Ed note: This review, written in August 2024, is belatedly published, thus the wishful reference to a woman president in its last paragraph.
The director is French, which I found surprising. And she cannot be called young. That was my second shock, for, in watching her movie, THE SUBSTANCE, I would have sworn it was made by a young man — much as the equally pornish ANORA was made by one — so vacuous and shallow its premise. The movie assumes that women are mortally obsessed by fear of aging, and that the manifestation of that idea (one with which I beg to differ) justifies an onslaught of pornographic violence against the bodies of the women, a mainstay of the movie.
But no. Coralie Fargeat is in her early fifties, which places her one generation behind me. What a difference a generation makes! I was fifteen years old in 1970 when consciousness-raising groups made the transition to a full fledged women’s liberation movement. My concern about women and their portrayal in the arts is more than deeply held. It’s nearly in my blood. And blood is a relevant subject because in Ms. Fargeat’s movie, the red stuff spews and sprays indiscriminately.
Fans of grindhouse films will find it playful. I found it hateful. THE SUBSTANCE’s star, Demi Moore, as “Elisabeth Sparkle,” is so thrown off-balance by learning that her swarmy boss (Dennis Quaid, just awful in a revolting, caricatured, scenery-chewing performance) plans to age her out of her job that she risks life, limb, and literally her backbone to reclaim her former, youthful self (Margaret Qualley). That scenario had my hackles up going in, but admittedly it also had my interest.
Let’s unpack THE SUBSTANCE’s premise. Moore’s character, she of the lengthy brown locks and tight abs and gluts, is being displaced from her lofty perch. As what? An actress? No Greta Garbo, she’s a television exercise queen – hearkening Jane Fonda’s shtick. But she’s no Jane, either, nor is she Meryl Streep, whose hilarious comedy Death Becomes Her (1992) with Goldie Hawn and (Demi Moore’s then-husband) Bruce Willis, about aging, vain Los Angeles ladies, was so superior to THE SUBSTANCE, there’s no basis for comparison.
In the first fifteen minutes, when THE SUBSTANCE still had a hope of being clever, Moore overhears her boss calling for her replacement — the bitch is too old. yadda, yadda, yadda, fast forward half an hour, she replaces herself with herself by injecting magic goo. Now she’s younger but clearly not smarter. She doesn’t “go younger” to attend Community College and study computer science. She does so in order to be a more lascivious, pornographic pump-it-up version of a television exercise lady, only with tighter abs and gluts than Moore the Elder.
THE SUBSTANCE won an Award at the Cannes Film Festival for Best Screenplay, to which I would rejoin, What screenplay? This horrifying screed comprises flashing, rough-cut close-up images to the “tune” of an assaultive sound score, and a text so sparse as to be a silent movie. Would that it had been. I was plugging my ears by the movie’s end.
For a contrasting, enthusiastic response to THE SUBSTANCE, read critic Chris Evangelista, in /movies. He calls the movie a “bloody, brilliant, bonkers body horror movie.“
The overlong and tedious (because stupid and repetitive) THE SUBSTANCE drones through its bloody and predictable finale, burning through at least five suitable ending points, none of which it takes. When the sci-fi bloodbath had one woman, the younger, bashing the skull of her elder self, first against a mirror (symbolic!) and then, repeatedly, against the floor, that was my checkout point. There is a screen moment toward the end in which a mother shields her daughter’s eyes from the sight of the monstrously contorted Moore. To quote from our soon-coming first-woman president, whose dignity exists in painful juxtaposition to this horrible movie, “That little girl was me.”
Again: Would that it had been. See THE SUBSTANCE at your peril.
Arts journalist Debra Levine is founder/editor/publisher of arts●meme.