
Despite my penchant for reviewing decades-old movies, today we’re going to explore something a bit more contemporary: Coralie Fargeat’s newest film, The Substance, starring Demi Moore, Dennis Quaid and Margaret Qualley.
Of course, this isn’t my first time writing about body horror for Queen City Nerve and, if I have anything to say about it, it won’t be my last. For my last installment, you’d have to go back to 2019 (or just click the link) to read my piece on 1989’s Society.
But back to the present day. Fargeat previously wrote and directed 2017’s Revenge. That film, while not an instant success, has developed into a cult classic with its feminist take on the rape-revenge genre. So it was great to see the French director’s return, albeit seven years later — good art takes time.
With the release of Revenge, I was fortunate enough to watch it in VisArt Video’s micro-cinema in east Charlotte, but for The Substance, I was forced down a more traditional route. Visiting family in Wilmington, knowing both my dad and grandmother turn in around 8 p.m., I needed something to do.
A friend had told me about a movie called The Substance and, since I often trust their recommendations, I checked to see where it was playing. Before this suggestion, I had no knowledge of this movie. A quick search showed that Demi Moore and Dennis Quaid starred, and it only took me about halfway through the trailer before I said to myself, “Yeah, that’ll do.”
First, a note on the revealing nature of today’s trailers. I remember as a kid buying From Dusk Till Dawn with no inkling of the vampire twist. It blew my mind. Most of the time, these days, we know every moment of a film before we go in; even the trailers have no hang-up sharing spoilers.
For a Tuesday night in Wilmington, the movie had a decent crowd, potentially due to the star power of Moore and Quaid, the latter fresh off his turn in the new Reagan biopic for a very … different turn. Margaret Qualley’s rising star in her own right likely didn’t hurt either. Judging from everyone’s reactions in the theater, we were all in a similar boat — along for the ride, not knowing what to expect.
That’s also a rare thing for me. I don’t get to take part in the moviegoing experience as often as I would like due to a busy schedule, and the choices I do make are made with my wife’s tastes in mind. I also tend to feel like I want my money’s worth when spending so much on a movie ticket, and that can lead us to choose movies we know will provide a better experience on a big screen as opposed to the comfort of our living room.
Our living room wins out a lot of time. Yes, I know I’m long-winded, but the purpose of this preamble is to fight that feeling, especially for The Substance. See this movie in a theater.
On to our regularly scheduled programming. Just a warning, this review will be spoilers galore, so either stop reading or skip ahead if you haven’t seen the film.
From the first frames of the movie, I knew I had made the right choice. It was interesting to see Fargeat’s style play out through some of the same elements that made Revenge feel special.
The movie begins with a time-lapsed shot of Elisabeth Sparkle’s (Demi Moore) star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The lapse starts with a shiny, new star and ends with it cracking over time, people dropping food on it, etc.

This leads into Elisabeth filming an exercise class on her birthday before leaving the studio and walking down a hallway lined with pictures of her from the past, descending through her own timeline before reaching her present 50-year-old self. She attempts to go to the bathroom but has to use the men’s room due to the other being out of order.
As she ducks away in a stall, she overhears Dennis Quaid’s character, Harvey, talking on the phone about the need to find a young replacement for Elisabeth. We find out that Harvey is her agent, and he fires her over lunch.
On her drive home, she sees a billboard with her face on it being torn down to make way for a new billboard. As she’s distracted by this symbolic action, someone T-bones her car. Not a great day in the life of Elisabeth.
These opening scenes make it clear that the movie is not going to make you work too hard to find the message. The early themes involve society’s treatment of women in Hollywood and how they can be tossed out when a male-dominated industry deems they are past their prime. Elisabeth is reminiscent of real-life stars such as Jane Fonda, Suzanne Sommers, Cher, and dare I say Demi Moore, to name a few.
Discussing the film with my dad, Fonda’s name did come up, but every time he would simply bring up her 1972 visit to Hanoi, which earned her the nickname “Hanoi Jane” and caused her to lose work for decades to follow. The truth isn’t that simple, as she explained herself in Time Magazine, stating that photos from the trip were purposefully printed out of content to make it look like she endorsed the shooting down of American planes.
“If I was used, I allowed it to happen,” she said. “It was my mistake and I have paid and continue to pay a heavy price for it.”

