In a debut screening that rattled the bones of audience members at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance was suddenly one of the most anticipated films of Fall. With seven years between The Substance and Fargeat’s bloody feminist debut, Revenge (2017), the wait has been more than worth it. By all accounts, The Substance is a gradual step forward for the 48-year-old filmmaker who has quickly become a French favorite alongside her peer, Julia Ducournau (Raw, Titane). Fargeat’s contemporary pop spectacle of feminism takes to the streets of Los Angeles beneath palm trees and skyscraper-sized billboards. Starring an unnerved Demi Moore opposite a ruthlessly confident Margaret Qualley, The Substance remasters David Lynch’s triptych saga of L.A.’s shape-shifting descent into losing your mind through the decor of glitz, glamor, and glory.
With a titan like Moore and a surefire star in Qualley, Fargeat asks the most from her actresses as they embody one another in one of the nastiest movies of the year — an intoxicating dosage of self-loathing with enough venom to spare to leave little room for interpretation.
When network star Elisabeth Sparkle (Moore) is fired on her 50th birthday, she is secretly given a number to a mysterious serum supplier that creates a “younger, beautiful, perfect” version of the user. Elisabeth acquires and takes the serum shortly after a brief moment of hesitation, and Sue (Qualley) is ‘born’. Fargeat makes it a point to establish an internal conflict within Elisabeth shaped by the image she has of herself, and the image that has been made of her. This makes it easy for Fargeat to find slight hesitations against the elevated rules of the world that feel so personal. Elisabeth has enough personal stake to make the motivating factors meaningful, and the overt playfulness of the camera stimulates the film with a jolt of energy that makes it fun to watch. The relationship between the camera and Elisabeth absorbs the viewer into the image Elisabeth intends to recreate for herself, as well as the one Fargeat wants us to experience through the story.
There will be easy comparisons to the work of David Cronenberg (most notably The Fly). Still, Fargeat’s film is separate from the sterile practices of Cronenberg finding the incision points of characters removed from religious doctrine. Here, Fargeat formulates a body horror showcase that’ll pass most of its contemporaries, and rival her inspirations. She deliberately uses the female body as a vessel antagonized by expectations, and she’ll reveal how the body, and subsequently the mind, is unraveled by the pressures of an image. In one of the film’s greatest tricks, Fargeat utilizes a towering billboard of Sue to leer into Elisabeth’s penthouse. No matter the angle, the billboard is set on degrading Elisabeth’s body opposite the portrait of herself on the living room wall.
Fargeat operates in that space between Elisabeth’s internal projection of her outward self at all times. It is as much a body horror spectacle as it is a mindful psychological break, and Fargeat respects the relationship between the body and the mind to attribute a perceptive thematic purpose. For every grotesquerie, Fargeat matches it with moments where Elisabeth or Sue acknowledge their reflection with rueful consideration. These moments don’t last too long, as Fargeat makes sure she doesn’t let the tone slip from her grasp, but it is the self-reflective honesty that legitimizes the observations she makes. Few contemporaries can maintain that commitment to hyper-realized horror, as well as sustain the necessary psychological depths to anchor the film without letting either aspect slip through their fingers. That balance between cinematic self-indulgence and the vital components of a satisfying narrative is a wonderful extension of the very ideas the story is toying with. It appears as if Fargeat respects the audience’s intelligence enough to reward them with the thrill of sights unseen – I hope notes are taken and mulled over.
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