Tighten Up

Brendan Boyle considers Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance.”

By Brendan BoyleNovember 10, 2024

• Film

• Gender & Sexuality

• SF

HAVE YOU HEARD the good news? Horror cinema is thriving at the box office again. We’re so back, as they say. That sounds a little bit like a threat—filmgoers as zombies on the move. And they’re eating. Fed. Gagged, if you will. Streaming services like Screambox, in the image of industry leader Shudder, cater specifically to this audience. Vulnerable as ever to the whims of the market, the creative class follows: auteurs from Bill Hader to the Coen brothers are said to be developing horror projects, likely because the low-cost, high-upside model makes it currently the only genre in which risk-averse Hollywood studios are willing to finance original (to wit, non-IP) work.

Let’s run the numbers. So far, 2024 has produced two nine-figure horror hits in A Quiet Place: Day One and Alien: Romulus, both studio plays. Not earth-shattering, but on par with 2023, when Scream VI and the gamer phenomenon Five Nights at Freddy’s ruled the box office. More interestingly, a handful of indies this year have elbowed their way into relevance. Terrifier 3, the latest in a cult franchise from upstart distributor Cineverse debuted with $19 million, outgrossing the two previous installments combined and dethroning Joker: Folie à Deux—one scary clown for another. Neon’s Longlegs rode a slick marketing campaign to a massive $74 million domestic haul. And at the moment, toward the lower end of this pack sits a shiny newcomer. At around $14.5 million in domestic US grosses, French-helmed international co-production The Substance qualifies as a runaway success for boutique distributor MUBI, a breakout sophomore effort by Revenge director Coralie Fargeat, and also something of a Trojan horse. It’s a Cannes-minted, white-elephant art movie playing the part of a homebred monster mash.

The horror genre was still being treated as a sign of unseriousness when a Cannes audience booed Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day in 2001; two decades later, France is raising their own brood of Cronenbabies at home (viz. Fargeat and Julia Ducournau, of 2021 Palme d’Or winner Titane). So desperate is the festival to align itself with commercial trends that Greta Gerwig’s jury this year awarded not only top honors to Sean Baker’s Oscar contender Anora—a swanky, scaled-up version of previous works about low lives on the margins—but also its Best Screenplay Award to Fargeat’s underwritten script for The Substance, the same honor that had gone to Drive My Car only three years earlier. It’s a pick that deserves to go down as one of the legendary self-inflicted wounds in the festival’s history (at least until Ruben Östlund three-peats).

As a genre, horror is often said to be “critic-proof”: the paying customer only wants to know if it’s scary, a highly subjective assessment that nonetheless renders all other judgments secondary. Even pans of The Substance—not exactly in abundance, as suggested by the 90 percent score on the Tomatometer—have to acknowledge that, on the most basic level, the movie works, eliciting groans and shrieks of discomfort from willing viewers. The blessings extended by critics in print and online carry something of a shrug. Words seem wasted on it: a superficial satire of beauty culture whose interpretive layers fall somewhere short of skin-deep. On 30 Rock (2006–13), the character Grizz once took a stab at criticism with the line “You wouldn’t expect a movie called Somewhere to go absolutely nowhere.” To take the same dismissive (unfairly so, at least in the case of Sofia Coppola’s fine, reflective fourth feature) tack, you might not expect a movie called The Substance to have so little of it.

Now that chillers are not only conquering the box office but also accumulating festival hardware, perhaps audiences and critics no longer need grant these films an exceptional status. Linda Williams’s 1991 essay “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess” taxonomized horror, along with pornography and the melodramatic “weepie,” as a “body genre”: movies that fixate on the human form, and specifically the female body, while also eliciting physical responses to stimuli in the forms of screams, tears, or sexual excitement. Williams suggested that each of these genres has traditionally held a low status in public esteem, owing to “the perception that the body of the spectator is caught up in an almost involuntary mimicry of the emotion or sensation of the body on the screen along with the fact that the body displayed is female.” Discerning minds can disagree as to whether all body genres still suffer this marginalization, particularly in the time of “elevated horror”—a term that may not helpfully describe a filmmaking tendency but does by now capture the symbiotic collaboration between festival juries, distributors, and critics to “elevate” films in formerly distaff genres before audiences have the opportunity to either reject or reclaim them.