There’s another interesting parallel to the Elisabeth character: Demi Moore herself, once a member of the Brat Pack who saw her career stall out for some time after memorable roles in films like GI Jane and Ghost. In The Substance, she turns in one of the best performances of her career, for which she’s already getting Oscar buzz.
Then there’s Dennis Quaid, a vocal supporter of known sexual predator and convicted felon Donald Trump, playing a character named Harvey, a thinly veiled reference to Harvey Weinstein.
It’s rich to think of Quaid, the three-time divorced actor now married to a woman 39 years his junior, delivering lines about women being past their prime. The cognitive dissonance that the role requires makes your head spin.

The role was originally slated for the late, great Ray Liotta, who would have made a meal out of Harvey. That’s not to take anything away from the acting chops of Dennis Quaid, who chews up his scenes both literally and figuratively.
Back to the film: We see Elisabeth in the doctor’s office after getting some X-rays related to her car accident. The doctor says she’s lucky not to have much physical damage before leaving her with a young male nurse. The nurse tells her she’s “a good candidate” then slips her a flash drive and a note personally endorsing the contents of said flash drive.
Outside of the doctor’s office, she’s cornered by an old classmate, Fred, who asks her out. Having had a rough day, she takes the flattery where she can get it, accepting the number but promptly exiting the conversation. Back in her apartment, she wrestles with the implications of opening the flash drive, throwing it in the trash only to dig it out and see what’s on it.
The flash drive reveals a product called The Substance. She calls the number and they give her an address to pick up the product.
Without going into the plot more for fear of further spoilers, she brings the titular Substance back to her apartment and uses it. The main thrust, which you can glean from the trailer, is that The Substance causes Elisabeth to split into two, creating a younger version of herself that she names Sue (Margaret Qualley).
The Substance allows the user to live as their younger self for seven days before returning to their “Matrix-self.” Sue begins her new life, quickly swept up by Harvey as her new agent. She takes over as the new host of the workout show, enrapturing the world with her youthful beauty and charisma.

But remember the rules: You can only be young for seven days at a time. Your old version then must be reactivated for seven days to replenish the cells needed to stay young, while you are deactivated. It’s also important to remember that both versions of the self are one; whatever you do to the new body will affect the host body.
Like mentioned earlier, body horror often serves as satire and Coralie Fargeat doesn’t want you to miss these themes. They’re plastered throughout the film, screaming, “THIS IS THE THING I WANT YOU TO BE AWARE OF.”
We often expect films to more subtly veil their themes, even as literature is known to spell them out. Like Franz Kafka with The Metamorphosis, which deals with capitalism and dehumanization in the workplace by inexplicably transforming the main character into a bug.

It’s also entirely possible that Fargeat just doesn’t trust American audiences, so painting with a wide brush serves as a way to spoon feed the message. I was there to eat it all up.
It’s hard for me to comment on the film through the lens of feminist theory as a straight cis-male, but with a credit shy of a Women’s History minor, I’ll do my best. Much of the movie plays with the idea of male gaze, sometimes subverting that idea while at other times seemingly pushing it.
In Fargeat’s previous film Revenge, we get a subversion of the rape-revenge genre joined by a nuanced dynamic that relishes in violence and the male gaze. As we move into the idea of third-wave feminism balanced against fourth-wave feminism, with the director being in her late 40s, it’s clearly a purposeful contrast.
A quick digest: First-wave feminism brought us Mary Wollstonecraft and her book Vindication of the Rights of Women, which helped gain women the right to vote in 1920. Second-wave feminism came in the 1960s, inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, centered on equal pay and equality in the household and workplace. With notable figures including Gloria Steinem and Angela Davis, successes include the Equal Pay Act (1963) and Roe v. Wade (1973).
Third-wave feminism, a term coined by a 23-year old bisexual woman named Rebecca Walker, brought us The Vagina Monologues, the Riot Grrrl movement and the concept of “inclusivity.” Some critics say we’re still in the third-wave while others insist that we have turned a corner with the advent of the #MeToo movement.
Fourth-wave feminism looks back and criticizes “white feminism” and some of the puritanical views on body image and sexuality while also attempting to look at feminism in respect to queer theory and its intersection with the LGBTQIA+ movement.
Self proclaimed third-wave feminists like JK Rowling, Meghan Murphy and Roseanne Barr have used their feminism as a cudgel to demonize trans people, using derogatory phrases like “rooster in a hen house.” You are likely aware of the phrase Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist, aka TERF. Fourth-wave feminists attempt to course correct this by including more marginalized groups into the conversation as a whole.
The Substance feels like a commentary from someone who was raised on third-wave feminism and is coming to terms with the ideas of the fourth wave. This is of course a very white and straight movie, but to her credit, that’s simply the lens the writer/director could honestly have a conversation through.
In the past decade or so, we’ve seen a lot of think pieces about sex and nudity in movies, to the point that in the late-2010s a lot of sex had been scrubbed from mainstream culture. Of course, we are inundated with it on the internet and it’s still in most of the marketing and other media we consume, but in film culture it’s been mainly missing.

