The Substance and hate-eating chicken

On Demi Moore’s new horror movie and the New York film festival.

I trust by now a portion of you have watched The Substance? Critiques of Coralie Fargeat’s new movie have been rippling since its divisive Cannes premiere earlier this year, where it inspired many a walk out. The film’s lack of subtlety for some is an issue and while others a boon. For me it was mostly the latter. The key to your enjoyment is to approach it as a tour-de-force of midnight viewing and not dwell too heavily on the single-mindedness of its conceit. The substance is after all an easy Ozempic stand in, which I asked Fargeat about when I interviewed her for Vogue. She also talked about bright yellow pea coat Demi wears. More on the film below, with references to binge-eating.

• In NICKEL BOYS, RaMell Ross *does* something with Colson Whitehead’s novel, setting an inconceivably high bar for all page-to-screen adaptions to come and cementing his auteur status. Disruptively lyrical.

• Mike Leigh is so back with HARD TRUTHS. Adult drama with flawed people, tricky empathy, no preaching. All the best parts of a play, outfitted with devastation and outrage. I wrung my hands white with tension. The best film of the year so far.

• PAVEMENTS is an audacious hybridization tipping back and forth between sly and sincere. Alex Ross Perry gives the World’s Greatest and Most Important Band genre-defying treatment in this three-headed film. You’ll understand when you see it. Stephen, Steve, Scott, and Mark & Bob 4ever.

• I knew I would love ON BECOMING A GUINEA FOWL the second I heard the Lijadu Sisters and saw the protagonist costumed as a Supa Dupa Fly Missy Elliott. The film from Welsh-Zambian director Rungano Nyoni brings subtle comedy to traumatic material and transcends cultural boundaries. I felt like I just visited my family in Korea.

• My strongest films of the festival were the shortest: 

  • Leo Carax’s 45 minute IT’S NOT ME was a playfully philosophical palate cleanser indebted to Godard.

  • Granting powers of speech to African works of art, Mati Diop’s 67 minute documentary DAHOMEY about the repatriation Beninese artifacts is a deceptively tidy achievement that decolonizes art in more ways than one.

• Carlo De Los Santos Arias similarly gives voice to silent in PEPE. In this case a family of hippos once owned by Pablo Escobar. Mixing aspect ratios, textures, and storytelling modes, this anti nature-doc felt a bit unwieldy in its attempt to highlight and make cohesive the lasting impacts of colonialism. It also reminded me of last year’s EUREKA, now playing, which I found more harmonious.

• Hypnotizingly meta, THE BALLAD of SUZANNE CESAIRE is a formally and politically radical inquiry into the life of the Surrealist writer. Poetically fragmented, it grapples with the elusiveness of portraiture by withholding traditional information dumps and flooding us instead with bits of voice over, staged reenactments, and tons of images of the natural world rendered in lushly pigmented 16mm.

• Yashaddai Owens also attacks the biopic from an oblique angle. JIMMY is a freewheeling impression of James Baldwin that captures his vulnerable essence as a youth.

• I must recant any and all negative things I’ve said about dogs having watched THE FRIEND, in which Naomi Watts must contend with her dead friend’s Great Dane. The New Yorker had a lengthy profile of the animal trainer and preparing the canine for the role.

• One of the most pleasurable things you can watch at the festival is the restoration of Frederick Wiseman’s MODEL, which gives the new york fashion world the observational fly-on-the-wall treatment.

• Ask and you shall receive. I’ve started working on a fall/winter movie guide with notable releases! Still a WIP.

THE SUBSTANCE

dir. Coralie Fargeat

Something’s off about the Los Angeles of The Substance. The Overlook Hotel inspired carpeting and dramatically empty apartment hints at something askance in the world of this movie, which isn’t just an unwaveringly deranged account of the perils of today’s unattainable beauty standards but a cautionary moral tale about self-mythologizing and the lethality of the gaze.  

After a car accident, fitness guru-celebrity- actress Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) becomes privy to a black market drug promising a better, sleeker version of herself. Though modern technology isn’t central to the film, she purchases the UV green substance (packaged boldly and minimally) with the kind of discrete ease and curiosity we reserve for impulsive latenight scrolling purchases. Soon after injecting the fluid she spawns Sue (Margaret Qualley), the younger shinier manifestation who quickly soars to stardom and takes over Elizabeth’s original daytime gig. Elizabeth is one spirit-two bodies and the catch is she must switch between her physical forms every seven days or face dire side effects, which, of course, she does. The Substance goes to comically grotesque lengths to accommodate its critique of our looks-obsessed society with the final 30 minutes spiraling mercilessly into a trashy spectacle of absurdist gore. There is an argument that the bludgeoning force of the film, its body horror and surfeit of latex, is a necessary and crucial to repudiate the dehumanizing influence of the male gaze. See it’s representation by the camera leering inconspicuously leering at Sur, aggressively panning down the length of Sue’s body. (Qualley was outfitted in curve-accentuating prosthetics for the film.)

Even if you have a low-tolerance for scares everything that happens is so over the top farcical you can brush it aside, or close your eyes. What’s perhaps more striking than The Substance’s carnage is the way Elizabeth/Sue engage in self-scrutiny. The power of one’s reflection is as potent a drug. Awaiting her turn as Sue, Elizabeth languishes in boredom, counting down the seconds until she can once again bask in the adoring glow of others. But the act of looking cuts both ways. One of the film’s most affecting scenes shows Demi Moore rushing back to the bathroom before a date to adjust her makeup, only to smear it off in anguish once she gets a look at herself. Few films delve into such ugly depths of loathing with the same hardened intensity.

Our struggle with body-image is profoundly internal, which the film illustrates by confining us to Elizabeth’s perspective. There is little dialogue or interaction with others. She has no friends or family—only her producer Harvey (Dennis Quaid), filmed with crass fishbowl lens. During a business lunch he attacks his shrimp with disgusting vigor, juice and mayo dribbling down his face and hands. Food in The Substance reflects Elizabeth’s viewpoint; it’s horrifyingly repugnant, something that runs in total opposition to the aspirational self.

When Sue overstays her welcome (to the bleak detriment of Elizabeth’s original 50-year-old body), Elizabeth furiously retaliates by binge eating, wielding food as a weapon against what she perceives as her enemy. The next morning’s kitchen, defiled by takeout containers, chicken carcasses, and four-burner cooking, lends a distance to her senses. As anyone familiar with disordered eating knows, in the end you’re only hurting yourself.

On Halloween, The Substance streams exclusively on MUBI. Sign up with my link to get 30 days free.

Does this gross you out? because it should.

Related viewing

• Revenge (Fargeat, 2017)

• Requiem for a Dream (Aaronofsky, 2000)

• Possession (Andrzej Żuławski, 1981)

• Titane (Julia Ducornau, 2021)

• The Fly (Cronenberg, 1986)

• From Beyond (Stuart Gordon ,1986) 

• Society (Brian Yuzna, 1989)