Beauty and Body Horror Collide in The Substance

Is self-care just another name for self-loathing? Today, entire industries are dedicated to convincing people of their many imperfections. The skincare, makeup, and cosmetic surgery industries all prey on our insecurities, our perceptions that we are not beautiful enough, not thin enough, or not young enough. And while we can change ourselves as much as we want to the point of being unrecognizable on the outside, the insecurities will always remain.

This dichotomy between vanity and misanthropy is central to The Substance, French director Coralie Fargeat's Cannes winner for Best Screenplay. The film is a bold, brutal examination of the ways our cultural obsession with beauty and youth can be oppressive, especially for women. The titular "Substance" is a cosmetic treatment that goes far beyond even the most drastic surgical treatments: Just one injection, its glossy, menacing marketing video declares, and it will create a whole new you.

Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), a washed-up Hollywood actress in late middle age, recently kicked off her TV fitness gig by domineering, openly sexist producer Harvey (Dennis Quaid), comes to find out just how literal the Substance's marketing is. She contacts the shadowy company and picks up her dose in a white-walled room full of lockers in an abandoned building somewhere in Los Angeles (the lockers decrease in number as the film goes on). At home in her white-tiled bathroom, just as surgical and sparse as the locker room, she strips and injects the "Activator," a serum of green goop, and begins to writhe on the ground in pain. In the first of many tremendous, stomach-churning scenes of body horror in the film, a crack forms in her skin, running down the spine, and from this, her new self (Margaret Qualley) emerges, covered in slime, like a butterfly from a chrysalis. Younger, thinner, with taut buttocks, perky breasts, and smooth skin, she declares herself "Sue" and takes over Elizabeth's old job, sexing up the old aerobics program into a plastic-fantastic, borderline pornographic show redolent of Instagram and Equinox.
Yet the old self remains. As the directions for the Substance caution, the two bodies must "without exception" switch every seven days. Big block letters declare, "REMEMBER YOU ARE ONE." Elizabeth and Sue have the same consciousness, and they inhabit two radically different bodies. Yet the more time they spend apart, the more jealousy between the two sides begins to mount — Sue wants more time in her body, while Elizabeth resents her younger self's success and desirability. She (they?) builds a side chamber in the bathroom to hide away the other half, which remains lifeless when one body is in use. The way they spend their time could not be more different: While Sue grabs life by the horns, partying and bringing home boy toys, Elizabeth languishes in her apartment, glued to her chair, watching TV. In one scene, she steps out and encounters the biker dude she had slept with as Sue the night before. He screams at her to step out of his way — older women are repellant to him. Eventually, Sue begins to breach the seven-day limit, causing Elizabeth to age rapidly — she becomes her own Picture of Dorian Gray, the ugliness of her inner self finally displayed on the exterior.

This begs the question: Is Elizabeth Sparkle a victim of the patriarchal, openly sexist showbiz world she lives in or of her self-centeredness? The answer is a poisonous cocktail of both. When we first meet her, she hosts an aerobics TV show that hasn't been updated since the '80s and lives in a cavernous apartment that's just as dated-looking. She has a giant photo portrait of herself on the wall. She's not married, which is fine, but she does not seem to have any friends. She's hedonistic, lacking in self-control, and vengeful in both bodies — after Sue leaves out bottles and ashtrays from all-night partying, Elizabeth lets her outrageous French cooking hobby cover the apartment in dirty dishes.

Much implies that part of the reason Elizabeth's career has faded — the opening sequence shows her literal star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame crack and weather over time — is due to her refusal to accept that she's no longer as young and beautiful as she once was. And why would she, with a boss who talks behind her back about wanting someone younger and hotter to replace her? Her life is her body, and her body is not what it used to be. Moore, once a sex symbol in her own right, bravely puts herself on display as Elizabeth, facing up to her own body's age in a way that the character never could. She lives in a gilded cage built on the inflated ego of a vanished, younger version of herself, trapped in the amber of her glory days and refusing to adjust to the times. When she does try to reach out to others, her pride and shame get in the way. In one scene, she gets ready to meet a high school classmate for a drink, a guy she never would have glanced at when she was younger. She puts on her face once, twice, a third time, always with Sue's perfect visage in view, silently taunting her from the next room. Try as she might, she will never measure up to her more beautiful shadow, and so she stays in, letting the texts from her date pile up.
The silence of Elizabeth's loneliness blankets the film. There are long stretches where little is said, as Moore and Fargeat let the images and filmmaking do the talking. The director wears her influences on her sleeve, creating a mix of Lynchian visuals — bold colors, expressive lighting, dream sequences and sequences that feel like dreams, and there are even direct visual references to Mulholland Drive and Lost Highway — Cronenbergian gore, and Paul Verhoeven's satirical bite. Showgirls, a film that has aged well into its depiction of violent sexism in show business, is an essential touchstone.

Ultimately, Elizabeth's isolation isn't just the result of Harvey and the other chauvinist pigs in Hollywood telling her that her worth as a person is inextricable from her body and their implacable standards. It's also the result of her internalizing their sexism, of seeing herself as no more than a body and letting its beauty, or perceived lack thereof, obsess her. By not letting its characters off the hook for their refusal to fight the system — demand better parts, reject the limited body standards that it demands — The Substance ends up a stronger film. In the end, when a final, monstrous transformation leads to a spectacular, blood-soaked finale, we finally understand what an angry, personal film Fargeat and Moore have made, a thrilling, visceral explosion of feminist rage fired in all directions and an uncompromising work of art that is elevated by its messiness.

The Substance. Starring Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, and Dennis Quaid. Written and directed by Coralie Fargeat. 140 minutes. Rated R. Opens Friday; check for showtimes at miaminewtimes.com/miami/movietimes.