Essen. Coralie Fargeat’s horror “The Substance” provokes with drastic means and takes inspiration from models like “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”.
“There is something that will help you.” The sentence awakens Elizabeth’s spirits. Everything has crumbled for her, the fame and the career. No one remembers her Oscar win, and people walk obliviously over her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Now, in her mid-50s, she is left with a third-rate fitness show for women, and even that the producer Harvey wants to take away from her in favor of a younger, fitter front woman.
In this situation, Elizabeth (Demi Moore, at 60 trimmed to 45 thanks to lifts) gets a tip. She should call a phone number, and then she can pick up the substance. Those who take it reproduce a young, fresh self that continues the lifespan of the host body.
This is how Sue (Margaret Qualley) enters the scene. She charms Harvey (Dennis Quaid as a caricature of Weinstein on speed), gets the new show, rises to stardom – and has no intention of continuing to share her lifespan with Elizabeth. This sounds understandable, yet early on, the anonymous seller of the substance warns that Elizabeth and Sue are always the same person. What one gains, the other will lose, and in the end, both will be left with nothing.
“The Substance” is the second directorial work of the French Coralie Fargeat
Which leads to the fundamentally promising realization that the dark fantasies of the late 19th century are coming back into style 150 years later. Thus, in the second directorial effort of the French Coralie Fargeat, who with her debut “Revenge” in 2018 sold the brutal fantasies of the rape-and-revenge schlock films of the early 1980s with stylish images and even more hardness as a contribution to MeToo.
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Her new work at least presents itself as intellectually demanding. Quickly, thought-provoking models like R.L. Stevenson’s “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” and Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray” emerge, which Fargeat shamelessly plunders for her allegedly satirical examination of the world of superficial beauty. It becomes clear that Fargeat enjoys sipping from the nectar of fame herself. The ingredients are well-known.
“The Substance” in theaters: Stylistic exercise in excess and voyeurism
This begins with a design pleasure in sex appeal and disgust, as Sue, with mediocre dancing talent and even skimpier costumes, is ogled by the camera, while Elizabeth continues to fall apart.
The collision of the two culminates in an orgy of grotesquely exaggerated body disgust and calculated satisfaction of the lowest scandal instincts. Decadent culture shock (Ruben Östlund, “The Square”), David Cronenberg’s body horror (“The Unkillables”), Luca Guadagnino’s lustful seductions (“Challengers”), and a feminist facade for festival circles (the film won the best screenplay award at Cannes) escalate here into a deliberately gaudy, obscenely stretched (140 minutes!) stylistic exercise in excess and voyeurism. Or in shorter terms: schlock for snobs.