'The Substance' briefing

3 ½ (out of 4)

            Walking straight into this sucker cold you could just about lose your mind. Fortunately 2017’s Revenge was probably the easiest director homework (One movie? No sweat) I’ve had the pleasure to complete — by the time I was watching a rapist dig glass out of his foot in excruciating detail, I knew I was lucky to be watching the overseas invasion of the New French Extremity, or some tricky, more mainstream branch of its movement as the international icebreaker was likely Julia Ducarnou with her coming-of-age cannibals in 2016’s Raw, later followed up by the Palme-d’Or-winning auto-erotic gender-bender Titane.

Director, writer, editor and co-producer Coralie Fargeat has so far made the grotesque her weapon of choice, but this really isn’t so unpalatable next to what she gets away with in Revenge — each film would have protestors en masse were it a man behind the staggeringly sexed-up send-ups. Revenge was a treasure trove of genre forgery inverting the rape revenge setup with scary, disgusting, vibrant, thematically dense laughs and thrills, and The Substance is roughly just style-forward in its ingenious take on pure sci-fi body-horror, seasoned with a fresh feminist angle on the cycles of Hollywood stardom, like All About Eve for masochists. It may be an egregious 140 minutes, the amoebic final form of your “perfect self” might go on and on, but there’s something about Coralie’s thorny, gonzo, hardcore style that has you hoping it never ends — the implications here may be blunt as a botoxed bag of bricks but this kind of forward, emphatic filmmaking could metaphorically move mountains and bottle lightning. Her eye is so probing, almost Kubrickian this time around, with Shining-esque sets and 2001's Jupiter light show spliced in the transformation sequences — its mathematical escalation into unashamed insanity is such an appreciable rarity, the simple mechanics of the story hardly ever out of sync with its own hopscotching case of one-upping yourself.

The Substance is one of those dreaded ‘poison valentines’ worthy of Lynch’s lines of thought (like if The Elephant Man weren’t so sympathetic, or Eraserhead, or Mulholland Dr…), a bright, flashing warning against vanity, navigating the slippery slope women ride when it comes to age, the makeup market, the media’s perception of female worth and all the tradeoffs the familiar premise’s devil’s bargain has to offer. This black market magic solution could be a symbol of any youth-robbing addictive tendencies, or just serve as the instrument of some stupendously feminist horror, both gratuitous and gratuitously enjoyable. Her amalgamation of the most astounding of body horror’s outlandish offerings (Carpenter, Cronenberg, Henenlotter or any of the more cult, low budget ugly beauts of the 80s) is just the subsurface, even if you could squarely sum up The Substance as some bastard bred of Frankenhooker and Brain Damage as well as The Fly and The Brood. There’s also notes of John Frankenheimer’s Seconds, Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, in addition to the fashionable immediacy and style-suffusing of great modern South Korean cinema (likely Kim Jee-woon most of all), not to mention Jon Waters’ flippant disregard for polite society’s taste. It’s not pastiche when it’s so purely inspired, though of course her springboards, outside of the foibles of advancing, go on and on. Fargeat is already some goddess of “good Lord!” and The Substance becomes a sensory experience with little like it even as it cribs from all of the above, confidently skipping from sublime to so sickening you’re compelled to enunciate some kind of guttural panic now and again.

It’s tidy in its scripting but schizophrenic in it’s scrupulous execution — by the time the ballet sprinkler of blood is painting a horrified, scrambling audience in a more nightmarish riff on Carrie, you’re either going cuckoo too or you’ve probably checked out long before. I’m pleased as punch that something so incisively, roundly, darkly meaningful (The Neon Demon makes a good visual/temperamental companion piece), gloriously well-produced and cheekily parodic has already secured a cult following. The Substance is an escapist crazy-scape, a novel-like exploration of self-worth and self-destruction — sex sells and even the sparkliest of us are so easily replaceable. Fargeat has a case for the most promising new voice in horror, horror comedy, or just no-fucks-given cinema in general.

Speaking zero Fs, I don’t care for Demi Moore or Margaret Qualley in general but they each have gone to hell and back for this one. After popping up in nothing of note this side of 2000 apart from maybe Margin Call, Moore is about as amazing as they say, it’s probably the best thing she’s ever done, a complete comeback and a pluming feather in her cap. She’s not exactly brave for this career-definer (she wasn’t even the first casting choice lol, neither was Dennis Quaid). IN FACT, it’s hilarious that Quaid’s whole bathroom break smear of her character, the “Oscar-winner my ass” bit referencing King Kong would make her what, Jane Fonda or Naomi Watts in this case? Anyway it’s a nice rewrite since Moore’s Razzie-winning role in G.I. Jane is one she considers a career highlight (and not without reason) and Lizzy Sparkle may as well be an all-too-vain version of herself. Regardless of whether Mikey Madison’s sexy moves outshine her, Demi's stock just shot up. Nothing in the film is as scary, or honest about women, or anyone’s personal feelings of inadequacy, than that makeup sequence just as the green goo starts to go sour, when she can’t even face a nobody from grade school — it’s probably the best scene in the film, no gimmicks just Demi demolishing her role. Meanwhile Qualley has done her darnedest to outstep her prominent nepotism status, and she’s scoped out some range since she was a Manson Girl for Tarantino five years back — her teeth and 'tude don’t match a demure Demi (one would assume a younger you popping out of the stretch of your spine would uh, LOOK like you) but I’ll forgive it for the premise’s sake. Margaret, born from the back of Andie McDowell, is curiously well cast, and likewise enhances the film as she secures her own professional benchmark.

With the cinematographer from Promising Young Woman (Benjamin Kračun), a fresh DJ doing the score (Raffertie), untenable creative confidence and a premise to relish (and boy does it), man, this has got to be one of the least expensive movies with what’s gotta be the most interesting behind-the-scenes, hell it's not far-fetched to say Fargeat’s second has perhaps the most memorable horror makeup since The Exorcist. The Substance is lethally entertaining and effortlessly intriguing, rising from flavor of the month curiosity to the most instantaneous instant classic these eyes have graced in a moment, since maybe The Lighthouse, another peerless, auteur-making sophomore effort. As a movie about self-hatred it’s very, very funny, feminist in such a brutal fashion BUT it’s made by a woman so HELL YEAH, can’t nobody say nothing, actually here, take a Best Picture nod and a Best Director nomination. Ironically maybe ladies gotta break horror’s glass ceiling in the eyes of the Academy Awards, Get Out might not have been enough.

It’s a pretty epic, exhaustive cautionary tale, an acute allegory, a deranged, prickly parable, a fucked-up fairy tale, a fantastic freak-show, an unfussy body image paradox come to life, masterfully arranging movements of repulsion and pure sexsploitation satire on standards both patriarchal and self-imposed. The Substance is unforgiving, irresistibly counterintuitive Faustian food for thought.