French film-maker Coralie Fargeat won the best screenplay award at Cannes this year for her second feature, a gruesomely in-your-face fable and a daring feminist commentary on ageing and vanity.
In the cross hairs of Fargeat’s intoxicating and exhilarating body-horror is Demi Moore as a veteran TV personality named Elisabeth Sparkle, whose waning career is cleverly depicted in the opening credits by the fading of her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
She’s been reduced to hosting a workout show but she’s reached her producers’ use-by date for that. On her 50th birthday, Sparkle gets ushered into the office of her boss “Harvey” (an unctuous Dennis Quaid) and fired.
Reeling first from the insult and then from a brutal car crash, Sparkle finds herself presented with a mysterious offer of hope: use of a black-market drug which will deliver a new, improved version of herself. What ageing aerobics instructor could resist?
The procedure gives Sparkle a younger, firmer offshoot named Sue (Margaret Qualley, Drive-Away Dolls) who gets her old television gig back, having every second week off to let Sparkle live her life. Sparkle’s world rapidly shrinks from billboards and sycophantic studio staff to being a sunglassed celebrity scuttling through LA backstreets to get her next hit of the substance that promises reinvention but risks stealing her soul.
Fargeat hammers home the psychological horror with extreme close-ups of gorging mouths, violated body parts and needles plunging into flesh. All this, along with hyperbolically loud sound design and a stunning colour palette of rich blues and golden yellows, makes The Substance a glorious but gory experience, which is absolutely not for the faint-hearted.
Qualley (the daughter of Andie MacDowell) and Moore are both excellent in the film’s Dorian Gray act, and the 61-year-old Moore embraces the film’s graphic cruelty and full-frontal nudity while delivering some Oscar-worthy acting.
Of course, the underlying message is not new: women have long been battling with middle-aged invisibility thanks to society’s obsession with the tight glutes of youth.
But one scene in particular will hit a nerve for any woman who’s gazed in the mirror and second-, third- and fourth-guessed her choice of outfit. Fargeat takes these hard truths to the extreme and her visceral vision pummels the viewer into horrified, sometimes hysterical, submission.
Rating out of five: ★★★★½
The Substance, directed by Coralie Fargeat, is in cinemas from September 19.
