
A biological miracle with disastrous consequences in The Substance
Chris Forrester connects Coralie Fargeat’s award-winning body-horror sensation The Substance to its B-movie roots.
As is now something of a tradition with buzzy festival hits, The Substance (Fargeat, 2024) almost immediately became the subject of a discourse whose least productive concerns have more or less eclipsed much of the actual film they relate to. It’s an annual practice in the more knee-jerk segments of Film Twitter for questions like “Did (actor) have enough lines to count as a character?” or “Is this obvious critique an endorsement?” to loom like storm clouds over films at least worthy of more nuanced conversation, if not actual praise, but with The Substance the particular topics of argument seem to have steered the conversation directly away from the film’s most successful qualities. As Demi Moore’s Elisabeth Sparkle, an aging TV personality with a live-taped fitness program who begins taking a mysterious chemical to renew her lease on life (and youth) after losing her show due to her age, is told time and again by a never-identified voice on the phone when capital-S Substance abuse begins to cause problems (more on that later), we must “respect the balance.” The following is, I hope, something of a corollary to the discourse — an effort to tip the scales back toward equilibrium.
The specific gripes with The Substance have largely concerned its general lack of subtlety (yes, it’s in part about addiction, and yes, by way of a character literally abusing a drug called The Substance) and trust in its audience (if there’s one sure pitfall of Fargeat’s, it’s her insistence on making every narrative turn forcefully explicit). And sure, perhaps a certain degree of overemphasis on Hollywood caricaturing combined with a slight vagueness of concept — in such a searing comment on the entertainment industry’s treatment of women, fitness shows and New Year’s Eve broadcasts feel a touch out of step with any actual cultural relevance — dull the teeth of its otherwise ferocious bite. But the grand failing of much criticism around the film has been in taking its Cannes premiere, awards-season campaign, and prestige-horror trappings as too great a mark of its identity and failing to have fun with the nastier, goopier tradition of monster movies it so clearly belongs to. Amidst all the proclamations of “it’s David Cronenberg’s Barbie” and invocations of Isabelle Adjani’s famous turn in Possession (Zulawski, 1981) have emerged startlingly few mentions of Frank Henenlotter and Brian Yuzna, whose Basket Case and Society seem as obvious of reference points as Mulholland Drive (Lynch, 2001) and Kubrick. Spoilers follow.

The Substance takes effect
The concept promises goop and gore — the titular drug doesn’t just make Elisabeth a younger, spryer woman, it births an alter ego from her back and she must both sew up the gaping orifice and transfuse her consciousness weekly between bodies (the aforementioned balance refers to the equal time she must spend as both the elder Elisabeth and the youthful Sue). And the reviews, from the day of its festival debut, underscore that promise with gleeful verbosity. The film is then at least clearly recognized as a nasty beast, distinct in its willingness to get bloody in its hands-on dissection of wellness culture and misogynistic ageism from the all-too-common prestige horrors that regard the more carnal pleasures of the genre with haughty dismissal. Like Fargeat’s previous film, the equally blood-and-gutsy though altogether less successful Revenge (2017), The Substance has its roots firmly in the traditions of scuzzy genre cinema — more grindhouse than arthouse, in spite of the prestige facade her sensibilities may suggest.
Whether or not the work always lives up to or fully embodies the ethos of such films is a separate question, but it’s as generative to place The Substance in conversation with “low” art as much as high. In both blunt simplicity and goofiness, its title invokes The Stuff (1985), Larry Cohen’s consumerist satire about a delicious and healthy and suspicious white goo mined from the Earth and sold to ravenous Americans who chow it down by the pint as it slowly turns them into zombies of a sort. In pure bodily transformation grotesquerie, it of course recalls Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986) and its queasy, slimy transformation of man into beast with all the falling-out fingernails, squelching pustules, and other varieties of anatomical disarray that entails. And in the stupendous third act, in which a desperate Sue, already long overstaying her time in the youthful body, tries to create a new avatar for herself and instead births a lumbering two-woman-and-some-change hybrid of herself and Elisabeth affectionately dubbed Monstro-Elisasue, it slides fully into the territory of Frank Henenlotter, Stuart Gordon, and Brian Yuzna’s oozing paeans to the human body’s malleability (at least within the confines of their preferred genres).

The exceptional creature effects of From Beyond
It’s certainly easier to make sense of the film’s emphatic caricaturing of Dennis Quaid’s douchebag producer character (have shrimp ever looked so unappetizing?) or the gross-out consequences of Moore’s binge-eating or even the faintly disrespectful narrative handholding of certain plot points when envisioning the film as equally of high and low ilks. An early shot of a hallway may foreground The Shining (Kubrick, 1980) as a reference point and its fractured psyche torn further asunder by Hollywood corruption dramatic arc may recall Mulholland Drive (or the godmother of fading starlet dramas, Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard), but its DNA is hardly so pure. More successfully than its vitality-addicted protagonist, the film strikes a steady balance between influences and functions most clearly as a hybridization of two strains rather than an elevation of one to meet the other.
The tradition of prestige horror is to steer away from the blood and guts so frequently associated with the genre and into realms of psychological intensity matched by cold, precise technique. Conversely, exploitation and B-movie horrors match their ideas precisely to the genre’s most ghoulish potentials; the class satire-turned-shapeshifting body horror orgy of Society or the extradimensional horniness of From Beyond (Gordon, 1986) represent particular ideas whose expression rests on their scuzziness. The Substance embodies both modes as inextricable halves of the same gruesome whole; it’s a psychodrama about addiction until the full harms of that addiction literally explode in a hilariously bloody pyrotechnics show of innards becoming outards, and the better for it.

A worrisome growth in Frank Henenlotter’s Basket Case
But it’s the meshing of those contrasting (on paper more than in execution) sensibilities that seems to have produced the most critical responses, as if the presentation of glossy pop psychodrama alongside gross-out body horror comedy can only be judged on the terms of the former, rather than the latter. Which isn’t to say that standards ought to be any lower or higher for one, so much as that you’d hardly judge something like Frankenhooker (Henenlotter, 1990) for lack of subtlety. Perhaps Fargeat is simply too (visually) successful a filmmaker, and the fanciful stylings of this “B-movie with A-ideas” (to make something worthwhile of a dreadful quote from the dreadful Maxxxine, a markedly less successful attempt at bridging the void between genre sleaze and arthouse intellect) outpace the grace of its writing, earning it a touch of ire. Or perhaps the sometimes thudding obviousness of her narrative approach is too grating and the gleeful ickiness of the finale not pleasurable enough to outweigh it. But regardless of quality, this immensely satisfying monstrosity ought at least to be talked about in terms of all its myriad influences. So, take this as my humble plea to restore some semblance of balance — lest we forget what happens when we don’t.
Coralie Fargeat’s Cannes Best Screenplay-winner The Substance screens on January 31 at 10pm as part of the series Not Quite Midnights.