Director Coralie Fargeat exploded onto the scene in 2017 with Revenge, a shockingly brutal version of the rape-revenge film, marking her as a talent to watch. The French filmmaker returns to FrightFest with this Hollywood-set body horror, starring Demi Moore as ageing celebrity Elisabeth Sparkle. Learning on her birthday that she is to be fired from her hit show, a desolate Elisabeth resorts to a black market drug known as ‘The Substance’ – a cell-replicating serum which creates a younger, better version of herself, who she names Sue (Margaret Qualley). That it looks like Herbert West’s Re-Animator formula should be warning enough that this is a bad idea.
Regardless, Elisabeth persists, and this miracle drug comes with a set of Gremlins-like rules which must be adhered to – the most important of which being that she and Sue must switch back every seven days, with no exceptions. And, as Sue’s fame grows, so does her reluctance to go back to being plain-old Elisabeth. The two sides of her personality soon find themselves at odds, with Sue taking more and more each time. And what has been lost cannot be recovered…
As Revenge shattered audiences’ perception of what a rape-revenge film could or should look like, so The Substance is a body horror revolution, fusing the DNA of Brian Yuzna’s Society with a hagsploitation version of The Nutty Professor; throwing Barbie into a blender with David Cronenberg’s The Fly. From the grotesque, gruelling gore to Dennis Quaid gluttonously demolishing a bowl of seafood, there’s something to upset every tummy in town.
Moore and Qualley are magnetic as the warring halves of one woman’s personality, with the former bravely baring all as the sad, angry Elisabeth. For all the bloodshed, The Substance’s most affecting scene is one in which the older woman prepares for a date, tormented by visions of her younger, ‘better’ self. The allegory for feminine self-loathing and internalised misogyny is not subtle, but nor does it need to be – The Substance is a scream of fury, and the heated battle between Elisabeth and Sue shows how vicious self-hatred can be.
Eventually, that anger turns outward, and into cries of hurt and anguish. All bets are off as the curtain is raised on its final act, a transcendent work of boobs-to-the-wall Grand Guignol which cements The Substance as one of the most incendiary body horror films of all time.
THE SUBSTANCE premiered at Pigeon Shrine FrightFest on August 26th, 2024.
