Cross body shock

[Three weeks till the Academy Awards! And since I’m an Oscar nerd you’ll be getting my reviews of all the Best Picture nominees, and some of the other major ones, before the March 2 show. Reviews of A Complete Unknown, The Brutalist, Conclave, Nickel Boys, and Emilia Pérez, are already up.]

I’m not even sure what qualifies as “body horror” — go on, inundate me with definitions — but by instinct I am the opposite of a body horror fan. I love all the other frissons that cinema has to offer, from nostalgia to righteous outrage to contemplation to eroticism. But grotesqueries of the human body turn me right off. As a kid I had the stomach for it, or rather the need to show that I did, as a kind of nerd machismo. But now, nuh-uh. I can’t even get through The Holy Mountain because of that — and I don’t mean I have to race through the gross parts, or glimpse them through my fingers; I mean my reaction is, “well, if it’s gonna be like that, never mind, click.”

Maybe it has more to do with narrative than with gross-out. I love Cronenberg and will sit through much pathomorphism from him, because I know he’s going to lead me somewhere. I had no experience of Coralie Fargeat before I saw The Substance, but she gave enough sense of direction from the beginning that I could stand the injections, home surgeries, repulsive prosthetics and whatnot, albeit through finger-screens, not only because I wanted to see where it was going but also because I sensed the body horror was part of the point.

The Substance is an eternal-youth-gone-wrong story, in the vein of Seconds and The Picture of Dorian Gray, but from a female perspective and therefore, unavoidably, a feminist one. We first learn that Elisabeth Sparkle is a movie star from her emblem on the Hollywood Walk of Fame — which we also see, over several seasons, trod upon, cracked, and, finally, covered in accidentally-spilled tomato sauce. This is our first alert that the movie will not be subtle.

We quickly learn Sparkle’s now a TV exercise queen; we meet Demi Moore as Sparkle finishing up a taping, shouting blandly positive patter as she and her crew dancersize. Afterwards she towels off, walking past factota crying “Happy birthday.” Everything is pleasant and plastic.

Then Sparkle overhears program executive Harvey — Dennis Quaid, crass and stupid and filmed with a fish-eye lens — telling someone the “old bitch” is going to get canned in favor of someone “young” and “hot.” Sparkle has lunch with him; he tries to be subtle and exhibits terrible eating habits, also in fisheye. (All the men in The Substance are gross but, as I’ve said before in a similar context, turnabout is fair play.)

Sparkle’s reaction is very controlled, almost as if what’s happening is in fact happening to someone else. She appears determined to march stoically through her delisting as, we gather, she has marched through everything else in her showbiz career. But she gets in a car crash — distracted by her own face, torn from a billboard by workmen, floating through the air — and when the doctor who checks her out wishes her happy birthday, she starts crying. Unnoticed, the accompanying young resident slips her a note — IT CHANGED MY LIFE — and a flash drive.

This is the promo for the Substance, a regimen that allows one to be young via an alter ego drawn from one’s own flesh. The promo, bold and infomercial-style, claims the user can be a younger version of themself, but only for a week at a time, at the end of which they have to return to their older self for a week, via a similar process. (They’re a little vague on how these processes work.) It ends with a dire warning to the potentially self-twinning listener: “YOU ARE ONE. You can’t escape from yourself.”

There are small subplots (including an unexpectedly poignant one involving an old classmate) but the movie is now about Sparkle and “Sue,” the other self that, literally, and disgustingly, emerges from her body when she takes the Substance. As Sue, Margaret Qualley is obviously Sparkle, but as young and hot as Harvey could wish. When she shows up to audition as Sparkle’s replacement, Harvey and all the other gross guys love her. Qualley navigates this with the restraint we first saw in Sparkle, along with some girly-flirty energy she knows her previously-vanished youth and physical perfection will put over.

It looks as if Sparkle’s got what she wanted, but The Substance is too front-loaded with dread and disgust for that to be possible. It’s hardly a spoiler to say that Sparkle, and Sue, want more than what the Substance can give, and it makes them enemies. But, as the promo warned, they can’t escape each other.

Here the body horror follows the logic of addiction and self-destruction, but with a twist; while, as usual, the junkie seeks gratification, she doesn’t get it from the drug, but from the way the drug makes the world look at her. Thus the disintegration isn’t just a side-effect of the gratification, it’s a catastrophe, and instead of subduing the victim it drives her to mania. The fight to get level becomes increasingly outsized and violent until it explodes in blood and rage.

The ending, which I won’t describe, suggests Sparkle, in extremis, has figured out if only for a moment that her real calamity isn’t sagging flesh or female competition. If you think it’s too much, I can’t argue with you; maybe I accepted because, having already accepted the horror as legit, I was ready for the whole burning-castle conclusion.

All the craft elements are spectacular. The editing, by Fargeat, Valentin Féron, and Jerome Eltabet, keeps the pace and smooths the monstrous transitions, and the techno score by Raffertie manages to both enhance the shifting moods and support the overall otherworldly feel.