Review: 'The Substance' coats its subversive message about body image and self-loathing with an impressively insane amount of gross horror

There’s out there, there’s crazy, there’s bat-crap insane, and if you keep going further out on that limb, there’s writer-director Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance” — a body-horror movie about beauty, age and the efforts to keep those two ideas separated for as long as possible.

Fargeat shows the career track of her movie’s main character through a clever montage, in which a Hollywood Walk of Fame star goes from shiny and adored by fans to cracked and ignored. A similar process is happening to the star’s honoree, Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), an award-winner in her heyday who’s now hosting a morning aerobics show.

On her 50th birthday, Elisabeth gets the word from the network’s repugnant boss, Harvey (Dennis Quaid), that she’s fired — and will be replaced by a younger version of her. She leaves the studio enraged, and ends up in a car wreck, which she survives with barely a scratch.

A nurse at the hospital suggests Elisabeth could be a good candidate for a new drug, called The Substance. The promise is that this wonder drug will restore one’s youth, by allowing a person to become two people, one of them younger. 

Of course, there are rules: The patient injects an “activator,” then the other self extracts a liquid, called a “stabilizer,” from the unconscious first self and injects it once a day for a week — and every week, the two must switch back, no exceptions.

Elisabeth tries it, and suddenly there’s a 30-year-old woman (Margaret Qualley) looking in the bathroom mirror where Elisabeth had been standing before taking the shot. This younger woman, who gives herself the name Sue, walks into the network’s offices and nails the audition to take over Elisabeth’s aerobics show — and even gets Harvey to agree to her unusual schedule, where she’s mysteriously out of town every other week. A star is cloned.

Like the Gremlins, there’s no movie if they don’t get fed after midnight — or, more accurately here, if Elisabeth and Sue stick strictly to the one-week plan. When that detail is violated, things go downhill very fast, leading to one of the most blood-splattered finales I have seen in ages.

Fargeat doesn’t sugar-coat the bloody mess that Elisabeth’s descent becomes — in fact, by the ending, which goes on a little bit too long, she’s fully immersed us in Elisabeth and Sue’s shared psychosis, and in the buckets of blood and viscera that go with it. To paraphrase Mark Twain, never argue with someone who buys their stage blood by the barrel.

If you’re OK with that level of grotesquerie, though, “The Substance” has a lot to say about the sadly obvious predictability of the male gaze, the impossible beauty standards placed on women hitting 50 — and, most importantly, how women contort themselves (in this case, literally) to reach for those standards.

Moore and Qualley play sharply divided sides of the same coin: The older woman trying to forestall time and recapture her youth, and the younger version trying not to screw up her second chance but finding the old bad habits returning. The two women combine for a perfectly mirrored performance, which makes the weirdness of “The Substance” more than arresting, but strangely affecting.

——

‘The Substance’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, September 20, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City) and other theaters. Rated R for strong bloody violent content, gore, graphic nudity and language. Running time: 140 minutes.