Anthony McIntyre 🎥 My daughter recommended we watch this blend of sci-fi and psychological thriller.
She had previously viewed it in the cinema and explained that it was essentially a body horror movie - not a concept I was familiar with until I watched it - that satirically eviscerates the American entertainment industry.
The elixir of youth, much like the Philosopher's Stone of Indiana Jones fame, has for aeons found itself being pursued by a posse of age averse death evaders. The elixir unlike the stone has remained beyond reach although it has not dampened the enthusiasm for the search parties eager to hold back death anxiety.
Demi Moore is Elizabeth Sparkle and puts in a sparkling performance. Acting non-sexual nude scenes at 60 showed a robust character, not in the slightest deterred by her equally naked, and equally brilliant, co-actress Margaret Qually, thirty years her junior. A long time star, age became a hindrance to Elizabeth because of the demands of her boss, Harvey (a telling choice of name). His interest in Elizabeth began to wane as her marketability began to wither. She was replaced as the face of a popular television morning aerobics show. Having lived with fame and face recognition for so much of her life, she was alarmed at the void opening up in front of her, a fame-free future, once Harvey told her that her presence on the Hollywood Walk of Fame was superfluous to requirement.
Anxious and anguished, not quite ready to walk off the stage, with the termination notice to the fore of her mind, her drive through city streets leads to her finding herself distracted by her image being erased from a billboard. In the second it took her to glance away she lost control of her vehicle. The camera work from inside the car was done with aplomb, causing more than one wince and a gasp in the living room, as Ms Sparkle was thrown around like a rag doll. Suddenly it seemed the light might be going out in her life. No more Ms Sparkle was avoided by good luck, which was explained to her by the hospital doctor who fortunately gave her the all-clear before telling her that his wife loved her TV show. Not so fortunately, the male nurse examining her gave her information about The Substance that could change her life. With the sparkle having gone out of her career thanks to the avarice of Harvey, the chance to reignite the flame of fame was too much of an allure. Seemingly on the up . . . so began her descent into Hell.
The Substance is a green liquid that restores youthful vitality but it can only work via the emergence of a new person. A secular version of the biblical myth where a woman is created from a rib, the only concession to feminism lies in the figurative rib from which Sue was created belonging to Elizabeth. The profiteering suppliers of The Substance explain that there are not two people but one. If the viewer can grasp the Catholic theological Blessed Trinity idea they can get their head around Elizabeth and Sue being the same person existing in two bodies.
Success in a cutthroat world inevitably sees someone's throat cut. Failure for somebody is invariably the price of success for someone else. The younger Sue soars while the older Elizabeth sinks. Feast of fame for one, famine of fading for the other, the inevitable internal conflict is set in motion.
The script could have been written by Stephen King, not just because of the horror dimension - while the supernatural is not at work in the film, The Dark Half invites comparisons - but because of the cut throat rat race that defines US capitalism into which King sketched a window with The Running Man, under the pseudonym Richard Bachmann. Parallels may also be found in the sporting world where performance enhancing drugs have at times caused a very corrosive effect on authentic competition. The final part of the two and half hour movie has echoes of Marry Shelley's Frankenstein. A movie, not of the horror genre but which serves up horror nonetheless.
Written and directed by French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat, The Substance is a film of the Me Too era, a pushback against the Harvey ilk of this world who denigrate and destroy in their own rapacious race to the top that sends so many others spiralling to the bottom. Those who are singularly committed to the objectification of women and reduce them to mere chattel are not the heroes of this film. No heroines emerge either, just women crushed by the relentless lust of the male gaze. A sad denouement where Fargeat plants a thought in the minds of her viewers as to how such an ugly industry ever became known as the beauty industry.
