The Substance: a pinnacle of die-hard body horror (review)
Coralie Fargeat creates an enjoyable film that dynamites everything in its path. Starting with its two stars: Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley.
Since Julia Ducournau prayed for the Palme d’Or one evening (Titanium in May 2021) from “let the monsters in“, the pundits of the Cannes Film Festival have opened the doors to the sheepfold. The Substance of Coralie Fargeatan openly gory comedy thus landed among the oils, in competition. Not very far fromEmilia Perez by Jacques Audiard, another expatriate French film (Mexico over there, the United States here) which seemed to share the same desire to examine the transformation of a body to better remove the stitches of cumbersome realism . The Substance walked away with a Screenplay Prize (we personally would have aimed differently and higher!).
Until now we knew the 48-year-old French filmmaker for Revenge (2018), a first feature which followed a young woman being raped by horny bastards before being impaled on a stake in the middle of nowhere. In a magnificent gesture of survival, the unfortunate woman managed to escape from her uncomfortable posture and began a revenge that made Rambo look like a figure skater. Esteemed successes, Hollywood sirens: here then The Substance. The bodies are once again bruised in every direction. We follow a “fifties” (Demi Moore), ex-film star turned star of a television aerobics show (all of this is told in one absolutely brilliant shot!)
The producer of the program (Dennis Quaid in total overheating) decides to fire her overnight to cast a much younger woman (it will be Margaret Qualley). At the same time, the outcast receives a shady proposition that she cannot refuse: inject herself with a strange substance that will allow her to generate a sort of double, an improved version of herself, young and pretty, with her own personality. . As in any tale, there is one condition: every seven days, she will have to regain possession of her old body to avoid irreversible degradation of her appearance. We know how Faustian pacts end. Very bad, in general.
The two beings thus split very quickly engage in a war at a distance. Filmed in a barely dystopian Los Angeles, deliberately sanitized and almost depopulated (in fact recreated in the Parisian suburbs and in the South of France), our heroines advance in a world full of bay windows, flat screens, candy pink decor and endless Kubrickian corridors. Their sick ego fills the frame with an increasingly angry and dull tension. The good idea is to tell this war from a single, physically split character. One then the other, one against the other… This duality allows the story to go beyond its simple political aim (the worn-to-the-bone refrain of a society of spectacle and its mirages, the triumphant feminism…) to confront a purely organic challenge of cinematic representation.
The enjoyment felt comes mainly from there. Coralie Fargeat presses all the keys of an identified cinephile bestiary (choice: Cronenberg, Carpenter, Verhoeven, de Palma, Peter Jackson first style…), to graft them to her own author’s vision. A vision that takes him very far, to the end of a road of no return. Its immediately omniscient staging takes an all-powerful look at a reality devoid of off-camera. Like this magnificent opening sequence where the aura of a soon-to-be-fallen star can be read on the fragile surface of his star on the Los Angeles Walk of Fame, Coralie Fargeat films a slow and inevitable degradation of an image trapped in herself. From then on, the foreign body can take up all the space and devour it from the inside. We come out feeling both groggy and excited.
By Coralie Fargeat. With Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, Dennis Quaid… Duration 2h20. Released November 6, 2024