Sure, your Game of Thrones or Euphoria may have brought it back, but its depictions are often couched in darkness or trauma, which is puritanical in and of itself.
As a French woman, Coralie may be commenting on how Americans see nudity in movies. All of Moore’s nudity in the film is played from a place of shame. The actress has spoken at length about what she put herself through while filming 1991’s Indecent Proposal, biking 60 miles a day to and from the set to stay in shape while working 12-hour days and caring for her newborn son.
Then juxtapose Moore’s nude scenes with those of Sue, the younger version of Elisabeth Sparkle, played by Margaret Qualley. Sue is seen as a blank canvas, a point spelled out as she walks the empty hallway once littered with posters of Elisabeth’s life’s work.

Qualley has said that fans have already transposed Sue’s character onto her when she couldn’t be further from her portrayal. She trained for the role by remaining in character while walking around the house she shares with husband Jack Antonoff. She said her husband hated the practice, as Sue is so different from Qualley.
Qualley has also revealed that the visual effects department outfit her with prosthetic breasts for her nude scenes to heighten the idea of the “perfect woman,” adding, “Unfortunately, there is no magic boob potion.”
The male gaze is subverted and inverted so many times that it ends up thrown out the window of Elisabeth/Sue’s high rise apartment. As the daughter of Andie McDowell, who co-starred with Moore in St. Elmo’s Fire (1985) and has recently acted as an advocate for older women, Qualley certainly has insight into the way Hollywood treats aging women.

The film speaks a lot about “respecting the balance,” which I took to be an allegory for living in a world that tells a woman what she should or shouldn’t do with their bodies — the idea of not feeling shame about but wrestling with how you fit into society, whether you want to consider it or not.
We should, of course, break free of those cultural paradigms that direct how we should view our gender, sexuality and humanity, but are we really living in our own truth or are we just talking for our own benefit? It’s impossible to answer without looking inward, a common thread in the film depicted in how Sue treats Elisabeth and how Elisabeth treats herself — all while keeping in mind that these two women are but halves of one whole.
If there’s any part of the movie worth criticizing, it would be the third act. It’s not so much the content but the fact that the movie goes on entirely too long. A shorter edit bringing it under two hours would be a welcome change, but only if it could be done with all of the basic elements left intact.

If it weren’t already clear that we’re operating in a heightened reality, the third act ramps that idea up to a new level, testing the viewer’s suspension of disbelief. This is where Fargeat brings us into French horror territory, a la High Tension.
There’s so much more to uncover in this movie, but in an attempt to not spoil the whole film for those of you that read this far without watching first, I’ll wrap up with a list of recommendations for other classics in the body-horror genre that you should check out if you dug The Substance but aren’t entirely familiar with the style.
While its run at Independent Picture House has already come to a close, you can still catch The Substance at Charlotte’s other independently owned theater, Ayrsley Grand Cinemas 14 in southwest Charlotte.
Society (1989) – I couldn’t help but include this Brian Yuzna classic, as it’s the closest in tone to The Substance — an over the top horror/comedy commentary of the rich exploiting the poor.
Slither (2006) – The practical effects and dark comedy are what brought this to mind. James Gunn might be tethered to superhero fare now, but this is the type of content he brought us in his earlier days.
The Stuff (1985) – Larry Cohen’s film is a commentary about consumer culture, marketing and obsession.
Brain Damage (1988) – Frank Henenlotter followed up his batshit low-budget masterpiece Basket Case with a batshit commentary about drug use, drawing from his own struggles with cocaine addiction in the 1980s.
From Beyond (1986) – Stuart Gordon of Reanimator fame brings another HP Lovecraft tale to the big screen. This is more cosmic horror than the aforementioned films, but worth a spot on the list nonetheless.
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