The Substance: ‘Til the Screaming is Gone, by Scott Nye

It’d be quite silly to start discussing Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance with any sort of clever allusions to its larger thematic purpose. The film is almost certainly the bluntest object I’ll see this year. Something akin to stretching Ellen Burstyn’s segment of Requiem for a Dream far past the breaking point, The Substance is a 140-minute pummeling experience about the relentless agony of aging and addiction, and the delirious joy of youth and beauty. Its structure is roundly familiar, its characters somewhat thinly-drawn. But we’re not here for theme, philosophy, structure, or character. We’re here to be pummeled. We’re here to be strung-out. We’re here to dance in blood.

Demi Moore stars as Elisabeth Sparkle, a one-time movie star turned TV aerobics instructor, who is fired on her 50th birthday for, well, being fifty essentially. Harvey (Dennis Quaid), the executive in charge of her show, isn’t exactly subtle about it when she overhears him screaming into his phone, his face inches from the camera’s wide-angle lens, about how – more or less – he’s just not turned on by her anymore. These are the eight-figure-salary decisions one has to make.

So Elisabeth is already in a foul mood when she’s struck by a car and sent to the hospital, and perhaps a little more receptive than usual to a gorgeous young male nurse handing her a flash drive, saying he thinks it’d be perfect for her, or her for it. The flash drive contains a video, or more directly, a promise – youth, beauty, rejuvenation. But with a regimen, one the film doesn’t quite explicate until Elisabeth starts taking it (because, come now, we didn’t show up for her not to take it) and finds her back bursting apart and Margaret Qualley crawling out of it.

Activate. Stabilize. Switch.

These are the words to live by.

Every seven days, Elisabeth can swap into the new, young, smooth, beautiful body she’s named Sue. She can ace the audition for the aerobics show she hosts. She can captivate millions of viewers. She can fuck the hottest boys, she can party all night, and she can still show up the next day to tape another class – tight, fit, and turned-on. But when the week ends, the body needs a rest, and she has to go back to being Elisabeth – tired, sagging, checked out. Can these two poles hold their place?

Well, it’s an addiction narrative, so you tell me.

It doesn’t matter that you know where it’s going. It matters that it’s the most ostentatious, grotesque version of where it must go. Fargeat and her sound team emphasize every brittle bone, her makeup team every wrinkle, and her hair team every loose strand, all the better for everything to snap into place when Sue takes over. Elisabeth’s apartment is hardly a living space – barely a soundstage – and it looks out at a billboard of Sue. Every minute she spends as herself is agony. Every minute as Sue ecstasy. And the film drills that home, again and again and again.

Demi Moore has, of late, turned towards lower-budget, auteur-driven work like The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent and Please Baby Please, so Fargeat has found her at just the right time. Her glamorous, spiteful, confident, fragile performance here is spectacular, her vision of Elisabeth a polite landmine who won’t let anyone – herself included – know where the trip wire is. Qualley, one of her generation’s most versatile and captivating actresses, has never had a role quite like this. Her work is often in modest denial of her beauty, channeling it into spunk, pep, and attitude. Fargeat lets her be who she is, an enviable vision, while constantly prodding Sue of the inescapable threat of an aging body she’s leaving somewhere to rot. Qualley similarly played this divide between outward beauty and inward terror in Stars at Noon, and Fargeat – as is her way with every aspect of the film – only invites her to carry it further in both directions.

At 140 minutes, I expect the repetition will wear on some viewers. It’s a thin premise, and perhaps there are only so many aerobics routines the average viewer can stick with. Not me. I loved it precisely for its abundance and lack of abandon, its determination to carry things – even the small, minute-to-minute things – far further than they ever needed to go. It’s a joy to sit in an audience and hear them squirm, while your smile only gets wider. The Substance invites it all. Take it.