Coralie Fargeat
The Substance

"The essence of flesh is decay. The function of flesh, placed within the passage of time, is to bear witness to destruction and decay." Yukio Mishima, The Decay of the Angel

Time, as we know, spares nothing and no one, devouring everything material that comes into contact with it. Including all of us, of course. Subject to gravity and entropy.

Narrative cinema starts with a basic question: "what if?".

The Substance wonders what would happen if an experimental substance could somehow solve this unsolvable problem of the human condition.

But it's not so much– and not only– the aesthetic beauty that fades. It's no coincidence that a woman like Demi Moore was chosen to portray the beautiful protagonist Elisabeth Sparkle, a sixty-year-old playing a fifty-year-old, still stunning, much more than many actresses half her age.

What decays instead is the idea of beauty as imposed by the entertainment industry, which, after all, is nothing more than the direct expression of society itself.

A ruthless and nihilistic society that chews up and spits out its children as soon as they reach a certain age. For continuous and indifferent renewal.

Dog eat dog. Nothing even personal.

It's simply business, dictated by ratings and views.

But it's from this eternal dynamic that monsters are born.

The space child in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the new man representing the future of the human race, is thus, in the birth of this type of consumer and media society, a deformed, monstrous, repugnant creature.

The Substance is a pastiche of references that form a mosaic, where ultimately, the grotesque, the deformation, and the blood that floods and overwhelms everything prevail, evoking the famous finale of Carrie, one of the many films indeed cited.

Others: The Shining, Sunset Boulevard, Mulholland Drive, Re-Animator, The Elephant Man. Cronenbergian body horror.

But even while absorbing many references and not tackling a theme that is new in itself, The Substance finds its original way to stand out and not result in just a postmodern toy.

The idea of the protagonist's doubling, whose two entities are, at the same time, both a single unit yet in constant mutual tension. Elisabeth and Sue, in truth, despise each other, even though they are two sides of the same coin of insecurity and vanity.

The film reaches great heights when it speaks of these feelings, of Elisabeth's insecurity and self-hatred, driven to the extreme by this vicious cycle of consumption of bodies and images. And the way Sue kills her matrix, attacking without pity, shows all the non-acceptance of aging, and the hatred towards one's image once the illusion of youth is lost. More than this, it's the hatred towards the inevitability of time and decay. One of the great taboos of the modern world.

The Substance stages the anger against the cage of flesh.

An anger as irrational as it is understandable and very human.

Out of mind and over the top, perhaps even too much so, The Substance is initially permeated by a subtly disturbing atmosphere, only to abandon itself to out-of-control black humor and feelings of repulsion and disturbance, towards scenes that explicitly show the derailment that occurs when ego and psychological factors take precedence over the scrupulous adherence to the medical instructions of the substance.

Because, from the outset, this was indeed what it was about: ego and psychology.

Hollywood, with its lights and promises, intensifies the desire to shine, thus also weighing down the fall and pain of the crash.

The candle burns at both ends. The stars of the firmament are like the replicants from Blade Runner, destined for a short life and to disappear like tears in the rain.

After a bright yet fleeting arc.

Hollywood and its lesser and even more petty emanation, namely television, ultimately represent nothing but the oldest and most naive of human utopias since its origins: immortality.