Los Angeles. For her 50th birthday, Elizabeth Sparkle gets a rather unwanted birthday gift: producer Harvey fires her from the TV aerobics show because she is now too old. She thus decides to accept an illegal product called "The Substance" from an unknown agency, which causes her to fall unconscious in her bathroom while a 20-year old self, Sue, emrges from her back. As Sue, she re-gains her old role in the same aerobics TV show. But Sue needs to transfer her consciousness back into Elizabeth's body every 7 days, and vice-versa, in order to keep the balance. As she spends too much time as Sue, Elizabeth's body degenerates into a deformed state. When Sue is hired to host a New Year's eve show, she uses "The Substance" on herself, creating a monster which goes on stage and spills blood on the audience. It flees on the street, and dissolves, with the remnants of Elizabeth's face crawling up her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
A satire without humor: Coralie Fargeat's "The Substance" is a (horror) meditation and commentary on the beauty industry and all its beauty products, plastic surgery, medication and others which are proclaiming to be improving people's lives, but come with a high side-effects-price. Conceptualized as some sort of horror version of "Freaky Friday" and "17 Again", Fargeat and her cinematographer Benjamin Kračun use the stunning camera to conjure up aesthetically pleasant, stylish images in the opening act, but with time the film becomes more and more gruesome, gory, grotesque, bloody and nauseous—congruent with its theme of traversing from the aesthetics of beauty into the aesthetics of ugliness. The first third is the best—several clever ideas (bird's-eye view of Elizabeth's star on the Walk of Fame as it changes with time, ending with a tourist dropping his food on it, signalling her fading away; the painting of Elizabeth is "covered" when her younger self Sue raises her head up) and a sharp visual style (wide-angle fisheye lens; polished shot compositions; unusual camera drives; the hyper-stylization of the aerobics show, such as the camera circling around Sue's butt in gym clothes as she is about to do an audition) appeal more to the intellectual side of the viewing experience. Unfortunately, just as Elizabeth is slowly starting to fall apart, so does the movie, which slowly starts appealing only to the disgust side of the viewing experience. Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley are excellent, but underused, yet "The Substamce" becomes more and more excessive, bizarre and revolting, especially in the unnecessary close-ups of a syringe or a needle going through the skin, whereas the ending is bad, since Fargeat botched the directing of the banal finale of a deformed monster (reminiscent of Cronenberg's "The Fly") spilling gallons of blood over the beauty-obssessed audience, which doesn't work. Watching "The Substance" is a strange experience: it is better than the similar feminist horror "Titane", but also suffers from the same syndrome of slowly dissolving from a good story into a mess that drowns in its sick, misguided symbols.
Grade:++
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