Blunt object body horror The Substance is bloody, feminist catharsis in action
Photo: Mubi
The Substance is not a subtle movie. The filmmaking is aggressive. The metaphor is a blunt object. The music is loud and thumping, and the color palette is bright enough to peel the film off of your eyeballs. It’s animated by a white-hot rage that escalates throughout its epic 140-minute run time, building to a jaw-droppingly audacious climax that sprays a firehose of blood at the audience. It’s demented and absurd in the best way possible.
Writer-director Coralie Fargeat brought a similar go-for-broke mentality to her 2018 debut Revenge, a film that would never even consider a tasteful medium shot when an extreme fish-eye close-up was available. Fargeat directs the hell out of The Substance as well, using dramatic camera angles to imbue even throwaway moments with a sense of hyper-stylized delirium. A character throws something in a trash can? She puts the camera at the bottom of it. That same character walks down a hallway? She places her lens low to the ground, distorting the perspective and rendering an ordinary location bewildering and strange.
Then the body horror comes in. Stars Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley both spent hours in the makeup chair preparing for scenes in this film, and the practical latex prosthetics are perverse and surreal in the style of Screaming Mad George, the effects artist behind Society and Freaked. These combine with an aesthetic of syringes and latex gloves best described as “medspa chic,” evoking “miracle cures” like Ozempic and Botox that encourage people (mostly women, let’s be real) to pump themselves full of barely regulated substances whose side effects won’t be clear for a few more decades so they can make themselves more palatable to patriarchal beauty standards.
None of this will prevent the shitty, lumpy men who rule the world from throwing you away when you don’t give them a boner anymore, as Elisabeth Sparkle (Moore) rudely discovers early on in the film. Elisabeth is extremely famous—billboard famous; Walk of Fame famous—and has been for decades. You’d think this would give her the slightest bit of leverage when it comes to renegotiating her contract as the host of the aerobics program that broadcasts her tight body and sparkling smile into millions of American homes every week. You’d be wrong.