From the left: Margaret Qualley, director Coralie Fargeat and Demi Moore attend the North American premiere of The Substance on opening night of the Toronto International Film Festival at the Royal Alexandra Theatre in Toronto, on Sept. 5.VALERIE MACON/AFP/Getty Images
There is no way to describe French auteur Coralie Fargeat’s new film, The Substance, as anything other than delightfully demented. The follow-up to her high-voltage debut, the 2017 rape-revenge flick Revenge, The Substance gleefully doubles down on Fargeat’s now trademark blood-and-guts feminism in its body horror take on an aging Hollywood star desperate to maintain the industry’s impossible standards of youth and desirability.
In one of this year’s greatest triumphs in screen casting, Demi Moore stars as Elisabeth Sparkle, an Oscar winner and Jane Fonda-esque aerobics show superstar, who is unceremoniously fired by misogynist television executives on her 50th birthday. Defeated and, in all ways, kicked while she’s down, Elisabeth is introduced to a black-market serum named “The Substance,” which, when injected, promises to spawn a younger and more beautiful alter ego of the user that, despite its separate physical form, remains connected with its “source” body and mind as a single entity.
It is a grotesque alchemy of creation that gives rise to not only Sue – a perkier and glistening twenty-something projection of Elizabeth’s former youth and success, who quickly ascends the Hollywood ranks as the newest ingenue (played here by Margaret Qualley) – but also a range of horrific side effects that set in once the inextricable duo inevitably push the limits of the substance’s guidelines. It’s a madcap descent into a battle of ego and id, which further catapults into the creation of an enchantingly repulsive hybrid monster aptly named “MonstruoElisaSue.”
“I was really captivated reading the script,” Moore says during an interview following the film’s raucous reception at the Toronto International Film Festival last week, where the movie won the People’s Choice Midnight Madness Award. Co-star Qualley is quick to add, “I thought it was really singular and special. I had never read anything like it – it was totally new.”
“It was such a wild ride just reading it – never mind stepping in to actually make the film,” Moore continues. “It was something that I really felt would push me out of my comfort zone and allow me to delve into some emotionally deep places that I haven’t had the chance to explore in a long time.”
Between the physical demands of the role and the film’s take on aging as a woman in Hollywood, the character offers Moore a vulnerable character that echoes her own industry experiences. During the mid-nineties, Moore was famously the highest-paid female actor working at the time, and an early advocate for equitable pay for women in the industry.
Despite her many successes, one only needs to recall the media frenzy that celebrated her svelte physical appearance while, at the same time, critically panning her performance in the 1996 black comedy Striptease to get a sense of the cruelly gendered ironies a woman actor such as herself must endure.
“I think that what made the film so special is everything that she put into it as an actor – her trust in me to go into unknown territories. I think her instincts told her that this was a powerful and empowering story,” Fargeat says alongside her two stars. “We wanted to do something with these ideas of what women have to face in society – all the power dynamics that these issues give birth to and the violence of it all. We wanted to confront all of this; we didn’t want to be victims of it anymore.”
While The Substance sees Fargeat run full tilt into her vision of balls-to-the-wall genre thrills in some of the most silly, campy, self-referential, if not, deranged ways, the film is a major tonal pivot for Moore’s filmography to date.
“It’s not particularly a genre that I was super familiar with,” she says. “I’d seen Coralie’s first film but, other than that, I couldn’t really list off specific body horror films to you off the top of my head.”
The Substance no doubt makes itself right at home in the same sort of stark and disturbed – if not fully squelching – imagination that fellow body horror filmmakers David Cronenberg, Brian Yuzna, or Frank Henenlotter have created. And, much like her peers, Fargeat leans into a playfully unhinged (or, what some may blithely refer to as “French”) political incorrectness in order to materialize its political satire.
“The point of the movie was to make a political statement in a very massive and uncompromising and unsubtle way,” Fargeat says. “It’s what I love about genre filmmaking: being able to go a bit wild – allowing what is burning on the inside to live on the outside.”
To that end, The Substance is a marvel of practical effects and prosthetics work, with French special effects artist Pierre-Olivier Persin and his team’s craftwork charting the delirious transformations of its lead characters from variations of idealized female bodies to their final, monstrous and wholly Othered, chimeric form.
“I knew from the start that I wanted to do everything for real,” Fargeat says. “Body horror is about flesh and bones. It’s something that is organic that you have to be able to feel and touch while you’re filming.”
With an unforgettable final scene that required 30,000 gallons of fake blood to be sprayed on set, The Substance revels in its own materials and making, right up until its final slimy moments.
“It was a challenge,” Qualley says of the physical demands. “I don’t know which one was harder – playing Sue or playing the monster. One side has so much pressure and is awkward and painful in its own way and so is the other, both physically and spiritually.”
Despite all of its blood-soaked grotesquerie, all three collaborators are firm in their belief that what audiences see in the film pales in comparison to the kinds of violence women both internalize and externalize onto themselves in order to meet a perpetually changing idea of beauty.
“One of the things that drew me to working on this film was not just how Fargeat shows us the circumstances of our societal conditioning that many of us have bought into, in regards to the lifespan of a woman’s desirability,” Moore says, “but also the violence that we subject ourselves to.”
“There is always something new that can make you feel and believe that you’re not right, that something about you is wrong,” Fargeat agrees.
“I’m so touched when I see people react strongly to MonstruoElisaSue. She is the light in the film – that hope that one day you can finally release your internal beast and be at peace with yourself.”
The Substance opens in select theatres Sept. 20.