The Substance is the fulfillment of a prayer: that of having a film in the cinema capable of leaving a lasting mark, of giving something significant, memorable, of doing it with audacity and above all with great creativity. Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley and Dennis Quaid are the protagonists of a wild, irrepressible, magnificent body horror comedy, which confirms how much La Croisette is linked to the genre and above all knows how to propose incredibly innovative variations of it.

The Substance – the plot

The Substance guides us in a world that is ours, but is not really ours, let’s say it resembles us, consider finding yourself in a uchronia that is a mix between the most plasticky 80s imaginable and the drift individualistic 21st century technocrat. The protagonist is Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) who has obtained her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, but time has passed, she has reached 50, she is no longer the most desired woman. All that remains of her myth is a fitness television program.

But that program, as she is told by her manager, the slimy and amoral Harvey (Dennis Quaid), will no longer be her program, she is too old, her beauty is gone, they want a new face. Desperate, she is involved in a car accident on the way back. Hospitalized, she is approached by a nurse, who says he can help her. In a short time, through a mysterious organisation, she is offered a sort of incredible pact with the devil: injecting herself with a mysterious substance, which will lead her to give birth, so to speak, to another her, but much younger, more beautiful, endowed with free will and independence.

The two women will have a week each in the real world, with one stuck in some sort of stasis, but they are not two people, simply one person with two lives. Elisabeth in particular essentially acts as a biological reserve for Sue (Margaret Qualley), who however will naturally begin to take various liberties. In fact, nothing will go as expected, because the very young and beautiful clone will become the new star of the television program, finally a celebrity, and then that precarious coexistence between the two will be completely broken, with effects that are nothing short of monstrous.

The Substance bears the signature of Coralie Fargeat, who confirms herself as an interesting and atypical director, aggressively feminist but never an end in itself. And in fact it gives us a crazy film, but above all capable of proposing different themes with interconnected and particularly interesting reading levels. The Substance is an extraordinary body horror comedy, the likes of which we haven’t seen in a long time, and which turns the clock back to those fabulous 80s of cinematic counterculture. There are obvious homages and connections with the cinematography of Yuzna, Carpetner, Cronenberg. We laugh, we are horrified, above all we are never indifferent to a story which is basically a sort of dark pop fairy tale, apparently second-class, but in reality a very refined authorial product.

A crazy genre comedy capable of always hitting the nail on the head

The Substance is dominated by these two female pillars, Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley. The first was the sex symbol of the 90s, then she had a sort not unlike her character. Qualley often mimics her, quotes her, walks around armed with a body modified by an extraordinary make-up department, which makes her even more of a Barbie, much more than what we have had from Margot Robbie and Greta Gerwig.

Everything in The Substance, from the direction, to the glossy but cold photography, from the essential sets, aims to imprison us in a world that is almost exclusively for interiors, another element that winks at genre cinema. There is a clear attack on all the worst things that the mainstream American industry still produces today, the one that always tries to produce new bodies to adore, new curves to sell. Another dominant theme in The Substance is ageing, the centrality of being young eternally and without conditions in modern society, the thought of being able to defeat time with surgery and the like, with the illusion that it is the only thing that really matters.

We talk very well about the problem linked to the female image in the media, the need to always and deliberately be connected to certain aesthetic canons, which don’t want to know about leaving or being seriously annihilated. Fargeat then also adds a touch of parody to the male-centric objectification, with a crescendo that leads to a final epiphany in which she mentions The Thing, Blob, in short the many cornerstones of the body horror of the past. If Moore is extraordinary in her ability to be everything and the opposite of everything, to move between irony and drama in an irresistible way, Qualley confirms herself as the most disturbing interpreter of her generation.

The Substance is vibrant, original, it is not afraid of anything or anyone, but it is also capable of sensitivity, of a veil of melancholy that hovers and touches us intimately, while we see this still beautiful woman not recognizing herself in the mirror. Extremely ferocious towards Showbiz and image culture, The Substance is a film that you absolutely cannot miss, it will be remembered as the symbolic work of this Cannes 2024, which in other ways is quite disappointing. Now it remains to be understood how much such audacity will appeal overseas, also for the use of nudity, the explicitness of the contradictions of society 2.0 without sugarcoating the pill, a practice that is very little liked in America.

Rating: 9