Winner of the Cannes 2024 Best Screenplay award, this film by Director Coralie Fargeat is a body horror satire that literally dares you to sit through the two-hour twenty running time without once flinching or averting your eyes from the screen. Honestly, if you keep your eyes glued to the screen and do not once feel queasy, please change profession and become a surgeon, mortician, or old-school butcher. Visceral, bloody, and gory, this film is certainly not for the weak of the stomach.

And yet, lying at the heart of the film is a laudable screenplay that talks of our hypocritical standards for beauty, our obsession with youth, and how one thing can lead to another as we descend down this rabbit hole of what’s sellable and in vogue in Hollywood. 

The premise is simple: Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) had her 15 minutes of Hollywood fame, and her star on the Avenue is just a tarnished reminder of what once was. Now, she’s like some Jane Fonda, surviving and staying relevant as a TV fitness Queen. When a chance phone conversation is overheard in the men’s bathroom, she realizes that her TV producer (Dennis Quaid) is already out to find a younger version. Elisabeth is pushed to find a solution at any cost.

Cutting-edge medical technology holds out the offer of an illegal designer street drug that allows one to undergo ‘mitosis’ and create a younger version of oneself. The caveats are you have to revert every seven days and remember you are one - not two separate persons. Forget the dubious science of it all or why the house cleaner suddenly disappears - the point is how vanity and ambition will lead us down any avenue of potential redemption. 

So from the use of said Substance, a new better Elisabeth is ‘born’, portrayed by Margaret Qualley, who christens herself as Sue. It works like a charm; Sue is everyone’s dream replacement, and only she knows it’s still Elisabeth. There are some crazy humorous scenes, such as when the neighbor knocks to complain about the DIY home improvement Sue has embarked on in ‘their’ apartment. 

And the moral lesson comes when Sue starts delaying the reverting, too enamored by her days as Sue. Then it isn’t long before all Hell breaks loose, there’s a stiff price to be paid, and hubris comes knocking. The graphic nature of this telling is what has made this film such a body horror hit. My middle son declared it the film he’s enjoyed the most this year. Plus, in a month, when we got Megalopolis and Joker Folie A Deux, Matteo felt The Substance was, by far, the actual film to watch. 

For me, Coralie Fargeat has grown up on a diet of David Cronenberg films, such as Dead Ringers and The Fly. It’s an acquired taste and not for the mainstream. But I do like the fact that one can’t even call this an exploitative film, turning women into objects as a woman directs it. If ever, it’s her manifesto against the standards of beauty that society imposes on us.