Real Dolls

Kara Rota reviews Coralie Fargeat’s film “The Substance.”

By Kara RotaNovember 10, 2024

• Film

• Gender & Sexuality

• SF

AS A PAEAN to body horror, Coralie Fargeat’s 2024 MUBI film The Substance savors the conventions of the genre. It’s a movie made for big-screen viewing, satisfyingly evoking revulsion with shots of half-chewed food and smeared makeup as much as with splattered blood and penetrating needles. But the true terror here is deeper and more terrifying than the effects of the unregulated, bile-yellow “Substance” that transforms its users into idealized versions of themselves. The real horror is aging in a woman’s body in a society that would rather see you dead.

Unceremoniously dumped from her decades-long tenure on a daytime exercise show for the cardinal sin of aging, Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) embarks on an experimental solution: an underground service providing a complicated series of injections and related apparatuses that allow users to spend every other week as the younger, perfected, Substance-improved version of themselves. Both the new and the original bodies exist in the same reality, but only one vessel can hold the user’s consciousness at a time—one week on, one week off. Elisabeth trades time with her Substance-renewed version, Sue (Margaret Qualley), who immediately lands Elisabeth’s former job and attachment to the spotlight, an insatiable vortex of It girl in her prime. For Sue, the weekly switch quickly becomes unimaginable.

The pleasure of body horror is often its cartoonish violence played for metaphor rather than its realism, and in that sense, The Substance is a master class in slapstick. There’s a goofy comic book gratification to witnessing a full-body scar heal in two weeks or watching a crop-topped Qualley complete a full HGTV demolition and home reno faster than her neighbor can arrive to present the size of his hammer. Even the nudity in The Substance has a visceral, over-the-top quality, effectively parodying the male gaze. Qualley dons prosthetic breasts that give Sue an eerie, RealDoll quality. After the first episode of Sue’s show, we watch her watch her own mouth move across a field of 20-some televisions on the office wall, a Videodrome homage by way of Marilyn Minter. A seminal plot point relies on the entire production and camera crew staring, absurdly, with crossed arms and furrowed brows, at a blown-up screen-by-screen replay of Sue’s gyrating ass.

Fargeat, whose 2017 film Revenge engages with many of the same themes to subvert the genre’s objectification and disposal of women’s bodies, is clearly at home here. Blood, bile, and body horror abound, and by the time the film raises the visual stakes to the effective desexualization of breasts, the level of gore is triumphant. The film is crammed with visual references to other classics that only elevate The Substance to an immediately high tier: it’s Freaky Friday meets The Cask of Amontillado, I mentally noted halfway through. Afterward, I wrote down: Freaky Friday meets Cask of Amontillado meets Alien meets Multiplicity meets Joker meets Carrie meets Black Swan meets The Elephant Man meets Psycho meets The Shining meets the vomit scene in Stand by Me meets the part in The Faculty with the hot teacher’s head. It is cinematic pastiche meets high-concept movie pitch to Hollywood executives, a stunning Human Centipede of art and commerce.

The casting quickly becomes inextricable from the plot, an inevitable fourth-wall break in a movie about celebrity. Moore, in the role of Elisabeth Sparkle, offers a knowing send-up of her lifelong relationship with the public consumption of her body. Since she first appeared on the cover of adult magazine Oui in a photo taken before she was 18, Moore’s career and life in public have been an incredible triumph over—or reckoning with—that objectification, from the pregnant Vanity Fair cover that launched a million maternity shoots to her refusal to be defined by her controversial, humiliating marriage to and divorce from Ashton Kutcher. Her physical body and its reinventions are part of the collective consciousness: Moore crouched over a pottery wheel in Ghost (1990), her shaved head in G.I. Jane (1997), the black Mugler dress in Indecent Proposal (1993), the black office pumps in Disclosure (1994). Six Demi Moores would be an excellent group Halloween costume, as recognizable as a timeline of Britneys walking into the bar or all the T-Swifts in the “Look What You Made Me Do” video.

From the start of her acting career in 2013’s Palo Alto and her immediate star turn in HBO’s The Leftovers (2014–17), Margaret Qualley’s reception has been peppered with backhanded compliments about how her risky choices of projects make her the “right kind” of nepo baby. (Actress Andie McDowell and former model Paul Qualley are her parents.) Rather than pushing back against this characterization in interviews, Qualley effectively braids the nuance of that identity into her projects, playing a Sue-adjacent specter of manufactured femininity as Poor Things’ Felicity in 2023 and her own mother’s daughter in the Netflix miniseries Maid (2021), on which Qualley reportedly landed McDowell the part.

And then there’s Dennis Quaid. Before filming The Substance, Quaid starred in the 2024 film Reagan, an off-putting, if not entirely surprising, turn for an actor who seems to have never quite felt he received his due after winning fans as the hunky Gordon Cooper in 1983’s The Right Stuff, then suffering from anorexia after losing 40 pounds for Wyatt Earp (1994). To the audience that includes Qualley’s generation, he may be best remembered as the well-meaning but easily hustled dad in 1998’s Parent Trap remake. Hollywood makes substances of all its actors regardless of gender, even if the standards and scripts are different. How, or if, Quaid sees his own career in a film about how heteronormative stardom literally mortifies the body and spirit is unclear.

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“You were amazing!” reads the card on the roses that appear in Elisabeth Sparkle’s apartment after her network’s showrunner Harvey, played with nauseating crassness by Quaid, fires her. “At 50 […] it stops,” he spatters, over a bowl of head-on prawns he smothers in aioli and destroys in gory close-up. He is himself pushing 70.

