I have been staring at a blinking cursor for several minutes now, failing to find a place to start discussing Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance. This is, to be clear, not a complaint. The audacious and unrelenting film is one of the most singular works of cinema I have seen this year, anddebatably in any other. It’s a laser-focused satire of society’s toxic beauty standards. Set in a surreal fever-dream world, the film examines how far one might be willing to go to stay ahead of those standards, takes that simple idea to its further logical endpoint, and then keeps going.
Demi Moore stars as Elisabeth, an older but still active actress with a successful television fitness show, the kind that Jane Fonda used to do. She is, in a word, stunning. There’s no getting around the fact that Demi Moore is still a gorgeous and powerful woman, which makes the following scene in which Dennis Quaid lets her know that past the age of 50 she has no value to the industry.
Soon after, she is in an accident, and while being dismissed utterly by the older male doctor attending her, the young, hot doctor hands her a card with the number for The Substance on it, saying it changed his life.
It’s important to note that The Substance, the film, takes place in a world adjacent to our own. This world is where Elisabeth is a TV star with an exercise show simply called “The Show,” a world where we only get the details we need. It’s also a world devoid of subtlety. Dennis Quaid’s disgusting, leering, open-mouth-chewing producer character is named Harvey, surely a jibe at the now-disgraced former Hollywood mogul of the same name, and this is the least of it.
So when Elisabeth takes the substance, the drug, we know nothing about it other than that she picks it up from a sterile lab disguised in a dilapidated warehouse and that once she takes it, her back splits open, and a younger, hotter version of herself played by Margret Qualley is born. To say this -and the following scene in which the younger self stitches up Elisabeth’s back with enormous needle and thick black sutures featured in the film poster- is visceral would be an understatement.
It’s also only the beginning.
Link: https://movieswetextedabout.com/the-substance-movie-review-a-singular-and-unapologetic-piece-of-cinema/
‘The Substance’: A Singular and Unapologetic Piece of Cinema | Movies We Texted About
