In the Flesh: The Substance

“...and at fifty, it stops,” says Harvey (Dennis Quaid), stripping and eating shrimp like he’s Denethor turned loose in a tomato patch. “What stops?” asks Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), a faded actress in the process of losing her last toehold in the realm of fame, a vapid exercise show in the vein of Jane Fonda’s similar television work in the ‘80s. She knows the answer, of course: Everything. There’s no subtlety at work here, nor even the pretense of subtlety. The Substance is concerned, paradoxically, with emptiness, with vacuousness, with the infinite void of American pop culture’s hunger for young flesh and the smell of sex. There is no interiority here, because there is no interior, only nested surfaces, shrimp shells to be cracked and stripped away in search of the tender meat within. Consumption is its own justification, the seeking of attention its own reason. The art we glimpse in this bizarro version of Los Angeles reflects this emptiness, shows consisting of little more than grunting and gyrating, programs with names like “The Show”. There’s no fiction, no artifice, just objects and appetites.

Elizabeth is equally empty. We know nothing about her except that once she was famous and desired and now she isn’t. We see no family, no partners, no friends, nothing but her formless want. Her youthful doppelganger, Sue (Margaret Qualley), is if anything even more of a non-entity, an animalistic parasite alternately coveted and resented by her host. Here, I think, is where the film’s thematic concerns run aground somewhat. Determined as it is to avoid investing its characters with depth, it neglects their connection to one another, instead spinning its wheels in a cul-de-sac of thematically muddled food obsession. The missed opportunity to further investigate the dynamic between the two halves of the same woman weighs heavily on the film's back half. To put it bluntly, how can you make this movie without having Demi Moore fuck Margaret Qualley's comatose body? The old age makeup along the way, though, does Screaming Mad George proud, with Moore decaying into a shriveled, knobby crone as Sue pushes the boundaries of their strange arrangement, each taking a week of their shared life at a time.

When those boundaries finally break, the real body horror comes out to play, plunging things deep into Society territory with an abominable transformation and subsequent scene of persecution like an unholy mixture of Carrie, King Kong, and Young Frankenstein into a putrid slurry in which subject and object collapse into one another without apparent end, the self calving chunks from its central mass like a rotten glacier breaking apart. Perhaps The Substance has little revolutionary to say on the subject of feminine disposability and modern beauty standards. Perhaps there are smarter, more insightful versions of the film still to come. But the brute force grotesquerie and exquisite craftsmanship of Coralie Fargeat’s version does more than enough to justify itself, taking a bludgeon directly to its audience with wild, repulsive abandon.