'The Substance' review: fearless Demi Moore in a satire of showbiz

Filmmaker Coralie Fargeat is fascinated by butts. In “The Substance,” her Cannes-winning spoof about an aging Hollywood actress with a high threshold for self-inflicted pain, she boasts of having more butts per minute than a chain-smoker’s ashtray — a feat made all the more monumental by the film’s nearly two-and-a-half-hour running time. Whether clad in spandex or naked, each is caressed by the lens with the same hunger a burger commercial has for its buns. The point is that in this body horror film, a human being’s only value is as meat. With fearless, ferocious leads Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley willing to let the camera slice them into pieces of flesh — lips, calves, hair, wrinkles and, yes, butts — for a movie that prioritizes surprises over plot, prepare for plenty of blood and guts from them, too.

The story is simple. Former star Elisabeth Sparkle (Moore) is too old to continue hosting televised aerobics shows, the latest stop on her road to exiting the industry. There was a time when Elisabeth had talent. She even won an Academy Award, if the mutterings of her boss, Harvey (Dennis Quaid), are to be believed, who, in the spirit of the film, grumbles, “Oscar winner, my ass.” But that was so long ago that even Elisabeth has forgotten that she is more than a pair of toned thighs.

Elisabeth's solution is A solution—a green goo called the Stuff—that splits his cells in two and grows a second, younger one that bursts out of his back and takes over his existence. When his alternate, Sue (Qualley), struts into Elisabeth’s old TV station, a throbbing Harvey immediately anoints her as his new fitness goddess. Cue the butt montage! The editing is high-energy, entertaining, and hard-hitting; if each scene’s hip thrust or needle jab were shown just once, the movie would run 90 minutes.

“The Substance” has two traps. First, the women must alternate weeks, giving Sue just seven days to twerk before ceding her consciousness to Elisabeth, who must then rely on herself (and her other self) to continue exchanging the baton, or else… The more tragic trap is that beneath the skin, Elisabeth/Sue hasn’t changed at all. She still has the same superficial ambitions, the same ugly self-loathing that allows her to leave her comatose body strewn on the bathroom floor like a dirty towel. Watching Qualley strut around in a pink bomber jacket and matching lip gloss, it’s like Barbie becoming human but refusing to evolve.

All the men in the film are repulsive, even the handsome ones, and as the film progresses they metastasize into an anonymous horde of gray hairs. But Fargeat is a messy feminist (a feminist who rightly and painfully insists that her heroine is her own worst enemy). Sue even continues to smile obediently at the same idiots who threw Elisabeth out onto the street. They cut open her back, but there's not a hint of a spine to be seen.

I’m also not convinced that there’s that much at stake in the film. It’s a shallow movie about a shallow world, and like its protagonist, it doesn’t pretend to anything more. Fargeat has style and has clearly earned an unofficial PhD in ’80s MTV and VHS, particularly the gory stuff that makes you gasp and laugh. She and her cinematographer, Benjamin Kracun, love garish grids, bright colors, extreme close-ups, and distorting fish-eye lenses. Her style is as subtle as a stop sign (she even name-dropped Quaid’s nefarious producer, Harvey) and her storytelling is so visual that her storyboards could be a comic book. (The wordless opening sequence on the Hollywood Walk of Fame that captures Elisabeth’s rise and fall is fantastic.) If this were a graphic novel, all we'd miss is the gruesomely effective soundscape of splashes and pops, though that would make it easier to stomach a shot of Quaid chomping shrimp in his maw, or when he advances toward the screen like it's a urinal and appears to urinate in our laps.

Dennis Quaid in the movie “The Substance”.

(Music)

I can’t think of another Cannes award winner who seems so indifferent to his own script. Fargeat, who speaks French as her native tongue, pared down the dialogue to what seems like ten pages, and much of that is recycled in flashbacks. At heart, Fargeat is a remix artist who constructed the film as a mashup of her own “The Fly” and “Sunset Blvd.” DVDs and sleazy early 2000s music videos. She flaunts her influences as a plastic surgery client who asks for Angelina’s lips and Charlize’s nose. In one scene, I thought a special effects creature in the film looked like Gollum… and then the end credits actually described it as Gollum. Still, when Fargeat starts playing “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” (a piece of music that doesn’t need to be in a movie for another 2001 years), we’re eager to hear her own voice.

The film centers on Elisabeth and Sue, who become roommates from hell. It doesn't care at all about who manufactured the substance, how many other people take it, or what its makers get out of the people who change their lives. To its own detriment, it doesn't care about Elisabeth either. The character has no friends, no layers, no hobbies, and no interests beyond being the sexiest woman in the room. When her younger self appears on a talk show, her stupidity is met with the kind of enthusiastic applause that makes her fans not care what she says. If it weren't for Moore and Qualley, who jump in to share the role, it would be as flat as a pinup girl stuck together with duct tape. If it weren't for Moore, I'm not even sure it would work.

Moore lived in the Hollywood that Fargeat satirizes, and in her 40-odd years in the business, she's probably been asked more about her workout routine than her craft. Her conviction lends credibility to the film. No one would allow themselves to be criticized so harshly if they didn't believe in the cause. In return, she's been given a major, somber, gritty, funny, and eye-catching role that demands a complete reappraisal of her career, plus the flattery of, at 61, convincingly playing a 50-year-old woman. No matter how much the film insists that she's a witch, we know—and Moore knows that we know—that she could do more squats than any of us in the audience. (And if She is As for Qualley, the fact that this is merely the latest bold challenge in her filmography is the closest thing to the optimism that “The Substance” offers. Her work, far more than her own body, proves that an actress’s fortunes can improve.