Review: 'The Substance' Is Disgusting, Twisted, Divisive

Photo: MUBI

Everyone’s talking about The Substance today at Cannes. It premiered last night to a shocked and delighted audience and has already engendered a fascinating debate about its intentions. French writer-director Coralie Fargeat’s second film after the 2017 thriller Revenge, the explicit body-horror fable follows Demi Moore as a Jane Fonda–esque starlet named Elisabeth Sparkle, who’s being unceremoniously fired from her decadeslong position as the host of a successful daytime exercise show. The head of the network, played with grotesquerie by Dennis Quaid, shoves wet, oily shrimp into his mouth, the camera zooming in on his slimy teeth, as he explains to Elisabeth that “things just stop after 50” for women. Rather than fade into the obscurity to which she has been doomed, Elisabeth takes a gamble on a black-market drug called the Substance.

Elisabeth picks up the acid-green liquid and its accoutrements from a sketchy warehouse, then goes home to her 1980s-style penthouse, where she stands nude in front of her mirror, examining her body in great detail. She runs her hands over her breasts, her butt, taking critical stock of what she sees. Then she injects the Substance directly into her veins. Moments later, she’s writhing on the bathroom floor, choking for air, her body stiff with horrible pain. Her back splits open like a raw coconut, her flesh flapping, oozing blood from her new orifice. A naked, slick Margaret Qualley crawls out. Leaving Moore’s unconscious body on the cold floor, Qualley walks over to the mirror. She too runs her hands slowly across her butt, her newly perky breasts, down her taut arms and legs. She’s mesmerized by her own beauty.

The scene is perfectly disgusting, twisted, darkly funny, and instantly memorable. (And compared to what happens afterward, it’s practically benign.) The new, younger, more optimized Elisabeth, who renames herself Sue, plans to take back everything that’s been stolen from her. She rebooks her old job and then some, fucks whoever she wants, leaves passersby speechless over her beauty and vitality. The only catch, as the Substance’s mysterious, unseen purveyor explains over the phone, is that Elisabeth and Sue are not two separate women but one, inextricable from each other. And they must switch places every seven days — one lying prone and unconscious on the bathroom floor, one out in the world — or they’ll face irreversible consequences.

Those consequences make themselves apparent quickly, as Elisabeth and Sue begin to war with each other. Sue can’t bear to give up her new life of Vogue photo shoots and late-night appearances, so she starts extending her weeklong stints into months, sustaining herself by stabbing a needle daily into Elisabeth’s lower back and extracting spinal fluid. The back wound crusts over, goes purple, gets infected, oozes. When Elisabeth finally does get her turn to wake up, she instantly learns the cost of Sue’s Substance extensions; her body is rapidly degrading, falling apart, her skin age-spotted and rotting, her bones cracking and curling. She yanks and pulls at her face in the mirror, screaming. She wants to take it all back, to get rid of Sue, but she can’t — the damage is permanent, and Sue is the “only part of her that’s lovable.”

Things only get more horrific from there, both narratively and visually. This is one of the most graphic body-horror films I’ve ever seen, managing not only to turn the human body into a revolting canvas of degradation and despair (characters pull out their teeth, rip off their nails, crack their own bones back into place) but rendering all food repulsive. Fargeat shoots Elisabeth — who begins to use food as a form of revenge against Sue — digging into a trussed chicken like she’s violating a human carcass and whisking eggs like they’re liquified guts, spraying the thick yellow liquid across the kitchen and her own decaying body. Moore and Qualley turn in some of the best performances of their respective careers with Moore especially impressive as she descends into enraged madness and deformity. That audiences will likely call her performance braveor laud her “lack of vanity” is perfect proof of the film’s salient points. And her performance is brave, but more for its rawness, its unembarrassed self-referentiality, and its balls-to-the-wall insanity — at one point, Moore’s face, buried in prosthetics and makeup, erupts from her own back in a silent, open-mouthed scream.

