Starring: Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, Denis Quaid
Distributor: Madman Films
Runtime: 140 mins. Reviewed in Sep 2024
Reviewer: Fr Peter Malone msc
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A celebrity deemed ‘too old’ decides to use a black-market drug, a cell-replicating substance that temporarily creates a younger, better version of herself.
The Substance is a serious, challenging drama on some key contemporary issues, winner of the Best Screenplay Award at Cannes, 2024. However, it could also be described as ‘not for the fainthearted’. The Australian government classification is indicative: R18+ ‘High impact violence, blood and gore’.
The film was written and directed by French filmmaker, Coralie Fargeat (whose previous feature film Revenge (2017), also featured blood and gore).
The Substance was made in Paris but with American key leads. Fargeat is an angry filmmaker, standing up for women, targeting the exploitation of the ‘male gaze’ and women’s treatment by sleazy males, here in the television industry and advertising.
To indicate the serious treatment here, this reviewer immediately started to think about Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, the doctor at home and his experimentation, taking substances, and his public persona, charming but sinister, Mr Hyde. In fact, the director herself has suggested thinking about Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, the ugly ageing portrait at home, the seemingly perennial youthful public figure. And, some reviewers also offer helpful cinema and theatre comparisons, the 1966 Seconds, with Rock Hudson, a banker wanting to start his life again with a new identity and a new face. Another suggestion is the story of the ageing and fading star, Norma Desmond, in Sunset Boulevard.
Star of this film is Demi Moore, 40 years after she began her film career. Appearing in this film and her being exposed in so many ways seems a courageous choice on her part. She plays a Jane Fonda-like television host of aerobic exercises for women. Quite a celebrity, there is a corridor filled with flattering posters… But, at 50 she is being forced out of her career because she’s considered too old. She is involved in a car crash – ironically as she stares at her image being torn down from a boulevard billboard.
While the film has a range of male characters, they are presented as leering, stupid, followers, incompetent… And, at the head, is Dennis Quaid as an over-the-top sleazy television producer. Satirical, maybe, but the #Me Too movement and various court cases indicate the elements of truth.
This film runs for 140 minutes so the audience has plenty of time to contemplate what is happening. The ageing star takes the substance, which enables a new 30-something self to emerge. The new self is Sue (Qualley).
Sue is the right age for the male gaze, for audience popularity – and she basks in it only to be the agent of her own downfall. Some of the transformation sequences have their harrowing and startling moments, commentators referring to as ‘body horror’. But, as with Jekyll and Hyde, there has to be a reckoning, Jekyll becoming a monster, Hyde and his exposure.
Which means that the climax of the film has high monstrous elements, physically, psychologically, violently, a climax and a New Year’s Eve television show where everyone is spattered with the blood of the creatures.
Symbolically, the film opens with a popular star on the Hollywood catwalk of fame, gradually deteriorating and ignored – and, that is where the film ends, a star is born and dies.
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