Why This Disgusting Horror Film About Hollywood Beauty Standards Is the Most Divisive Movie of 2024

No one who watches this twisted Demi Moore movie a couple of particular anti-aging remedy will overlook it. But is it a feminist masterpiece or a superficial, misogynistic, exploitative one?

In The substanceIn French director Coralie Fargeat’s much-discussed, opulently stylized, and lavishly gory gonzo horror, a disembodied voice echoing over a promotional video for a sinister new magnificence product asks, “Have you ever dreamed of a greater model of your self, youthful, extra lovely, extra good?” It’s a query that captures Fargeat’s intent: to discover, by way of the medium of blood splatter, thrills, and a touch of science fiction, what occurs when this want to suit the mildew of magnificence requirements will get out of hand.

The movie opens with superstar aerobics teacher Elisabeth (Demi Moore) turns 50 and, deemed too wrinkled by TV executives to proceed internet hosting, is knowledgeable that she will likely be ousted from her daytime slot in favor of a youthful, prettier star. Enter “The Substance,” a suspicious inexperienced serum for which a shady medical firm is looking for take a look at topics. It guarantees to create a “youthful, prettier” model of itself. And so, Elisabeth’s substitute, Sue (Margaret Qualley), is born, rising from Elisabeth’s backbone in a macabre twist.

While its premise could inject one thing new into the combo, Fargeat’s chosen theme of the worry of getting older is already well-trodden floor. Think of Margo Channing (Bette Davis), whose profession is at risk of being snatched away by her younger assistant (Anne Baxter) in All About Eve (1950), or Veronica Ghent (Alice Krige) in 2021’s She Will, an getting older Hollywood star with a vengeful spirit. The Substance has additionally earned comparisons to Death Becomes Her (1992), wherein an getting older actress performed by Meryl Streep drinks a potion that bequeaths her everlasting youth.

But it’s not a lot Fargeat’s subject material as his remedy of it that has irked some critics. The Substance is the follow-up to Fargeat’s 2017 movie Revenge, a equally brash, pulpy and blood-soaked rape-revenge thriller, a grisly subgenre that has been infamous for its over-the-top depictions of ladies in ache. One of his signature works, I Spit on Your Grave (1978), was launched within the wake of the rise of the anti-rape motion within the United States, when feminists started to speak about sexual violence as an endemic social drawback, however it famously contained a chronic, 10-minute rape scene that many thought of horribly exploitative.

Fargeat’s tackle the style has seen a digital camera wink on the physique of his protagonist Jennifer (Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz) to poke enjoyable on the method males sexualise girls. This objectifying gaze returns in Fargeat’s second movie to deal with Qualley’s half-naked physique. While Fargeat’s debut aimed to subvert this gaze within the movie’s second half, when a mud-covered Jennifer miraculously returns from the useless to precise revenge on her tormentors, some really feel Qualley’s later takes don’t fairly do the job. “I believed they actually overdid it,” critic Hilary A White tells the BBC. “The digital camera is de facto looking at her. I’m unsure there’s sufficient ironic distance between the message of the movie and these fixed close-ups of the younger star’s sweaty physique.”

The line between subversion and indulgence in misogyny just isn’t simple to attract. Similar accusations have been leveled at Revenge, Slate critic Lena Wilson stated in his review that “whereas the movie makes a valiant try and subvert a sexist formulation by wrapping itself in French auteur movie trappings and pseudo-emancipatory femininity, it in the end falls prey to its exploitative roots.” The movie’s detractors did not have an excessive amount of of an total affect on its vital reception, nevertheless: it scored a stable 88% on Rotten tomatoes on the time of publication.

The Substance falls right into a subject often known as “physique horror,” outlined by carnal mutations, mutilations, and copious quantities of blood. Its recognition is commonly attributed to the Canadian king of horror The World of David Cronenberghowever lately filmmakers and non-binary girls like Titanium director Julia Ducournau, Rose Glass, Amanda Nell Eu and Laura Moss have pushed the style in new instructions. Body horror has provided these filmmakers the chance to delve into subjects similar to coming of age, feminine want and gender fluidity and, within the case of Glass, Love lies bleedingto take pleasure in patriarchy-crushing violence. Critic Katie Rife describes the motion as “a nascent wave of aggressive, stylized feminine style filmmakers” dealing in “in-your-face feminist metaphors.”

“The Substance just isn’t a refined movie,” Rife says. “I personally take pleasure in that form of aggressive hyper-stylization, however I might say there are individuals who don’t notably like being hit with extreme type.”

This grisly surplus, slightly than reinforcing his message, most likely obscures Fargeat’s level. One of the phrases and circumstances of the drug’s use is that Elisabeth and Sue should change locations each seven days. When this “steadiness” begins to interrupt down, that’s when the physique horror kicks in. White explains: “I discovered that the very plausible and really critical points he was satirising so successfully within the opening hour had been all drowned out by this bathe of blood and viscera within the final 20 minutes: monstrous prosthetics of physique horror coming at us from all angles.”

Furthermore, the portrayal of older girls in movie has additionally fueled a decades-long debate in regards to the portrayal of older girls on display screen. There is a protracted line of movies, categorised as “psycho-biddy” or “exploitation of hags” cinema, wherein girls, deemed by Hollywood to be previous their prime, are portrayed as grotesques and descend into insanity and homicide. Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), wherein Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) is a jilted former Hollywood icon pushed to violence, offered the archetype, with later horror movies similar to The Nanny (1965) and Strait-Jacket (1964) demonizing older girls in additional overtly ugly methods. Rife finds The Substance’s use of hagsploitation tropes, dramatically remodeling Moore’s physique with visible results, to be laced with irony. “There’s an enormous irony in the entire thing. Something that (Fargeat) stated within the Q&A on the Toronto International Film Festival was that what he advised the actors is that when characters lastly like one another, they develop into a monster, and I believe that is essential to the purpose of the movie.”

Perhaps on the coronary heart of the controversy over The Substance is the movie’s alleged superficiality. As Hannah Strong he puts it in his overview of Little White Lies: “in regurgitating previous speaking factors about Hollywood’s obsession with magnificence and its worry of getting older, The Substance turns into a sterile facsimile of Hollywood itself.” Rife believes the movie has “critical and legitimate” factors to make in regards to the magnificence trade and the titular substance’s parallels to mass-market medicine like Ozempic and Botox pressured upon girls, however he does not deny its shallowness. “As an expression of anger,[its lack of substance]does not damage the movie in any respect,” Rife says. “It does not actually damage the movie as a visceral, cathartic expertise, which I believe is its main worth.”

The query many will ask is: Does the movie perpetuate the concept magnificence and youth are society’s most prized possessions, whereas additionally conceptually attacking these values? “With something that’s on the floor glamorous, opulent, luxurious and opulent however has a darkish facet, it’s calibration,” White provides. “It’s about discovering that steadiness between the protagonist taking a look at it and being seduced by it, whereas on the similar time having sufficient of a curtain pulled again to point out the monster that’s behind it.”

Whether The Substance strikes this steadiness looks as if the jury continues to be out. Whether it’s a triumph of feminist rage, a chunk of pure leisure, or a simple catastrophe, that’s one thing viewers must see for themselves.

The Substance is now out there in theaters within the US and UK