The Substance is an indie masterpiece destined to turn filmmaking on its head overnight with its furious satire, retro techniques and list of B-movie references so long it reminds me of Pulp Fiction, another Franken-movie built out of references to French New Wave, more than anything else. The newer movie is even more Franken, building itself out of ‘80s body horror movies with an injection of gender horror and a snap-back escalation of the practical effects that make these movies so beloved, as if decades of innovation had stretched on unbroken. Like many genre revivals, it immediately enters the conversation for best body horror movie ever made.

Los Angeles- Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), who has an Oscar and a star on the Hollywood walk of fame to help hold onto the distant memory of her career, is suddenly fired from her longtime gig as an ‘80s-era fitness instructor, studio executive Harvey (Dennis Quaid) arbitrarily deciding that she’s too old. Despondent, she is approached by a secret society testing something referred to only as “the substance,” which causes Sparkle to produce an “other self,” an imperfect younger copy of herself with which she shares a consciousness, who introduces herself as Sue (Margaret Qualley).

Sue immediately goes back to the same studio lot, newspaper advert to be “the next Elisabeth Sparkle” in-hand, and gets a job from the same executive to do the same thing she’d been doing for years.

The degree to which Sue and Sparkle are the same person is contested within the film. The fine print of this is that they are the same person and can only inhabit one body at a time and they must switch between bodies once every seven days with severe consequences to both of them if they fail to do so. They are told at the start, and each reminded repeatedly, that they are the same person, but refer to each other in the third person, and they share a consciousness and never attempt to communicate with each other as if they were another person, but they do not appear to share each other’s memories. Most transitions between them are portrayed as one waking up from the other’s nightmare, and they almost always react in shock when they realize what the other has done. When they first switch, the camera zooms in tight to show us that Sue has different eyes than Sparkle, which indicates to me that they are meant to have different souls.

The Substance is bombastically, bitterly, almost sarcastically symbolic, and refuses to be taken any other way. Its basic thoughts about aging, fame, vanity, and gender are so obvious that you have to sort of move through them and start working on observations on the other side.

The demand for symbolic viewing is obvious in everything about it, but somehow even more apparent in its setting, which is deliberately vague but with sharp specifics. Sparkle’s spacious apartment, never seen from the outside because you couldn’t even imagine this thing actually existing, towers over South Los Angeles, and a massive portrait of herself smiles down at the skyline far below. It screams angrily at viewers that the film is metaphorical and can only be viewed through a metaphorical lens.

Moore and Qualley deliver evasive, spectacularly well-coordinated performances, each betraying their character’s unfathomable ego in different ways. It’s almost a vampire story, this old star looming high over the city making an unholy bargain for immortality, then suffering nightmares and monstrous deformities. Two or three times, they switch consciousness during fluid transfers the precise moment when one stream of blood crosses the other. They even build a chamber to hide their secret.

The film pointedly avoids tying itself to a specific time, but it drills into the alienation of the smartphone era. Sparkle and Sue never see their handler with the substance, being first introduced to it through a surreptitiously planted USB stick, and their only interaction is through a voice on the phone. Once the experience starts, Sparkle refuses to leave her apartment except for errands and is shot lingering for days in this isolation. The constant usage of needles – the experience involves daily fluid transfer between Sue and Sparkle – also evokes the modern heroin crisis.

The film’s main focus is on how differently Sue and Sparkle are treated and viewed, a primary anxiety tied to aging and gender transition, and true to form for a film that internalizes all of its anxieties, the thing that’s really treating and viewing them differently is the camera. Sparkle is shot mostly from static angles, at a bit of a distance and often still, but when the camera is on Sue, the whole world is alive with motion, color and music, the younger woman at the center of it, seemingly the source of it. She dresses for the male gaze as well, walking around the penthouse with no bra and these hot pink underpants that give everything away. In the shower, she clutches her new breasts and buttocks – perhaps the film’s most convincing prosthetics – like her most precious possessions. These shots are all double entendres, both honestly showing what the women think of themselves as it leers hungrily at them, the women’s internalized misogyny caught, preserved and brought to life.

This kind of aggressive male gaze hasn’t been in-fashion in my lifetime, but the way women are shot in modern films are still in reaction to it. The history is still present. This is another way the film reminds me keenly of Quentin Tarantino’s work – there’s never been a film remotely like The Substance before, but at the same time, everything in it is a part of some other film screaming to be recognized, fitting for a film about long-term Hollywood decay. The splatter-gore is also Tarantino-esque, as is the film’s cocky confidence in its own quality.

Writer/director/editor/producer Coralie Fargeat is in her second feature here after Revenge, which didn’t get a great release in the summer of 2018. Revenge was reportedly a bit of a different story – Fargeat said she kept herself empty of other rape-revenge films and ended up making something remarkably similar. The Substance is extremely aware of its genre’s history, putting a lot of it on display. Visual quotes of classics like The Shining and Psycho and effects and scenes lifted from The Thing and Carrie are the most prominent, but there’s a full festival’s worth of material on the “further reading” list here – Videodrome, Re-Animator, Requiem for a Dream, Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, the list is as long as the film itself.

That’s the knock against The Substance – as incredible as it is, it overstays its welcome to fit its extended, over-the-top climax, a scene that dominated headlines but takes away from a film that would have been just as eyebrow-raising without it. I saw this three times in theaters, and always get bored with it at around the same moment. The ending is completely perfect, even as I write against it, and there’s no other way the film could have dismounted. If The Substance didn’t go way, way too far, it wouldn’t have gone far enough. 

The great transformation of the film, and this is also an extremely Tarantino thought process, is for Fargeat to incorporate what the body horror genre evokes in her personally into the narrative – and she’s certainly not the only one who feels this way about body horror. She makes these external deformities frighteningly internal. Sue and Sparkle’s wounds are self-inflicted and driven by self-loathing, two concepts hopelessly complicated by this core conceit of the “other self.”

What The Substance captures so beautifully, and this is what really makes it so insidious, is the mundanity of its lead characters’ flaws. There’s a certain despair required to inject yourself with a neon-yellow substance on the recommendation of a voice on the telephone, and the film centers on a character desperate enough to do that to herself. Most of their mistreatment of each other is passive-aggressive roommate nonsense – leaving messes for the other to clean up, not respecting each other’s possessions, complaining behind each other’s back, sex in the living room – escalated to the point of violence.

Sparkle hates herself, and now she has an externalized other self to mistreat and insult. This is perhaps her most mundane flaw, and certainly the one that stops her from handling the substance well, how she lets this perception dictate her reality. Sparkle is unable to take responsibility for her actions, so now she has a second body to destroy herself from the outside. Sparkle has nothing she wants to do with her life, and when given the second chance that the substance provides, she goes back to the same office and literally replaces herself in the same job.

With the spectacular opportunity to choose whether to burn out or fade away, Sparkle does both.

Leopold Knopp is a UNT graduate. If you liked this post, you can donate to Reel Entropy here. Like Reel Entropy on Facebook and reach out to me at reelentropy@gmail.com.