Stealing Beauty: THE SUBSTANCE

Look what beauty standards can do to a body. The more desperately one clings to youthful beauty, the faster it slips away. It’s not news that Hollywood’s visual appeal can do great damage to its sex symbols who, as their brief moment of youthful beauty fades, often see their careers follow. We know this. But it’s nonetheless a lesson we have to keep learning. No wonder Taylor Swift named her song “Clara Bow,” a narrative about this very cycle, after one of the first It Girls of the screen. You know the story. As critic Farran Smith Nehme wrote in defense of Kim Novak, whose elderly appearance on the Oscars in 2014 led to some sadly predictable snark about her artificially smooth expression: couldn’t we have some sympathy for the pressures one faces in just such a moment? After a career of being known for your looks, how difficult must it be to face the harsh glow of the stage lights, and the viewing public’s scorn knowing we haven’t the cultural space for appreciating the natural changing beauty of age. She must have been “worried constantly that no matter how you looked, it wasn’t good enough.” Don’t they all. With every new generation of stars, we seem to find belatedly, and sometimes posthumously, a new sense of grace and understanding for the plight of the old. And then we turn around and let the cycle grind up the fresh meat all the same. Time will be kinder to them in retrospect, too.

That idea of a fading star doing damage to herself to further her youthful glow is the concept animating the wild and propulsive and insular new horror picture The Substance, a hard-charging work of showbiz satire that builds and builds until it erupts in gore on its way to a creature feature ending that’s both dripping in viscera and in despair. Set in a simple simulacrum of Hollywood, it stars Demi Moore as an aging actress who’s been hosting a fitness program for years. She’s on the verge of getting replaced by a newer, younger host when she turns to an underground experimental drug—a thick neon-green liquid that’s among the most potent symbolic horror concoctions this side of Larry Cohen’s The Stuff—that’ll reactivate her cells and unleash a newer, younger self. There’s a sadness immediately present as we see a woman desperately clinging to a youthful beauty because she has no greater ambition than that. Her talent or artistic endeavors are in the past, if they ever existed, simply because she’s been part of a business that’s made her only business her charisma, her screen presence, her sex appeal. When that’s all you’ve been paid to give for years and years, no wonder it’s all you want. She needs it to maintain her lavish, empty lifestyle. Moore plays this hollowed-out dissatisfaction with a weary resignation. When she meets with her producer (Dennis Quaid)—a sneering faux-cheery objectifier, wiggling a flaccid shrimp as he talks with his mouth full as he tells her she’s too old to keep hosting—she stares at him with buried outrage burning up into ugly agreement. Yes, she thinks, if only she could be young again.

This desire is so viscerally literalized here that taking The Substance causes the fresher body to hatch gorily out of the old. A viscous, bloody birth bursts out of her back until the lifeless shell lies bleeding on the bathroom floor while the new beauty (Margaret Qualley) stands dripping on the tile. It’s not a younger self; it’s a self, younger. The new body is shot like a car commercial—overlit poses while the camera swoops tight along aerodynamic curves in close up. The old one is a husk that’s to be kept hooked up to a liquid diet so the patient can switch between bodies to keep the bodies properly balanced. It soon enough becomes a pointed, physicalized Dorian Gray situation, with shades of Jekyll and Hyde, her split personality drawing her toward inevitable doom. Her self-loathing has been embodied. The more she wants, the less she’ll have. Writer-director Coralie Fargeat, of the similarly bloody French thriller Revenge, certainly isn’t pulling punches here, and isn’t hiding her intentions in subtlety. The movie is broad, blunt, obvious, as funny as it is nasty. Its conceit is pulled thinly over a drawn-out scenario that gets only more gross and explicit as it propels itself toward a grotesque ending. I mean that as a compliment. Fargeat frames it all in a bold style that keeps a steady eye—bright frames, clean digital precision, unsettling symmetries, thunderclap symbolism—as it piles on the absurd complications. It become a movie about a frenzied emptiness, a fractured loss of self that leads to desperate measures in an attempt to find something fulfilling, something whole. It drips with contempt for those who’d use an appreciation for the beauty of bodies as an excuse to reduce the humanity of those beauties—and bleeds sympathy for those bodies discarded when the shallow no longer have use for them. As Swift writes: “Beauty is a beast…demanding more / only when your girlish glow flickers just so…”