The Substance

★★★★½

Anyone who knows me knows this isn’t normally my kind of movie. Body horror continues to be the only film genre that I have a slight aversion to; my lifelong fear of blood and gore, which has thankfully subsided greatly in recent years, can still activate a fight-or-flight panic within me at the sight of certain images. Nothing I had heard of Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance” told me I’d be able to stomach it. I had made peace with missing this one. I had the chance to see this at the Toronto International Film Festival, at its opening night Midnight Madness screening, and I passed on it. Genuinely, I feared fainting in the middle of the Royal Alexandra Theatre.

Flash forward over a month, and nearly every person in my life was raving about “The Substance.” Its social media marketing was similarly inescapable. So I promised myself I’d watch the film when it arrived at home on demand. I could keep the lights on, I could pause at my leisure. But everyone that I told about this plan reacted with similar apprehension. I would be doing myself a disservice to miss this on the big screen, they told me, and more notably, I’d be lessening the film’s potent insanity to not experience it alongside a packed crowd of theatregoers. Now, if there’s one thing I fear more than blood and gore, it’s feeling left out of big cultural moments. I couldn’t rob myself of this, I had to take The Substance and I had to take it soon. I booked a ticket to the next busiest screening I could find, swallowed my fear, settled my racing heartbeat, and last night entered Coralie Fargeat’s body-horror nightmare.

What I found in that theatre was one of the most audacious and purely entertaining cinematic experiences of the year. “The Substance” is gnarly, sick fun, and completely, singularly unforgettable. I was blown away. I get it now. I have been activated.

For those unaware of the film’s madness, here’s the deal: Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) is a fading Hollywood star, an aging has-been desperate to reclaim the public’s admiration and love. Her chance to do so comes in the form of a mysterious black-market drug called The Substance: a multi-step injection regimen that forms from Elisabeth’s body a much younger duplicate who calls herself Sue (Margaret Qualley). Alternating seven days each, Sue finds immediate fame filling Elisabeth’s shoes. But when she begins outstaying her week-long intervals for more time in the spotlight, disastrous consequences befall Elisabeth. The physical disfigurement kind of consequences.

Propelled by a thumping techno score and coated in surreal vibrancy, “The Substance” is a brash wrecking-ball of a film that laces its satire of Hollywood and extreme beauty standards with some of the most twisted, grotesque images I have ever seen. Like a shot of adrenaline injected straight into your veins, Coralie Fargeat’s film is electrifying, blood-pumping cinema; an unflinching assault on the senses that had me laughing and wincing in equal measure. It’s gross, sickening stuff, but it’s also deeply hilarious and touchingly empathetic. Beyond its obvious formal strengths — from its stellar prosthetics and imaginative production design to its excellent costuming and flashy editing — “The Substance” strikes so sharply as the cumulative result of the world Fargeat crafts, which is absorbing, repulsive and gleefully exaggerated in its heightened in-your-face-ness.

Make no mistake, Fargeat is not aiming for subtlety. “The Substance” has one frequency and it maintains it through 140 minutes, its direct bluntness being its greatest strength. The internalized misogyny that makes women want to tear off their own skin to find something more outwardly desirable underneath is precisely the intersection of satire and horror that Fargeat’s film rests in. Sue being Elisabeth's younger, sexier counterpart to reclaim mainstream relevance is just the jumping off point for a film that could have delivered a wildly good time on that scenario alone. But instead, every time you think Fargeat has reached her limit, she cranks up the volume and finds a new ceiling to the madness. The way the premise is continually warped and disfigured to further drive home Fargeat’s one-note message is one of the film’s simplest joys. Its lack of nuance isn’t a detriment, it’s the film’s biggest asset.

Well, that and Demi Moore. To put to words the degree of fearlessness and vulnerability Moore displays here is to undercut it entirely — it can’t be quantified. She is the film’s anchor, the centre of gravity that everything orbits around, and none of it works without her. This is arguably the defining role of her career. In many interviews, Moore has explained that she took the role knowing the film could either be “something extraordinary or a complete disaster.” Her performance is a fundamental component of why the film is extraordinary, her dedication prevents it from becoming a complete disaster. She’s revolutionary.

Opposite her, Margaret Qualley is outstanding as Sue, similarly unafraid to bare it all physically and emotionally. She swings for the fences here with a fiercely uninhibited performance that marks some of her very best work, a lit firecracker of a role that she infuses with a delightful vivacity.

And that energy is felt in the theatre. I wish now to personally thank every person who insisted I see this with a crowd, because there are some experiences that simply demand the involuntary vocal reactions of several hundred theatregoers. The collective recoil in disgust that was felt throughout the auditorium at some of the film’s most insane moments was pure moviegoing bliss; the shared experience of laughing together, gasping together, cheering together and, yes, reacting with various noises of sickened revulsion together, is the magic we go to the movies for. I covered my eyes at points, squirmed in my seat, the man next to me put a hand to his mouth to hold back a gag. We felt bonded. Isn’t that what this is all about?

“The Substance” was something I was scared of. Now, I want to take it again. It’s original, singular, one of the most well-crafted experiences of the year, and an instant body-horror classic. Its last twenty minutes contains some of the most unhinged, stomach-churning images I’ve ever seen in a major multiplex, and I’ll be forever grateful to Coralie Fargeat for giving me that experience. I came out of that theatre positively buzzing, and ultimately just thankful I didn’t have too much to eat beforehand.