TIFF 2024: The Substance

Courtesy of TIFF

With apologies to what I assume will be the more niche appeal of Terrifier 3, I doubt any (relatively) mainstream movie this year will match the gleefully gonzo nature of Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance. Building on her excellent debut (2017’s Revenge), Fargeat supersizes her canvass, presenting a broad satire targeting the commodification of sex, beauty, and women’s bodies — which more than anything resembles a modern take on The Picture of Dorian Gray — and filling it with a collection of meticulous crafted body horror imagery and gross-out gags that are likely to elicit peals of laughter of cries of disgust in equal measure.

The Substance — and I say this fondly — is anything but subtle, with nearly every sequence emitting a level of freneticism that will have you wondering whether the primary on-set direction was to dial it up to eleven. For the most part this delivers to riotous effect: Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley look like they’re having the time of their lives as they deliver go-for-broke performances as two sides of the same doomed coin, with Moore in particular doing fine work to imbue her scenes with an undercurrent of emotional resonance and vulnerability as she simultaneously builds a realized character and taps into audiences’ collective history with her star persona.

Performance is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the film’s delirious energy, however. The premise itself sets the stage for the type of movie we’re in for — “aging” TV star, cast aside in favor of the new young thing, undergoes an experimental procedure with Gremlins-esque rules whose enjoyably predictable breaking leads to enjoyably predictable chaos — and every subsequent creative decision appears to be in service of overstimulating the viewer. The camera whips around and pushes in to an unpleasantly personal degree, with an image quality that’s ultrasharp and hypervivid, the overwhelming nature of which forces us to reckon with the culture we’ve created together.

Now, to some extent this is a double-edged sword. At an unwieldy 140 minutes, the film threatens to overstay its welcome as the frantic tone borders on punishing. By the time we reach the Grand Guignol climax, one may feel worn down or even desensitized. But relatively speaking this is a minor complaint, as exhaustion is outweighed by the sheer unbridled joy of watching to see how Fargeat — and her stellar makeup and effects team — top themselves from scene to scene.  See it loud, see it with a crowd, and give in to The Substance.