FrightFest review – The Substance
Coralie Fargeat’s gruesome showbiz satire is the first film I can think of which earns the adjective ‘Cronenbergian’ where it means ‘Brandon Cronenberg’. It’s also an essay in a long-established if intermittent sub-genre of body horror concentrating on doomed, vain (in several senses) and grotesque attempts to recapture lost youth. Indeed, it’s a fusion of Roger Corman’s The Wasp Woman with John Frankenheimer’s Seconds – albeit done in a gorgeous, highly commercial, very contemporary style where the excess is indeed the point. It’s a film about the objectification of desirable women which shamelessly indulges in glossy softcore ad-mat visuals … and it’s a condemnation of the urge to stay too long on the stage which runs 140 minutes and has a climactic third act on the model of, say, Society which literalises every metaphor and flings a thousand gallons of gore at a studio audience and presents an onstage display of flesh-twisting bizarro activity (courtesy effects whizzes Dave and Lou Elsey) as a New Year’s Eve TV special.
It opens with the making of a star for ‘Elisabeth Sparkle’ on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, showing the arc of a career as it becomes weathered and cracked and gets ketchup dropped on it … though worse will come later. Lizzie (Demi Moore), an Oscar-winning actress (for what, we wonder?), is fired from an exercise show by caricature evil grinning boss Harvey (Dennis Quaid) for the sin of being fifty (Moore is 62) and she gets into a car accident because she’s distracted by the sight of workmen taking down a toothpaste ad poster which shows her face. Like the businessman in Seconds, she’s introduced to a secretive, sinister company which offer a renewal process with a lot of strings – by injecting ‘the substance’, she forces her body to generate a younger self who is born from her spine and calls herself Sue (Margaret Qualley). Both bodies have to be maintained, and the rules are they get one week awake, one week in a coma … but when Sue gets Lizzie’s old gig and her career takes off the newcomer wants to eat into the old-timer’s share of the life, which means Lizzie progressively turns into a literal hag.
Fargeat made the stylish exploitation film Revenge and this is even more surfacey – its sheen is literally what the film is about and we have to take the title as a self-aware joke. Besides Qualley’s polished perfections set beside Moore’s only slightly weathered hotness, the film is designed to within an inch of its life … apartments, offices, corridors, facilities, studios and even the few streets we see are honed to sharpness, as defined (and colourful) as comic book panels. Nothing in this world is remotely realistic – not even its French version of Hollywood – and that’s plainly the intention. If it’s entertaining but – ahem – insubstantial, that’s also possibly the point.
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