Where genre grandmaster David Cronenberg’s cinema has gotten only more cerebral, mournful, and psychologically lucid with age, the younger enfants terribles spawning in his image favor the legacy of his and his contemporaries’ clinical-corporeal practical effects—to say nothing of the New French Extremity’s shock tactics—as a shorthand for cinephilic sophistication. The arguments of The Substance’s admirers hew closely to the formulation outlined in Williams’s essay: the movie is obviously not meant to be taken seriously, mirroring the contempt for female insecurity, and the spectacle of the female body, that provides the single-minded plot its animating force. The cheap thrills on offer, the enjoyment of the impressive makeup and viscera effects, are the sum total of its artistry. To praise the movie, one has to simultaneously credit Fargeat’s formal accomplishments while letting her off the hook for failures of construction.

Summarizing The Substance raises the question, Is it possible for a premise to be both sleekly intuitive and overdeveloped? An early teaser adapted the form of a commercial advertisement viewed by Demi Moore’s character, has-been actress and recently canned TV fitness personality Elisabeth Sparkle. “Have you ever dreamt of a better version of yourself? Younger, more beautiful, more perfect?” asks the unseen pitchman. “One single injection unlocks your DNA, starting a new cellular division that will release another version of yourself. This is … the Substance.” Catchy name, and sure, there are probably things they aren’t telling us—it’s a trailer, after all, so you’d hope most of the nasty business would be kept a surprise. What both Elisabeth and the audience discover is that there’s a lot more to this rejuvenating process than just one injection: the new self actually splits out of her back, in the form of Margaret Qualley’s Sue, and has to keep herself alive by withdrawing and injecting herself with the original body’s spinal fluid. Plus, the two selves have to switch off every seven days lest the fluid run out, corroding the withdrawal site and speeding up Elisabeth’s aging. So it’s not all that intuitive. What the story is, instead, is a metaphor, and an exhaustingly mixed one at that, for addiction issues, dysmorphia, and the external misogyny of celebrity and beauty culture turned punishingly inward.

Probably the most shocking thing about watching The Substance in an American multiplex is just how French it is: the inherited attitude of cultural chauvinism and ambient contempt in a movie that cannot be bothered to nail a single detail about the Hollywood milieu it satirizes. Fargeat knows about the Walk of Fame, and that the town contains palm trees and pederasts, but nothing else tracks very much. There seem to be about six people living in all of Los Angeles, where Elisabeth/Sue can travel on foot from the TV studio to her luxurious apartment somewhere in the hills, an aerobics-themed fitness show catapults Sue to national stardom, and her big break is a New Year’s variety telecast that resembles the death dreams from All That Jazz. Turnabout is fair play; Hollywood financing depends on shooting in foreign tax havens that make cultural specificity a bad joke. But the unmoored quality of the world-building here keeps the film from operating on any level except that of the fable, already shaky ground given Fargeat’s tendency to mix metaphors and double down on thin, simplistic ideas.

The film’s favored trick is the extreme close-up, an obnoxious crutch that usually betrays its contempt for the viewer, as in sudden inserts to emphasize expository information the preceding shots had already clarified. It also signifies a cruel sense of humor, a sensibility that ought to be an asset for a true schlock artist but here indicates the limits of Fargeat’s particular perspective. Early on, the film introduces Dennis Quaid’s network executive Harvey (cue Assassins’ Antonio Banderas, at his laptop) with a wide-angle lens stationed at eye level above a urinal; the effect not only magnifies and distorts his features into a monstrous likeness to accentuate the sexist invective he’s spraying into his mobile but also specifically enlarges his nose, instantly conjuring antisemitic caricatures of Hollywood power brokers. Quaid’s commitment is admirable if only in the abstract. It’s something of a comeback year for him, playing patriarchal supervillains both here and as the titular Reagan. (Only one of these performances is acted in scare-quotes.) If one wants to credit The Substance for its liberated indulgence of lowbrow shock tactics, they must also acknowledge that not all cheap laughs are created equal, and there is something quite unflattering about the meanness beneath Fargeat’s smirk.

The escalating conflict between Elisabeth and Sue provides much of the opportunity for cruel, cathartic feuding, yet it’s a relationship that both fails to map onto reality and never reaches a kind of narrative or psychological clarity in Fargeat’s telling. The revulsion each counterpart feels for the other ought to map onto common feelings of body dysmorphia and weaponized self-hatred, but despite the constant reminders from the Substance’s in-universe marketing that “YOU ARE ONE,” the dynamic remains muddled. They don’t seem to retain memories of the other’s actions (another clumsy analogy for substance abuse, perhaps), nor do they share recognizable mannerisms. Elisabeth’s eventual rapid degeneration into a weathered crone, when Sue strays from the routine in order to stay in her young body for months on end, suggests a fairy-tale lens with Elisabeth as witch or evil stepmother conspiring to imprison the not-so-innocent Sue—here a Rapunzel or Cinderella figure, particularly in the sequined dress chosen for the climactic New Year’s Eve broadcast that might be an enchanted ball.

