The Substance: A Dazzlingly Daring Body Horror

Coralie Fargeat once again reworks film history with rageful indignation with The Substance.

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In chapter two of The Sadeian Woman, Angela Carter uses a quote from Leslie Fielder’s Love and Death in the American Novel: “All the idealisations of the female from the earliest days of courtly love have been in fact devices to deprive her of freedom and self-determination.” It’s a thought that may spring to mind while watching Coralie Fargeat’s violently gory body horror, The Substance, a film that satirises Hollywood beauty standards through the eyes of ageing celebrity aerobics instructor Elisabeth Sparkle (an incredible Demi Moore) as she embarks on a botched course of fountain of youth type treatment.

When Elisabeth’s boss Harvey (Dennis Quiad) decides to axe her from the schedule and replace her with younger model Sue (Margaret Qualley) all manner of hell and insecurity breaks loose in her brain. The pressure gets to Elisabeth and she takes extreme measures to stay in the hugely rigged and toxic patriarchal game.

Fargeat, who previously subverted the rape/revenge genre in the aptly named Revenge, once again reworks film history with rageful indignation, dark humour and inventive visual style that harks back to the work of David Cronenberg, Gaspar Noe and the gonzo grossness of Brian Yuzna’s Society. Fargeat’s monstrous creation reflects all those sickening and hypocritical beauty myths shown in modern culture and on social media, but it’s all executed with a hyper-stylised 80s aesthetic full of John Carpenter-style synth and beats.

Every woman in Fargeat’s film is viciously exploited for the gain of greedy, sycophantic white men. The woozy camera angles contort the women’s bodies and the men’s evil demeanours. The in-your-face cartoonish characters and over-the-top design keeps building until it reaches an explosive climax mirroring Elisabeth and Sue’s declining and fragile psyche.

It’s a surreal, disorientating and stomach-turning experience that furiously points the finger of blame towards a broken system intended to rob women of their autonomy and power. It’s also a film that makes you wonder if anything has or will ever really change.

The Substance will be showing at FrightFest on 26 August. It will be released in cinemas in the UK and Ireland on 20 September 2024