Film Box

“Pretty girls should ALWAYS smile!”

So says Harvey (last name not revealed, but you can guess what it might be), a sleazy producer played by Dennis Quaid in The Substance, which I just saw yet am willing to crawl out on a limb to say is the best new horror film I’ve seen in the last five years, probably more. It’s the second feature by French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat, who with this and Revenge (2017) is carving a niche with satirical feminist takes on typically male-helmed sub-genres. With Revenge it was the rape/revenge film, with The Substance it’s body horror.

The story is that Jane Fonda-style fitness guru Elisabeth Sparkles (Demi Moore) is fading from the limelight due to LA’s misogynistic repulsion for ageing female bodies. Forced into retirement, she’s introduced to The Substance, a shady medical treatment that when injected causes your physical form to split in two so that for seven days you can live as a younger, fitter, “better” version of yourself.

During this time a new persona called Sue (Margaret Qualley), of perky breasts and silky glutes, becomes Harvey’s new commodity. But Sue starts growing tired of Elisabeth, while their use of The Substance causes the latter to start… changing.

The film speaks to a long lineage of horror, surrealist, and other genre properties, evoking The Shining (1980), Sunset Boulevard (1950), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the Davids Cronenberg and Lynch, and even 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the latter used for both psychedelic and at one point comic effect. Yet it stands head and shoulders above Cronenberg's most recent work and pretty much all horror made by man or woman in the studio system in recent years. I’m hesitant at this early stage to call The Substance a masterpiece, but it’s a straight 4/4 and to some degree, at least a new classic that moviegoers interested in original horror “should” watch.

Fargeat has emerged as an artist like Quentin Tarantino in that she takes genres and tropes associated with schlock and injects them with a vital artistic vision. Beyond the allusions above, The Substance calls to mind Frank Henenlotter movies, the sort of thing your general filmgoer would have too high an opinion of their own taste to go near.

Like Basket Case (1982), about a man on the run with a murderous flesh homunculus who was once his conjoined twin, or Frankenhooker (1990), in which a grieving man tries to resurrect his wife by sewing her back together with parts from sex workers. As in Manny Farber’s auteur theory, Fargeat uses such material to shove art up into the crevices of dreck.

Part of what’s so refreshing about The Substance is seeing this type of gross-out body horror from a feminist perspective, a female gaze if you will. Where Henenlotter’s jokes about sex workers were relatively shallow satirically, Fargeat brings strong gender commentary to the same dark humour, fetishised shots of youthful female bodies, and descent into carnage.

In the tradition of a lot of great horror, The Substance is also a comedy, most comparable to David Lynch’s candy-coloured, painterly depictions of American society with their tongue-in-cheek characterisations. Los Angeles stereotypes are mercilessly skewered and at its core, the story is a classic simple tale of disgusting Hollywood shallowness and greed, made literally disgusting with the horrible mutations that develop as Elisabeth/Sue chase lost youth. The body horror stuff is mesmeric, especially in a climax so wild and blood-soaked and weird it might set some kind of record, reminiscent of the conclusion to Society (1989).

Nausea is a prominent visual motif, not just in the mutations but for example how Harvey is depicted, slopping and slipping and crunching his way through dozens of prawns with heads attached in a restaurant, their carcasses soaking in sauce like the discarded women he’s probably burned through. Or how he sloppily relieves himself in a public bathroom while yelling about how useless older women are.

Demi Moore meanwhile gives what might be the performance of her career. There’s a tradition of Hollywood sex symbols going into horror once they’re no longer young, so much so that it’s even a named subgenre, “hagsploitation”. An extended sequence of Moore cooking while made up like a frazzled hermit is both shocking and hilarious, and honestly admirable in how she sends up her sex symbol image, allowing herself to be filmed so raw and vulnerable.

I’ll be seeing The Substance again, probably several times. It’s the most exciting and mature horror film to come along in years.

Rating: 4/4

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