c/o USA Today

The trailer for “The Substance,” the latest film from French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat, is phenomenal. It’s one of those rhythmic trailers that pelts you with image after image before you have time to process a single one. You walk away with the impression that the film’s visuals all have a glossy, symmetrical sheen; at the very least, the film will look pristine. Accompanied by gnarly sawing sounds, like something out of Charli xcx’s “how i’m feeling now,” the barrage of images gives the impression that, despite our overstimulation, we haven’t seen the half of it; this film will be forceful, extreme, and completely off-the-rails. 

What goes unacknowledged in a trailer like this is that the images are actually being presented in an “on-the-rails” manner. It is completely subject to a given rhythm and the demands of what can and cannot be shown, demonstrating just how much plot and just how much strangeness the recipe requires to make you want to see the film. It will be completely unhinged. How disappointing it is to walk into a film and find all the scaffolding still in place.

Don’t let me be misunderstood: Claims of this film’s extremity are not overstated. It is a body horror film through and through, and there were grotesque images of bodily transformation that I have been unable to shake. I believe I have a strong stomach for gore, yet “The Substance” effectively grossed me out. So when I speak of the film’s rigidity, I speak not of its wonderful, extremely creative practical effects, but of its form and how the film’s ideas are conveyed through it. In keeping with other films in the pesky trend of “elevated” horror, this will be a film with “Something to Say” in huge bold-faced text.

The film follows Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), an aging star who, at the behest of a predatory studio executive (Dennis Quaid), is ousted from her gig as a TV aerobics instructor in favor of someone younger. A casting call is put out for women aged 18-30, and she is relegated to a lonely existence in her beautiful Los Angeles apartment. Filled with a loathing for what age has done to her body, she undergoes an experimental treatment called The Substance which effectively produces a perfect younger version of her named Sue (Margaret Qualley), whom the film goes to great lengths to tell us she is “one” with. What happens when she gets a taste of existing in this younger body is not for me to spoil, but needless to say it becomes a “Goosebumps”-esque careful-what-you-wish-for fable.

The metatextual thrills of seeing Moore and Quaid in roles like this are undeniable: Her indignation and quiet rage are made especially poignant by her status as a faded sex symbol (in her own way, a relic of a bygone “movie star” era), and his blunt grotesqueness will be particularly satisfying to anyone who saw his po-faced, propagandistic performance in “Reagan.” Less satisfying is Qualley, who has recently proven herself to be one of the finest actors of her generation. In this film, she is so completely limited by the demands of the character that she can’t help but seem one-note. Nearly every shot of her is deliberately leering: There are sequences that feel like TikTok edits of her curves, and she’s consistently shot with a glossy haze that feels ripped from the world of ’80s pinup magazines. This imagery is pointed, of course, as we are meant to clock how the film implicates us by shifting to an objectifying mode when she is on-screen, but it has the effect of making her a caricature of bratty young stardom. Remember, the film goes to great pains to make it clear that she and Moore are one and the same, so to make one performance so lived-in and the other completely stylized is a misstep—one that reveals a film that cares more about its ideas than its central character.

What of the film’s ideas, then? Certainly, using this body-horror style to express the fear of age making one invisible is intriguing. However, nearly everything around the carnage is at once overly blunt and extremely broad, both vague and so in-your-face that the ways it refuses to fill in its world with specificity become off-putting. It traffics in our existing associations with Hollywood’s demands on women, as opposed to shading in those assumptions with any real detail; Quaid’s character is literally named Harvey. 

I’m reminded of two of the year’s best films and how they avoid the pitfalls of “The Substance:” “The Beast” and “I Saw the TV Glow.” Like “The Substance,” “The Beast” is a French view of LA (in its second half). Specifically, it evokes the terror of existing as a woman in an environment whose goal is to fit you into its mold or to kill you. Star Léa Seydoux is as pointedly “perfect” as Qualley is, but the LA of “The Beast” is filled with all the strange idiosyncrasies that “The Substance” can’t seem to muster. It’s no more realistic than Fargeat’s film, but the allusions to real incidents of incel-driven violence and to irony-poisoned internet misogyny (in the form of Dasha Nekrasova–yes, really) give the images an anchor in much knottier, more aggressively current conversations than “The Substance” seems to be able to engage in.

“I Saw the TV Glow,” on the other hand, shares with “The Substance” the horror of being trapped in a body you do not claim as your own. The films share the pain of feeling that time is running out, as well as a clear affinity for the work of David Cronenberg, the patron saint of bodily distortion. “The Substance,” however, is presented with complete precision, borrowing from the forms of MTV and fashion advertising to try to force this pain into hacky, long-established images, whereas “I Saw the TV Glow” has a much more subjective structure, moving through time with an uncontrollable momentum, capturing the feeling of life dragging one along faster than one could possibly prepare for. It’s worth noting “I Saw the TV Glow” is working in a far more allegorical mode than “The Substance” is, something that could certainly detach us from the film’s emotional reality, but instead it ends up being one of the most viscerally immersive films I’ve ever seen. 

To discuss the Cronenberg influence on both films: “I Saw the TV Glow” is also the one to really get it. Cronenberg’s view of the body is as infinitely malleable matter: always shifting, always with the capacity to be shifted. When asked about bodily change in the context of gender transition, the filmmaker responded by saying that transition is merely “an artist giving their all to their art.” In pithy terms, the horror of “I Saw the TV Glow” can be seen as coming from one not giving themselves over to their art. The “body horror” in Jane Schoenbrun’s film is not of a changed body but of a decomposing one, one which was not allowed its natural metamorphosis.

Compare this to the view of the body presented in “The Substance” and Fargeat’s film seems particularly reactionary. The bodily evolutions in her film are the product of selfishness and vanity, and the extent to which they look like nothing we have ever seen before is to be seen as a punishment on someone who hated their body too much. Despite its best intentions, “The Substance” reinforces the idea of a “perfect body,” a form that women would literally bleed themselves dry to embody instead of taking its genre—body horror—for what it is: an imagination of all the ways the body can be reconstructed into something inhuman and still be beautiful, even though it may be nightmarish. I found the prosthetics-heavy “final form” of Elisabeth/Sue beautiful. I’m sure Cronenberg would too. It’s a shame this beauty (and the craft that made it) is wasted on a film with such a limited imagination.

Louis Chiasson can be reached at lchiasson@wesleyan.edu.