By Linda and Al Lerner
Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley take fearless acting to the extreme in this grotesque sci-fi satire on youth and aging. Both bare themselves physically and emotionally, in scenes grossly over-the-top. Writer/Director Coralie Fargeat, (who won Best Screenplay at this year’s Cannes Festival),pulls out all the stops with a curious premise, drawing you in with glamorous and glitzy settings, high-end, revealing fashions, makeup, and long beautiful locks until times’ up and they morph into the ugly side of The Substance.
There are so many scenes that are hard to watch. The first disgusting instance has long-time popular star of a daytime dance workout TV show, a la Jane Fonda, Elisabeth (Moore who looks amazing), having lunch with her media boss, Harvey (Dennis Quaid). He talks incessantly, slurping while devouring shrimp, dripping sauce through his smiling mouth while looking around the room for his celebrity cronies.
Quaid is a cartoon caricature of a misogynistic boss who only looks at the bottom line. He sees Elisabeth as past her prime and tells her that people are always asking for something new, and after 50, it’s over. Knowing she’s about to be fired, she mysteriously finds a contact for a treatment that may be able to save her youthful appearance and her job. But not without scary complications and potentially frightening results.
The camera follows Elisabeth through a sketchy part of town traversing dangerous streets as a voice on the phone is telling her how to procure what she’s looking for. The Substance is a black market, neon green potion, with specific instructions for an injection that can unlock her DNA for another temporary version of herself. Fargeat shows a sickeningly gory birthing resulting in the emergence of a more youthful, sexy version of Elisabeth, called Sue (Qualley). They are one, but are they? Of course, Harvey takes to Sue big time as the star of his new show. Looks like Quaid relished this part, and you see him crazed as you’ve never seen him before.
Fargeat uses isolated loud, scary sounds to create tension and fear while showing the painful transformations of Elisabeth to Sue and back again. The youthful version and Elisabeth have explicit orders to switch every 7 days.The director gives cinematographer Benjamin Kracun (Promising Young Woman, Beast) a highly saturated blue hued high tech apartment with a floor to ceiling portrait of Elisabeth, juxtaposed with a stark white tile bathroom in her apartment as the lab for her weekly bloody transformation. Kracun shoots a collage of closeups of naked parts of their bodies, eyes, pupils pulsating and with prosthetics on limbs in distressing positions showing aging, ripples, and veins. Both Moore and Qualley are called on to twist their naked bodies in awkward positions. You see an injected egg splitting, duplicating into 2 yolks, as their DNA struggles transforming from one to the other taking this dysfunctional family to a whole new level!
There are two simple bromides Fargeat used to create this fable about beauty that can’t hide the ugliness within. “Be careful what you wish for” and “Beauty is only skin deep.” Both Moore and Qualley are fearless, and Moore deserves notice for enduring the most gruesome make-up and prosthetic transformation. And the full-on climax provides a high, sure to please horror fans and, in an intriguing way, horrify others.
MUBI 2 Hours 20 Minutes R