This interpretation would work just fine if the film had any additional psychology to deepen such a familiar narrative line. But for all that the marketing (and the ramping-up awards campaign) has relied on Qualley and in particular Demi Moore, a leading lady of yesteryear staging her deliciously metatextual comeback, neither Sue nor Elisabeth offers these actresses much to work with in terms of drama or characterization. They rarely share screen space with other performers, or even dialogue—the most emoting they do happens over the phone, with the Substance’s sinister, unseen customer “support,” or beneath layers of gonzo makeup. (Although many reviewers seem not to have noticed, Sue’s curvaceous body is not all Qualley but another feat of F/X wrought through a combination of doubling, compositing, airbrushing, and prosthetics.) Trying to fit these translucent characters into a legible reading is the most tedious part of the futile discourse about The Substance. Every viewer has their own explanation for what the two women mean to each other, and because of the underdeveloped writing, everyone has the same right to their equally unsatisfying interpretation. The film splits the difference between an open text—a structure both strong and flexible enough to support a multiplicity of readings—and a container that is actually just empty.

The only real play for a kind of imaginative empathy, one that might allow the viewer an emotional entry point into the movie rather than blowing the same escape hatches again and again, comes at the midway point, when Elisabeth readies herself for a night out with an old schoolmate. She gets dressed and applies makeup in the mirror, and each time she tries to leave the apartment, her nerve fails her—a familiar insecurity gnawing at her, heightened by the glow of the billboard outside her window, which now bears the blown-up image of Sue. It’s a painful scene, unlike any other in the movie, and all the phonier for it. In the emptied-out, half-rendered dreamworld of Fargeat’s film, none of the structures of power and misogyny that lead women (and men, as the only other user of the Substance is shown to be male) to hate their own bodies are depicted. Elisabeth’s vanity and its consequences—the poor judgment and lack of control that lead her to abuse the Substance—arise entirely from within. The destruction is all self-imposed.

Among splatter merchants and skillful genre parodists like Frank Henenlotter, whose Frankenhooker (1990) provides more than a little inspiration in Fargeat’s creative codex, The Substance ultimately has its eye on the the go-for-broke skin-freak finale of Brian Yuzna’s Society (1989). More than just the tempo of the ending has been lifted from Yuzna’s film, whose acting and staging throughout the first two acts stay pitched at the level of contemporary soft-core pornography before laying bare its exaggerated, run-on punch line. After all that broad and cartoony satire of the moneyed 90210 set, as Jim Gabriel wrote, “the last half-hour of this film means no good, philosophically—underneath all the delivering of genre goods is a genuinely pissed-off movie.”

That Fargeat means no good can be taken as read; it’s one of her defining qualities. (For a truly evil film that matches its ill will to formal virtuosity, give me Catherine Breillat’s late masterpiece Last Summer [2023] any day.) Yet something rankles about a movie this vapid insisting upon its own daring. The feeling of revelation, of an entire underworld of power and predation being exposed in Society’s climax, gets transposed in The Substance for the same clichés of leering condescension, personified through Quaid’s performance, that opened the movie. These predigested faux-feminist memes (“Pretty girls should always smile”—a line that the editing repeats in case the viewer could have missed its import) get processed through the stations of escalating decay and emerge on the other end with no additional insight. It’s a Human Centipede eating its own tail.

Body horror tends to put one off their appetite anyway. Elided somewhere in the leap from Trouble Every Day to the gooey, gory Cannes winners of the 2020s has been Claire Denis’s poetic equation of ravenous hunger, pain, and erotic pleasure, part of that film’s destabilizing, Tindersticks-scored atmosphere that leaves it decades later with the resonances of a classic. To the charges at the time that its extended scenes of erotic, carnivorous bloodletting reflected a high-art talent surrendering to low culture, one can only think now of the (possibly apocryphal) retort Denis offered at a Q and A for High Life (2018), in response to a query about “strong female leads”: “What the fuck? I’m not a social worker.”

In the spirit of that remark, one can at once appreciate the cruelty of a movie like The Substance while extending some of the same mercilessness to its flaws—and to our own. Where Williams noted that the body genres once endured a certain level of institutional disrespect, for horror, the pendulum has swung now to the opposite extreme. This sort of hateful movie could be an object of admiration if for a second it had to contend with underdog status. Without the chance to be disreputable, it arrives in cinemas instead as another example of bloated genre product flooding—like a torrent of artificial guts—into a saturated market in which desperate viewers and critics seek any evidence that popular cinema has life in it still. A closer look suggests that this vein is all but tapped, and that our weak, flabby horror cinema is producing weak, flabby spectators. Let’s tighten it up. That new flesh isn’t going to sculpt itself.