Coralie Fargeat’s Cannes-winning nightmare is a carnivorous, candy-coloured satire that sinks its tooth into Hollywood’s ageism in an outrageous meditation on self-perception and vainness. The French director, notorious for the brutal Revenge (2017), turns her lens again on an business that devours girls, digesting their youth and spitting them out like final season’s pattern. What begins because the acquainted story of an ageing star, dumped and forgotten, spirals right into a hallucinatory tug-of-war between flesh and spirit — a form of crack-fueled Dorian Grey on a bender throughout Hollywood.

The movie introduces us to Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), a former health queen whose heyday was again within the Spandex-drenched aerobics increase. As soon as the darling of televised exercises, Elisabeth now finds herself unceremoniously discarded by her vulgar, shrimp-slurping boss, Harvey (performed with nauseating camp by Dennis Quaid) for no larger crime than turning fifty. Quaid chomps on shrimp with a repulsive vigour, his face so shut which you could nearly odor the seafood — an ideal encapsulation of Elisabeth’s seething disgust with the lads who scrutinize and exploit her.

Devastated and determined, Elisabeth’s answer comes within the type of a mysterious Brat summer-coded inexperienced goo, a Frankensteinian tonic promising a rebirth of kinds. Known as merely The Substance, the titular potion guarantees to reverse the merciless markers of age, restoring Elisabeth to a extra vibrant, youthful self. However right here’s the kicker: after injecting it, her physique doesn’t simply revert, somewhat, endures a spine-splitting metamorphosis, peeling away her pores and skin to disclose her youthful, lither, and ravenously self-confident doppelgänger — Margaret Qualley’s Sue. The twisted new tag crew takes turns every week, swapping management of their shared life, navigating their existence with a algorithm that, if damaged, threat ruining them each. 

Demi Moore in a nonetheless from ‘The Substance’
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MUBI

Mirrors and reflections are in all places. Tortured by her ageing visage, Elisabeth returns obsessively to the trying glass, her personal Medusa. Each wrinkle, each sag is a reminder of her fall from grace, of Hollywood’s cruel gaze. And although Sue is her bodily “higher half,” Elisabeth’s jealousy and horror construct in equal measure as Sue revels within the newfound consideration her youthful kind garners. Via Sue, Elisabeth can reclaim her previous present, however the lustrous new pores and skin doesn’t make her life any smoother. If something, it amplifies the dread. The movie’s brilliance lies in the way it mines the duality between Elisabeth’s need and disgust and Sue’s ambition and entitlement.

With scant dialogue, the movie’s visible language is sort of extraordinary. Cinematographer Benjamin Kracun makes certain no inch of flesh goes unexamined, every digital camera shot lingers hungrily on each curve, wrinkle, and imperfection. Fargeat’s intelligent alternative of Kubrickian set design — a lurid, plastic-y Los Angeles world straight out of an ‘80s train video — solely amplifies the claustrophobia. 

However the movie after all revels in its grotesquery with a gusto hardly ever seen exterior Cronenbergian horror. Fargeat’s imaginative and prescient is complicit within the carnage, utilizing fish-eye lenses and excessive close-ups to magnify every disgusting element. Each squelch, each drip and tear is magnified to lurid, inescapable extremes, serving up a feast for body-horror followers with a stinging indictment of the lengths to which we go to combat age.

The lads of The Substance are predictably vile. They’re caricatures of chauvinism, united of their dismissal of Elisabeth’s personhood the second she loses her youthful lustre. But, she doesn’t draw back from implicating Elisabeth herself. As Sue steals Elisabeth’s life, Elisabeth realizes that she’s not simply preventing for relevance; she’s preventing a psychological conflict towards herself, towards the expectations and insecurities which have invaded her thoughts. Caught in a cycle of envy, she grows jealous of her personal creation, feeling changed by the youthful physique she sought so desperately to reclaim. 

Margaret Qualley and Dennis Quaid in a nonetheless from ‘The Substance’
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MUBI

There’s a rawness to how Fargeat tackles these themes. She invokes the specter of getting old not with pathos, however with rage — a rage that feels, at instances, like a pointed critique of Hollywood’s “hagsploitation” custom, the place older girls’s our bodies are exploited for horror and repulsion. However right here, the horror is interiorized. Elisabeth is terrified not of what others see, however of what she herself has come to consider — that with out youth, her value is misplaced. Moore’s efficiency is so fearless and unfiltered that we are able to really feel Elisabeth’s desperation seep from the display, a plea for validation that appears, paradoxically, extra poignant because it fails.

Ultimately, The Substance is a pitch-black parable, a mirrored image on the price of self-worship and the delusion of management. Fargeat’s comedy of horrors reveals us the lengths one would possibly go to recapture the sensation of being seen — solely to understand that what actually haunts us is our personal picture. That is physique horror for the Instagram technology, a delirious plunge into the psyche’s darkest corners, and a Faustian reminder that our most scary critic is commonly the one staring again from the mirror.

The Substance is at present streaming on MUBI