Later, the card on the roses Harvey sends Elisabeth’s new and Substance-improved version, Sue, before her big-time debut hosting the network’s New Year’s Eve special, echoes the sentiment in the future tense: “They are going to love you.”

A woman’s life is often like this, devoid of celebration in the present tense. To hear the patriarchy tell it, a girl is constantly in a state of striving to peak, to come of age, to debut, and then, almost immediately, is discarded, over the hill. “[D]id you know that a woman’s fertility starts to decrease about the age of 25?” Harvey crows into his cell phone when we first meet him, pissing in a men’s room urinal while Elisabeth hides in a bathroom stall. “How old is [your wife]? You better get busy,” he tells the man on the other end, guffawing.

“Remember you are one,” reads the packaging material that Elisabeth receives with her initial box of the Substance. Later, when she calls the customer service line to report the horrifying effect of Sue tacking extra hours onto her week, it’s unclear how much consciousness Sue and Elisabeth share. “She didn’t respect the balance,” Sue hisses, to which the voice replies: “Remember there is no ‘she’ and ‘you.’” The weekly switch for both Sue and Elisabeth comes with a level of shock and disgust at the other’s behavior, in a way that feels related to the blackout logic of self-sabotage. Why would your other self so willingly sacrifice future satisfaction for immediate gratification, or make a mess of your apartment and leave it for the future you to clean up, or binge-eat ridiculously in the middle of the night, or watch TV for hours in a blank freeze response, or sleep with men who are cruel and careless toward you?

Really, we don’t need a sci-fi doppelgänger to answer that question. How often do we all fail to respect the balance, even in only a single body? Lying on the floor of the shower in dismay, smacking the side of her head, reciting “Stop it stop it stop it,” Elisabeth might be the victim of a split-consciousness, superhuman maniac who would rather die than age gracefully, but, again, who among us …?

“Aging gracefully” often means stepping aside without complaint or comment, becoming quietly impervious to both rejection and desire. The internal disconnect that Elisabeth experiences feels fundamental, as if it predates Sue, and non-supernaturally familiar. That said, it’s unusual to see the theme treated as it is here: not as an aging woman’s desperate clinging to desirability played for laughs, or as a condemnation of the vanity and internalized misogyny that lies beneath casual self-criticism. When Elisabeth implodes in front of the bathroom mirror and ultimately stands up her date, a geek from high school who still sees her as “the most beautiful girl in the whole wide world,” Moore’s emotional performance does real justice to the pain and frustration of aging in a society that hates women.

Of course, Sue, with her flawless, collagen-abundant features, doesn’t have it much better, and as the customer service line constantly reminds us, the two women are one. The film doesn’t pit women against each other: they do that themselves. Sue’s youth and beauty come with their own taxes, from her wheedling neighbor to the constant liberties Harvey takes with Sue’s body and emotions—he calls her his “most beautiful creation.” She knows better than anyone that she’s running up against a tight deadline, having already run it out once as Elisabeth. Even without having the experience of existing in a twentysomething’s body twice, we might identify with the feeling of operating oneself as a sort of male gaze–placating marionette, with the cost that incurs.

As the film reaches its climax, Sue, actively shedding teeth and fingernails as she reaches the biological limit of the Substance’s power, runs into Harvey and his posse of investors, identical men in suits who gather around to peer at Sue. For a moment, she meets their gaze with panic, unable to speak or open her mouth for fear of revealing her internal decay. All it takes is a closed-mouth smile to set the men at ease, distract them until they’re even further distracted, like toddlers, by a parade of feathered beauties coming down the hallway to dress rehearsal. When Sue’s ear falls off in her hand, the man next to her in the elevator doesn’t even notice. There’s a joke here about what women can get away with, wrapped in tulle and wearing an unwavering smile, unconvincing as it may be.

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In Ling Ling Huang’s 2023 satirical horror novel Natural Beauty, the protagonist, transformed by cutting-edge medical interventions with deleterious side effects, has something beyond beauty to establish a sense of inner worth. Her piano playing, and the way it connects her deeply to her parents and their love for her, draws her back from the brink of total destruction. In The Substance, Elisabeth’s core value is desirability itself, performance and validation her keys to love and acceptance. What drives her to embark on a medically risky experiment and trade every other week of her life as a middle-aged woman is not just the idea of having another chance at youth but her inability to imagine an existence without anyone to witness and celebrate her success.

The Substance is a desperately lonely movie. Neither Elisabeth nor Sue has parents, family, or friends to remind them of their innate value. In fact, neither interacts with a single other woman. Everyone—the doctor that dismisses Elisabeth while she cries, the medical assistant that delivers the USB drive inviting her into the world of the Substance, the customer service voice that responds to Elisabeth’s and Sue’s escalating calls for help—is male. When other women appear on-screen, their presence is tongue-in-cheek commentary: the cancan dancers inexplicably featured on an ostensibly family-friendly New Year’s Eve special; Harvey’s assistant Isabella, whom he willfully refers to as Cindy; the waitress at the diner whose pasted-on smile in reaction to Elisabeth’s instability belies years of poker-faced service work.

The film’s carnage is limited to Elisabeth and her other versions—she self-destructs spectacularly, but her disintegration is a self-fulfilling prophecy; she doesn’t take anyone else down with her. While The Substance is a pleasure to watch, funny and smart and gross and satisfying, it’s also sad. In the end, what you wish for Elisabeth isn’t another body or more time or another chance at fame, but someone she could’ve called other than the disembodied male voice on the customer service line. Someone who could have said not just “You are one” but also “All of you are going to be okay.”