
Aesthetic conformity and perfection, whether it is achieved surgically or as a mask via social media filters, continues to distort perception, lead to inferiority complexes and the exclusion of people who do not want to emulate this norm. A few deviant people as role models do not change old structures. After all, “Germany’s Next Top Model” does not become progressive just because a curvy model or a few older women are allowed to take part in countless seasons.
The ever-escalating horror fantasy of the aging, decaying body that “The Substance” celebrates at some point has nothing to do with condescension towards the main character. After all, it’s not as if you’re actually seeing a realistic depiction of aging. It’s so exaggerated, so drawn into the monstrous, that the framing and tongue-in-cheek meaning of it are actually transparent. It’s a projection, a construct.
“The Substance” is a film of distorted perception
The extremely artificial, sterile glossy images that the director stages even in the dirtiest of situations are always clearly located in their origins. Because the horror fantasies and horror images in question do not simply reproduce what they criticize, but rather make clear their origins in ideological thought patterns and aesthetic norms. Here, they are quite literally born out of each other. Just as the creation of an allegedly more perfect self literally tells the other facets of a person what life is like. It is not ideals or counter-concepts that “The Substance” shows. Instead, the film deliberately and in a way that is actually child’s play to understand distorted perceptions from start to finish, from which some characters suffer and which others rise above.
The creature that Coralie Fargeat lets stumble into catastrophe at the end of her horror satire drives the monstrous caricature of the lived ideology into the spotlight in front of its followers. First you struggle with the self-image that everyday life in discriminatory and normative structures turns into pure terror in the mind. Then you confront the discriminators with the monster they have created. And the tragedy is completed in the dubious impression of a last shred of glory in self-destruction.
It’s darkly humorous, it’s evil and not without malicious glee. It doesn’t handle anyone with kid gloves. It risks being hated. But it’s projected, painted, sprayed and slaughtered on the screen with such energy and joy in excess, even for the sake of the effect itself, that “The Substance” is certainly one of the most memorable cinema experiences of the year.
“The Substance” has been running in German cinemas since September 19, 2024 and will be bei Mubi appear in streaming.
Source: www.digitalfernsehen.de
