Spoilers for The Substance below: skip to the Writing News section if you don’t want to know what happens!
Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance opens on the image of a Hollywood Walk of Fame star. A young Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) poses atop her star while cameras flash all around her. As the years pass and her fame fades, the crowds dissipate and the smooth, pink surface of the tile – far pinker than any of those stars in real life – begins to crack. In the final moment of that opening sequence, a passing tourist drops his fries and half-heartedly scoops up the mess, leaving Elisabeth’s name coated with a bloody gloss of ketchup.
At the very end of the movie, Elisabeth – now a vestigial face atop an amorphous blob of flesh – returns to her star. Her features contort in what looks like ecstasy before she explodes in a shower of real blood. In the morning, a street sweeper passes over the star and she is scrubbed away. Pink again.
The intervening story runs thus: Elisabeth, now a faded star who fronts a workout show on daytime TV, turns fifty and is promptly fired. The studio advertises for a “youthful” replacement. Only 18-30s need apply. In desperation, Elisabeth turns to a black-market drug called The Substance, a serum which causes a “better version” of her to burst out from within her skin. This is Sue (Margaret Qualley), a barely-legal Barbie-doll who immediately walks into Elisabeth’s old job. The catch is this: she can only be Sue for a week at a time. She must then revert to Elisabeth and live the next week as her unwanted, middle-aged self.
Is she ever really Sue? The faceless seller of The Substance – represented only as a disembodied voice on the phone – insists so, warning again and again that “You are one”. But as Sue elects to stay in her younger body for longer and longer stretches of time, sucking more and more life out of the original Elisabeth as she does so, Elisabeth continually refers to her in the third person. She sees Sue as a dangerous invader in her life, albeit one she can’t bear to kick out. At last, the two alternate selves face off, leading to a bloody fight and a monstrous melding.
The question of whether they are really "one" is never answered, but the nuances of identity aren’t the film’s main concern. What really struck me watching The Substance was its interplay of glossy surfaces: glowing, poreless skin and metallic pink leather; blood, grease, and lipstick; penthouse windows, screens and billboards. The characters – as Gretchen Felker-Martin points out in her excellent review – have little interiority. All we know of Sue is her desire to remain young, beautiful, and adored. Elisabeth, thanks to Moore’s bravura performance, is imbued with a smidgen more depth. In one of the most affecting scenes of the movie, she prepares to go on a date with an old school classmate who has clearly nursed a crush on her since they were kids. She pulls on opera gloves to hide the effects of the serum. She dons a sexy red dress, then second-guesses herself and covers her cleavage with a matronly scarf. She applies makeup, scrubs it off, reapplies it. The clock ticks down toward their appointed meeting-time with thriller-taut tension. In the end, of course, she doesn’t go.
Even here, though, Elisabeth’s concern is purely with how she looks. None of the other things that go along with ageing seem to come up. We don’t know if she’s ever dealt with the loss of a parent, as most people in their fifties will have; for an ageing fitness guru, she doesn’t even seem to have a sore knee that gives her trouble. Her only feelings are about how she is perceived from the outside. This is what gives the movie its keenly-felt cruelty. Its characters have no layers because they are all surface, evacuated of meaning. Their selves have been utterly subordinated to the gaze as harsh disciplinarian.
Even the things that bugged me about the movie seem, in fact, to work towards this conclusion. There’s a sub-plot around food that struck me at first as underexplored. When Elisabeth gets fired, her co-workers buy her a French cookery book “to keep you busy”, the implication surely being that now it’s no longer her job to embody Hollywood fitness (meaning thinness), she can at least take comfort in a good meal. During “her” weeks, locked in her increasingly dingy and messy apartment, she begins to cook obsessively.
These scenes are consciously grotesque: she cranks out a translucent putty of foie gras and strips a chicken carcass in greasy, unnerving closeup. She has no dinner guests, and we barely even see her eat. Instead, the cooking seems like a displacement activity as she takes out her rage at her own ageing body on the dead bodies of animals. They contrast startlingly with the scene early on in the film where Harvey (Dennis Quaid) casually gorges himself on a bowl of shiny, bright-pink shrimp at a restaurant while explaining to Elisabeth that her career is over. Are we to identify with the consumer, or the exploited flesh?
But diet culture never gets mentioned. When Sue takes over from Elisabeth, she expresses disgust at the state of the kitchen but no temptation to eat anything herself. Nor is there any acknowledgement of the semi-starvation that will be required – if not now, then soon – to maintain her skinny teenager’s figure. Is the absence of fat bodies from the world of the movie, the way diet culture lurks perpetually just out of frame, a missed opportunity? Or does it sit alongside The Substance’s other absurdities (a family-friendly NYE variety show with tits-out topless dancers; exercise videos that consist largely of gyrating crotch close-ups) in illustrating that this is a realm of flattened unreality – one that revolves around the consumption of flesh without nourishment and the suggestion of sex without pleasure?
I can’t quite decide. I think that’s in the movie’s favour. It may not be comprehensive or nuanced, but it is a gleamingly, brutally effective piece of horror.
Writing news
My
Heartlines Spec
story,
, is now free to read! Here's a snippet:
The world door deposited us on cracked, brown earth. Around us, a hundred more doors, perhaps a thousand. I had no idea which the rest of our people had fled through.
This in-between space was a neglected one, a place we passed through instead of inhabiting, taking notice only of whether it left dust or mud on our shoes. I was as guilty of that as any. All these centuries and I’d barely spared a glance at the low, scrubby trees, the long windblown grass, the sluggishly flowing stream. My gaze was always fixed upward and outward on the doors that hung in the air, iron and bronze and wood and stone, some trailing ladders, others hovering bare inches above the ground, all of them leading to new worlds.
Still leaning on my shoulder, you began to shiver. Your heel left a bloody print on the ground.I've also been working on a review-essay for New Welsh Review, which should, all being well, make its way into the winter issue. It's about Gothic or fantastic doubles, and gave me an excuse to read a couple of things that have been on my TBR since last year.
What I've been reading
Lloyd Markham's
is a wonderfully dark and inventive fantasy, smartly written, thematically dense, and very compelling. Like too much Welsh-published SFF, it seems to have flown under the radar a bit, which is a crying shame. It really deserves more readers.
What I've been watching
It's horror season, so the other new film I've caught recently was
Speak No Evil.
It's a decent thriller that makes black comedy out of the overwhelming urge to be polite at all costs -- though did pale a little for having been watched right after
The Substance.
That's all from me for this month. 'Til next time!
JL