MOVIE REVIEW: The Substance (2024)
With its ghoulish, stomach-churning assortment of shrivelling human appendages and rotting teeth, wetly glistening amorphous blobs and aquatic alien parasites, body horror is likely the last sub-genre you’d come to expecting: a. anything resembling particularly thought-provoking viewing or b. a cinematic work whose onscreen horrors discernibly align with those residing in our altogether less fantastical, day-to-day lives. Then again, seldom are the real-life horrors in question the quite literal stuff of Cronenberg-esque nightmares. And as a movie situated in the drastic acts of cosmetic enhancement, drug-taking and other innumerable forms of self-torture high-profile women in Hollywood frequently resort to in order to sustain careers in a ruthless and objectifying patriarchal industry, The Substance was always guaranteed to be a wondrously twisted and thought-provoking picture.
Sourcing rich inspiration from the inherently corrupt and all-devouring corporate machine that is the Hollywood film industry, it seems eerily apt that former ’90s mega-star Demi Moore should take centre stage of director Coralie Fargeat's gore-laden yet penetratingly insightful shocker. Having been fairly relentlessly hounded by the press throughout the early to mid-2000s and, moreover, experienced something of a career hiatus in recent decades, Moore is, without doubt, no stranger to the toxic gender politics that The Substance so unflinchingly and vividly evokes.
Within a nightmarish, dystopian universe in which both the antiquated trappings of back-slapping, ’80s-style chauvinism and the vacuous, hyper-sexualised aesthetics of the Instagram generation are amplified to truly repulsive, caricature-like extremes, Elisabeth Sparkle is the unwitting victim of a system spanning literal generations of unceasing misogyny. Having, thus far, enjoyed a long and lucrative career as a TV fitness personality, The Substance finds our ill-fated star at a waning point in her formerly flourishing career. Shortly thereafter, 50-year-old Sparkle is unceremoniously sacked by her once-fawning TV network who instantly set about sourcing a younger and more nubile replacement.
However, when a chance encounter with a sinister stranger in a local watering-hole promises to transform Sparkle’s seemingly irredeemable fortunes, the former star can’t help but seize this questionable yet undeniably tantalising opportunity. Fast-forward to the delivery of a mysterious video tape promoting a miracle injectable serum that promises “a better version of yourself” and indeed - following an exceptionally bloody and brutal, birth-like metamorphosis - ‘The Substance’ does, at first, deliver above and beyond all conceivable expectations. Resulting in the genesis of a twenty-something doppelgänger that literally emerges from the more senior Sparkle’s bloodied and broken carcass, her monosyllabic double (simply named ‘Sue’) facilitates the star’s rapid and explosive return to TV screens.
With its success dependent on a delicate and decidedly precarious equilibrium which requires the user to alternate weekly between their two respective halves, both Sparkle and ‘Sue’ inevitably fail to operate in accordance with the recommended dosage, precipitating catastrophic consequences. And from decaying extremities and lightning-paced ageing to a gag-inducing subdermal protrusion of a chicken drumstick in one joyously bizarre onscreen highlight, The Substance comprises an alternately harrowing, revolting and darkly comedic mind-fuck of a body horror. But, whether in a subdued state of quiet but visibly broken despair, manically animated hysteria or in a fit of violent, mascara-smearing self-hatred, it’s Moore’s staggering array of tortured emotional states that makes all of this such a relentlessly engrossing experience.
Calling to our collective consciousness such classic narratives as The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Substance derives from timeless and universally pertinent thematic territory. Those age-old cautionary tales of the terrible price we pay for our ill-advised attempts at tampering with nature or succumbing to our narcissistic impulses. The unending struggle with the darker or, in this case, cosmetically unpalatable halves of ourselves, and the ever-intriguing dualism of human nature.
But beyond all of this is a turmoil that feels distinctly feminine in flavour, specifically located in the numerous casualties of a patriarchal system that, despite some significant steps toward a more progressive tomorrow, retains an all-pervasive, psychological stranglehold not merely within tinsel-town alone, but in so many different aspects of ordinary women’s day-to-day lives. Manifesting in a jaw-droppingly graphic grand finale that sees all these most despicably voyeuristic and objectifying traits amplified to a howling crescendo of abject grotesquery, it’s with all the nimble dexterity of a high-grossing Hollywood surgeon that the showbiz world’s glittering, carefully curated façades are deftly dissected and peeled away, exposing an industry that’s quite literally rotten to the core. 10/10
The Substance is in cinemas now