The Substance

 Demi Moore plays Elisabeth Sparkle, a formerly famous movie star, who is now working as the host and exercise leader on a calisthenics show called Sparkle Your Life.  She has just turned fifty and, when she uses the men's restroom (the women's is occupied), she hears the producer of the show, a vicious and grotesque TV executive, planning to replace her with a younger woman.  Brooding about this injustice, she's involved in a bad motor vehicle crash -- windows exploding and her vehicle rolling side over side -- from which she mysteriously walks away unscathed.  At the ER, a doctor checks her out and, then, an odd-looking young paramedic inspects her back, says that it is perfect, and slips a message wrapped in paper into her pocket.  The uncanny-looking paraprofessional has a sarcoma on the back of his hand.  

Sparkle lives alone is a picturesquely modernist and empty house cantilevered out over a canyon in the mountains.  (The house has eerie works of art and strange corridors filmed with lenses that make them seem to stretch out to infinity.)  The message she finds in her pocket encourages her to perfect herself by using a treatment involving something called "The Substance" -- a sort of Bo-Tox from Hell that she picks up in an alcove behind a graffiti-smeared metal door in a noisome alley.  "The Substance" works for seven days, restoring its user to her youthful perfected self -- it's a sort of "fountain of youth" drug that involves various injections (shown in gruesome close-ups), tube-feeding, and blood transfusions.  The stuff comes with strict instructions -- it's a Jekyll and Hyde formula:  you can only be young and beautiful for seven days without having to return to the decrepit shell of your aged body.  Of course, this being a horror movie, there are ghastly consequences for not playing according to the rules.

Horror films invariably evoke precursors.  In the case of the lavishly produced The Substance, the movie alludes to David Cronenberg's The Fly (as in that movie, at one point the protagonist's ear falls off) as well as Brian de Palma's Carrie with respect to the firehose of gore unleashed in the movie's last minutes.  The picture, as I have noted, also channels Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in that the fifty-year old Elisabeth Sparkle finds herself competing with her amoral younger avatar, a beautiful and profoundly selfish starlet called Sue.  Of course, the two women are one person whose appearance changes between the two personae.  There is also an aspect of The Picture of Dorian Gray in the film; as Sue prospers and becomes famous and universally desired, poor Elisabeth, reduced to a cadaverous shell lying on the bathroom floor, begins to spectacularly decompose,,literally falling apart.  The film's premise is ingenious but, of course, since this is a genre movie, the outcome is predictable, although things become so exuberantly horrific that the climax must be interpreted as a kind of black-comedy spectacle that is far funnier than it is frightening.  

Pictures involving this sort of Faustian bargain inevitably end in tears (or far worse).  Sue resents having to revert to Elisabeth every seven days and begins stealing Elisabeth's time, keeping herself young and beautiful, having sex with handsome men, and becoming famous on TV while her poor alter ego literally goes to pieces. This is a very glossy movie, with fashion magazine vibes -- it features immense, disturbing close-ups, vast amounts of nudity, and bizarre, surreal sets that seemed to have crawled into the present from German expressionist cinema.  The picture is full of outre effects:  an egg yolk injected with the substance immediately begins to clone itself into bright yellow embryonic cells.  Pustulant, necrotic wounds are injected with long needles in micro-close-ups.  At one point, while Sue is twerking, her buttock pops open and the gory abscess gives birth to a chicken drumstick that Elisabeth ingested before turning back into the glamorous sex-pot starlet.  The movie is entertaining enough in its gruesome way, but much too long -- there's just too many horrors particularly in the hyper-violent last quarter of the movie.  Furthermore, the picture cheats -- it establishes certain rules that are slavishly demonstrated and followed for the first two-thirds of the picture.  But, when the really spectacular grand guignol begins, the rules fall by the wayside and everything yields to the picture's excessively gruesome finalethat proceeds according to a certain pictorial logic, but violates the plot points earlier (and rather tediously) established.    

Someone once said that women's magazines show massive cognitive dissonance -- the periodicals feature mortifying diets and advice as to painful exercise regimens next to recipes for lavish and calory-rich desserts.  The Substance has this aspect; it features beauty advice of the nastiest sort:  reduce yourself to a living corpse while cooking tripe-soup and other incredibly rich recipes -- the film has its cake and eats it too, suggesting that the path to perfect beauty embodies deadly anorexia somehow yoked to insane amounts of consumption of ultra-rich (disgustingly rich) foods.  There are huge closeups of lips and mouths masticating gobbets of food, shrimp and pastry, shot with the comic delectation of a Monty Python picture.  At the climax, Sue and Elisabeth get somehow fused together in a single monstrous entity covered in tumors with a stray eye peeping out here and there and Sue's perfect face embedded in a web of scar tissue on the back of the hunchbacked, suppurating figure -- it's like the appearance of the Brindlefly in Cronenberg's movie The Fly, a hideous combination of both women, full of ugly sac-like fistulas, one of which gives birth by expelling a perfectly globular breast dangling on a sinew of gory tissue.  The critter shoots blood as if from a fire hose on the audience.  None of this makes any sense at all -- the last twenty minutes is completely bonkers, off-the-rails and implausible.  But the movie has the courage of its convictions -- when the Sueelismonstre, as it is called, takes the stage at a New Year's Eve celebration, the fawning audience and technical crew somehow don't notice that it's a hideous creature that has arrived on stage and not the beautiful Sue (the monster is hiding behind a cut-out of Sue's face but, of course, the creature is elephantine, hunch-backed with oozing naked legs like tree-trunks).  You ask yourself how can they not know that this is a monster clambering up onto the stage with the bare-breasted showgirls standing all in neat rows for the camera.  But, I suppose, one could argue that celebrity blinds people to the reality of those who become celebrities and that this explains, at least symbolically, why no one seems to notice that the leading lady has become a horrible lump of tumors and abscesses with, at least, two heads.  This is a very stylish movie.  In the opening scenes, we see workmen installing an inlaid star on a sort of Walk of Fame, presumably in Hollywood.  This is Elisabeth Sparkle's star.  The star endures on the pavement, gets tread upon, and, at last, in this opening sequence, someone drops pizza sauce or ketchup all over it.  At the end of the movie, in a scene that is a direct steal from John Carpenter's The Thing, Sue's face grimacing out of the back of the monster, gets detached and creeps on tentacle feet along the sidewalk to sit in the midst of gory polyps on the star in the Walk of Fame.  

People have saluted this movie as feminist.  I suppose it has lines and scenes that could be interpreted in that light but really this is just a very long, elaborately made, special effects movie.  It's stylish but this doesn't change the fact that the esthetic is that of a slasher movie combined with a Vogue or Cosmopolitan fashion-shoot.  If a half-hour were cut out of this thing and some of the more excessive scenes eliminated (I really didn't need to see Sue fight it out with the decomposing Elisabeth and, ultimately, beat her to death in big grisly close-ups), the movie might be a classic.  For what it is, The Substance is pretty good.  (The picture was made in France it seems, with French personnel; the director is Carolie Fargeat, a French filmmaker -- this is her second feature.)