One term that’s hurled around a lot these days (especially by me) is “Cronenbergian”. For those not in the know, it’s shorthand to describe movies that use a particular kind of physical body horror that was pioneered by David Cronenberg during the early parts of his career. You’ll probably see it attached to lots of reviews that attempt to describe Coralie Fargeat stupendous descent into misshapen madness, The Substance – but while it’s technically true, there’s another purveyor of 80s insanity who deserves an overdue name drop.
New York sleeze meister, Frank Henenlotter turned fucked-up satire, graphic violence and crazed plots into an art form that bequeathed us underrated cult masterpieces such as Basket Case, Brain Damage and Frankenhooker. But before I make the horrible error of continually banging on about two male filmmakers when I should be hailing Fargeat, I just want to give thanks to the filmmaker by making the greatest Henenlotter movie never made.
Elisabeth Sparkle is famous. Her morning aerobics show has not only made her a household name but she also has herself a star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame, but something has arisen that will virtually end her glittering career overnight – she’s 50. Ousted from her job by unscrupulous, garish executive, Harvey, the indignities continue when she crashes her car after seeing her image being removed from a billboard, but while she’s treated in hospital, a young nurse slips her a flash drive that advertises something called “The Substance”, a mystery treatment that apparently unlocks a better version of yourself.
After ordering it during an extra low point, Elisabeth carries out the super-involved process that keeps the Substance working that comes with more ominous rules than the owning of a Mogwai. After injecting herself with step one, Elisabeth discovers how different this process truly is when she births a whole new person from her back who is younger, fitter and names herself Sue – but while Sue admires her vital new self in the mirror, she has to quickly move on to step two which is to extract a stabilising fluid from the comatose Elisabeth’s back to hold her new body together for a period of seven days.
But every seven days, the two have to switch back, which means the two now have a time share of consciousness where each one has week to live while the other lies in a heap in the bathroom.
At first, it works and Sue even manages to get hired for the revamp of Elisabeth’s old show, but while Sue’s star ascends, she wants to be active for longer periods of time. However, this comes at a cost, and as the ads proclaim, the two are one, so everytime Sue bends the rules, it takes a ravaging toll on Elisabeth. Soon, the two are at war and vehemently resents the other, but the more successful Sue becomes, the most bitter and gnarled Elisabeth becomes. Something has to give, and at this rate, it’s going to be their genetic code.
Coralie Fargeat seems to be making herself a major player in the world of feminist exploitation movies as her previous was the sun bleached rape/revenge flick, Revenge; however, with The Substance, she taken her craft to another level that has given us the most impressive art house/trash mash up since S. Craig Zahler’s Bone Tomahawk. But while that movie fused together The Searchers with Cannibal Holocaust, The Substance feels more like someone dropped Sunset Boulevard and Street Trash into a blender and gleefully pressed the button marked puree.
Everything in the movie has a grotesque, exaggerated nature that harkens back to a more controlled version of the macabre, vaudeville leanings of a Troma movie that suggests that one of the most watched TV programmes in the country is a near-pornographic aerobics show that basically feels exactly like the music video for Eric Prydz’s “Call on Me”. Similarly Dennis Quaid gives a performance as a hideously slimy executive so overblown, he makes a pantomime dame feel like the stillness of Toby Maguire in comparison and almost all the other men in the movie are portrayed as lecherous assholes.
It’s this heavy handed satire that makes the fucked up horror work so well, otherwise why else would a woman systematically destroy every single thing she hates about her physical appearance by pumping fuck knows what into her system (OK, maybe not that heavy handed) and while the male characters are given licence to go as broad as they can, Demi Moore attacks her role with the determination of an absolute warrior.
The casting of Moore is nothing short of perfection, not just because of how good she is, but because she’s pretty much lived most of this shit throughout a storied career that once saw her labeled as “Gimmie Moore” by the press because she strived to get paid as much as male actors in the 90s. Desperate to remain relevant in a world that simply doesn’t want to acknowledge something as natural as a woman growing old, Moore’s connection to the material feels as entwined as Sylvester Stallone in the sixth Rocky movie as the make believe, movie world she’s helping to create is one she’s actually lived in for a very long time. However, anyone familiar with her filmography knows that G.I. Jane herself isn’t afraid of getting her hands dirty and as the selfish actions of her other self escalate, she manages to turn in a performance that isn’t such truthfully raw, but is magnificently physical too as the heavy prosthetics work gives us a twisted, gnarled version of Moore we’ve truly never seen before. Not to be outdone, Margaret Qualley’s Sue is a lithe engine of id, all sculpted buttocks and blood red lips who soaks up the leering gaze of her peers in order to gyrate up the ladder of success and even though the rules defiantly state that the two women are one, the battle between young and old get pretty vicious as both claw and scratch to remain relevant and seen.
However, while the bulk of the film concentrates on the twisted trajectories of its bifurcated leads, the final stretch of the flick goes far beyond anything you were expecting. As a child of the prosthetics-filled 80s, seeing how wild The Substance truly gets with outlandish gore, rubbery monster suits and Sam Raimi/Peter Jackson style blood geysers that pump fluids like fire hoses, gave me genuine joy and it’s pretty amusing that the exact same outlandish, underground horror stuff I used to watch in my youth now seems to be lauded as art house gold.
In fact there’s been a spate of excellent, lauded movies lately that have been directed by women and are technically not much more that expertly helmed variations of exploitation genres and Fargeat may have just made the most crazy one of all.
In this world of garish characters, genuine pain, feminist agendas and malformed blob creatures that hack up breasts like X-rated hairballs, The Substance is the style.
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