On the Croisette, the reviews of The Substance so far have been mixed with critics disagreeing over whether the movie is an explicitly feminist work or is as objectifying as the industry it critiques as well as about whether it places too much of the blame on aging women for attempting to stave off, via any means necessary, their own erasure. Little White Lies’ Hannah Strong, who wrote on X that the movie was the “worst thing I’ve seen at Cannes so far,” elaborated in her review that she was frustrated by the fact that “Fargeat shoots Qualley in the same manner she shot Matilda Lutz in Revenge, with slow panning close-ups over her body, often naked or scantily clad … If Fargeat’s intention is to make the audience complicit, she replicates an existing history of horror’s exploitation of women’s bodies rather than turning it on its head.”

Alternatively, the Washington Post’s Jada Yuan wrote on X, “Demi Moore’s ‘comeback’ movie THE SUBSTANCE is a completely audacious, body horror fuck you to the way Hollywood treats aging women,” and freelance critic Manuela Lazić wrote that the film was the “best thing I’ve seen at #Cannes2024 so far — Hollywood’s ban on aging & its consequences pushed to their logical, extreme conclusions, with plenty of horrifying & hilarious gore, some devastating moments, & a De Palma–esque palette.” IndieWire’sDavid Ehrlich called The Substance “the best film in Competition so far.”

Time’s Stephanie Zacharek suggested that the divide might be along age and gender lines: “Many of the people raving about THE SUBSTANCE are male and under-50 (which is fine!). But I’d like to hear more from women in the closer-to-Demi age group, rather than the Qualley age group.” Freelancer Brandon Streussnig tweeted, “It’s so funny to read a vehemently angry pan of The Substance that ends with ‘only men will like this’ and the next tweet is a woman calling it the best thing she’s seen at Cannes.”

At the press conference for the film, which took place after the movie’s Cannes premiere, a reporter asked Fargeat if the film was “another [exposing] of females as objects by society.” Fargeat, who said she was inspired by The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Shining and The Fly, replied, “I hope the movie is not [exposing] of the female body. My point was to stress our body: As women, we’re defined as how we’re viewed in society; the violence we direct to ourselves is the violence around us. So that was the metaphorical way to show this. I think this violence is very extreme.”

Another reporter then asked Moore if the film’s full-frontal nude scenes gave her pause. “Going into it, it was really spelled out, the level of vulnerability and rawness that was really required to tell the story,” said Moore, who noted that she had never had a film at Cannes before. “It was a very vulnerable experience, and it required going into it with a lot of sensitivity and a conversation about what we were trying to accomplish, how we were trying to approach it. And finding that common ground of mutual trust.” She added of Qualley, who had to leave the festival early to shoot another movie, “I’m sorry that Margaret isn’t able to be with us today, but I had someone who was a great partner who I felt really safe with. We obviously were quite close in certain moments. Naked. It allowed us a lot of levity in those moments — how absurd those situations were, laying on the tile floor.”

When asked by yet another journalist “when” she had felt “canceled” by her age, Moore replied, “I don’t know if I share that perspective of feeling ‘canceled.’ My particular perception is that, regardless of what is going on outside of you, the real issue is how you are relating to the issue. So I guess my perspective is I don’t hold myself or the situation as a victim. What I loved in what Coralie wrote, when I first read the script, is this was about the male perspective of the idealized woman. What’s so interesting in the film is here’s this newer, younger, better version who gets an opportunity, and she still repeats the same pattern. She’s still seeking external validation. And in the end, she comes face-to-face with just fighting herself. Because that’s where we have to really look: within, not without.”

She elaborated on the experience a few questions later. “There was something freeing about this exploration,” she said. “It was a very raw experience that required vulnerability and willingness to expose myself emotionally and physically. It definitely pushed me out of my comfort zone. I feel like I came out on the other side in greater acceptance of myself as I am.”