What a wild ride of a thing. Coralie Fargeat’s pitch-black horror-comedy has in it, appropriately, the DNA of a half-dozen things you might’ve seen before — off the top of my head, there’s the “seemingly arbitrary rules that will inevitably be broken, and woe betide those who do so” of GREMLINS and the central bargain for youth and beauty very much reminds me of Robert Zemeckis’s DEATH BECOMES HER — and hell, I’ve never even seen the flick, but the ending has me going, “CARRIE, right?” But this whole stew of riffs and ideas is in service of one central thesis: ladies, holding yourself to patriarchal standards of youth and beauty is a losing game. The only winners are the leering perverts who prop this whole system up, who, no matter what you do, WILL invariably start looking the other way in search of fresh meat. This is what happens to actress and TV fitness star Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore, who spends probably two thirds of the movie in a state of visceral rage and/or horror, and has been getting some well-deserved kudos for it), cast out of her long-running TV program by the World’s Grossest TV Executive (Dennis Quaid, hamming it up magnificently as someone you’d REALLY like to see suffer some consequences at the end). The sight of her own face coming down off a billboard (not even for the show, it’s a TOOTHPASTE AD) so distracts her that she gets in a car accident, and while she’s getting a clean bill of health, a suspiciously handsome nurse (I literally said to myself before anything happened, “hold on, that man is TOO HANDSOME”) slips a USB drive in her pocket. On it is a video advertisement for the titular Substance. Once she breaks down and buys in, the deal is this: Elisabeth injects herself with this green stuff and a second person cooked up by her own DNA, uh, *emerges* (in a weird, gross way — there’s lots of things in this movie that can be described as “weird” and “gross”): younger, prettier, “more perfect,” but still tethered to the original “her” in multiple ways. Like, it seems clear this is very similar to (weirdly) how the last Doctor Who regeneration worked — both remember everything up to the point this process happened, but then they’re going about their own lives.
And herein lies the problem. So, Sue (Margaret Qualley) hatches from Elisabeth’s body, hooks Elisabeth up to a bag of nutrients to keep her alive for the next week, and then has to source a sustaining fluid from Elisabeth’s body as well and take it daily. She has seven days out and about — during which, yes, of course she managed to snag her old job from creepily-grinning Dennis Quaid. Once that week is up, then she goes under and Elisabeth gets to get on with HER life for a week. Except … what life? Her whole life was being famous and adored on television. She literally doesn’t know what to do with herself now that this (charming, beautiful, adored, and perhaps most frustratingly — HAPPY) *facet* of herself that she’s shunted off has her old job. And what drives the tragedy of the film is this resentment between the two — and it really starts with Elisabeth herself. If she could figure out anything to do for that week she’s up, maybe things wouldn’t go as spectacularly wrong as they do. But then, if she could have figured anything else out, she probably wouldn’t have bought into the Substance to begin with.
And of course, watching it you can’t help but feel a little complicit in the system the film is mad about, as the camera lingers on Qualley’s Sue in her cut-out leotard shooting the VERY much sexed-up version of Elisabeth’s old fitness show — and after that, in the little-or-skintight-or-both outfits she wears in her new day-to-day life. The film is goddamn lucky to have her, someone who looks the “perfect” part who magnificently conveys the euphoric joy of the new life she finds herself in and matches Moore’s Elisabeth outrage-for-outrage — in Sue’s case, at how her other half just wastes the days she can’t have bumming around the apartment and filling those empty hours, eventually, with food.
There’s really a lot to chew on here — the core of it is obviously not subtle at all, but there’s shadings around and interesting readings to be had, and on top of that there are visual pleasures aplenty — not just Margaret Qualley in pink spandex, but also some real eerie prosthetic makeup as the movie goes on, and a riotous final act reveal that had me cackling while also shaking my head at all the bad, bad choices that led to that point. Honest to goodness, looking over my somewhat barren movie year so far I think the only thing that matches it for giving me as much to ruminate on is, of all things, DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE. Alas, if you’re local, you’ve missed out, at least here in Pitt — I saw literally the last showing at the mall theater (and alone, to boot, which I guess is why it’s on its way out — I’m still a little stunned it was even here). But you can bet the minute someone is willing to sell me a disc (all the current preorders are downloads, YUCK), that’s going right in the blu-ray player to give this a second look. Highest recommendation.