The Substance (2024)

Academy Award winning actress Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) – a character name that does signal this film’s idea of subtlety like the crapping elephant did the quality of Babylon – has aged down in the world. She’s done a TV fitness show for ages now, but exec Harvey (Dennis Quaid) really, really wants to replace her with a younger model of public aerobics instructor. Losing that gig is one of the final nails in the coffin of Elisabeth’s societally deprecated self-respect, so she jumps at the chance offered by a mysterious underground drug.

The substance doesn’t make her any younger, but instead creates a younger, supposedly more perfect version of herself by some sort of cell-replication. The old self and the new are supposed to trade active weeks, the inactive one lying in a coma during the other half’s week. The new version needs to feed on some of the old one’s fluids during its waking week.

Calling herself Sue (Margaret Qualley), Elisabeth’s other self – not a font of creativity – grabs Elisabeth’s old job, becoming an overnight sensation. Self-centred as she is, Sue begins stealing time and overmuch feeding fluid from the original. This isn’t great for Elisabeth’s body, and parts of her start aging and decaying with increasing rapidity. It will take some time until she decides to do something about her new self, though.

I can’t say I love Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance as much as most everyone else seems to do. There’s no discounting Fargeat’s abilities as a visual stylist, and certainly little to critique about Moore’s or Qualley’s performances, but to my eyes, the film has two major drawbacks.

Firstly, for a film that so clearly is about the very clear and specific theme of cultural ageism, it has very little to say about it. That it’s grotesque and wrong should be a given, but that’s where the film stops: there’s no subtlety, no interest in exploring its theme beyond the most obvious elements. Which is a particular problem in a movie that’s nearly two and a half hours long – repetition begins to set in, and the neat little body horror freak-outs are simply not enough to distract from this problem.

Secondly, for a film that’s so focused on two characters, there’s very little substance to Elisabeth or to Sue. This does of course make sense with the latter (and is part of her point), but Elisabeth seems to have led a life without any human connections, any interests, any internal life, really, which does make it difficult to feel any interest in her plight. The film’s entertainment industry setting doesn’t help there: in the end, Elisabeth’s stinking rich and independent even in a world that can’t cope with women aging publically, and her self-pity isn’t terribly interesting in this context.

Revenge (2017)

Wealthy Richard (Kevin Janssens) has taken his young mistress Jen (Matilda Lutz in what will turn out to be quite the tour de force physical performance) to his modernist holiday home so deep in a desert they get flown in. The plan is for a bit of bump and grind with the young and somewhat naive woman, and then to have her fly out again before his friends Stan (Vincent Colombe) and Dimitri (Guillaume Bouchède) will come in for their yearly hunting get-together.

Alas, the guys come in a bit earlier than planned. These, as it will surprise nobody, are not the type of men a woman wants to be alone with. Leering and what one might just barely get away with calling sexual tension turns into rape when Richard is out to take care of their hunting licenses. When Jen rejects Richard’s offer to pay her off to forget the whole thing, he just pushes her off a mountain. Where rapist Stan and all-around shit Dimitri are still baseline human monsters, Richard turns out to be an honest to gawd sociopath.

It takes some time until these prime examples of upper class manhood realize that Jen has somehow survived the fall and crawled away to some hiding spot. Since these guys clearly live their lives following the question “What would a serial killer do?”, they, well, Richard decides - the others follow with more or less grumbling - to hunt Jen down and murder her again. They’ve got weapons, transport and equipment, after all, and Jen doesn’t even have water. Jen is by far not going to be the easy victim they are expecting, though.

Coralie Fargeat’s rape revenge film with the catchy title is rather special, not just because the director/writer being a woman leads to her approaching some of the well-worn plot beats of the subgenre somewhat – though not as extremely as one might expect - differently from most of the male directed brethren her film shares its genre with; not only because the film doesn’t stop at being somewhat more honestly feminist than is typical of a genre that often dances ambiguously between titillation and condemnation, without being didactic. It’s Fargeat’s ability to take, twist and shape genre standards and make them her own, staging everything from the rape scene, to action sequences to dream sequences and making it look easy.

Fargeat’s clearly perfectly okay with the implausibility of some of what happens in the film. In fact, there’s a line of dark, sardonic humour running through it that seems to luxuriate in the ability of a movie to be more than real. Things never devolve into outright comedy, though, the violence – while as over the top bloody as is the French style – always feels weighty and unpleasant, and the characters – the film even gives its trio of rapist shits a bit of depth and believable character relations which doesn’t make them more likeable but definitely more believable beyond “evil” – may be broadly drawn but are also exactly the type you might imagine would inhabit Revenge’s visual world.


Said visual world is rather spectacular too, Fargeat turning the desert and the house into playgrounds of colours, using directorial choices that hint at pop art and video clips yet which in her hands don’t feel tacky and distracting but fiercely focused. Just that this focus isn’t always exactly where you’d expect it to be – which is a good thing, obviously. There’s an air of the more-than-real/not-quite-real about Fargeat’s staging that turns the film from the decent genre programmer its plot might promise into something riveting, intense and dreamlike. At the same time, the director isn’t slave to her stylishness – the rape, the following violence, and so on, never feel lessened in impact or meaning by the way they are shot, but, as it should be, strengthened.