“Society asks our bodies to not change and to always stay the same. Young, beautiful, sexy, when you are not that, society considers you literally “body horror.” You are erased because you are considered disgusting,” – Coralie Fargeat, Hammer To Nail.
Blood spills stark against gleaming linoleum as a nubile form of entropy pushes itself from its host and releases a shining new perversion into the world with a guttural techno thrum. One more than ready to take its place in the light.
Wading through the sophomore feature of Coralie Fargeat, ‘The Substance’, is a feverish exercise in invasiveness, all shades of ecstatic putrefaction.
It is a romp through the winding labyrinthian halls of a 70s-esque disco ball, all fleshy tumescence illuminated in crawling, almost animate neons, during which, with explosive suddenness, all the party-goers burst forth into incomprehensible shapes of terror, and yet continue to dance.
And it is through this maze, that we follow the volatile and violence bathed struggle between the aging Elisabeth (Demi Moore), a former TV starlet now left to wither in the shadows of time, and Sue (Margaret Qualley), her newly birthed extension, teeming with beauty, virility, and utter insatiability.
Fargeat tenderly draws the two into a careful, gossamer dance, one inexplicably orbiting the other in the promise of a sickening collision. It is a choreography so expertly composed that throughout the duration of the film you are left unsure of the nature of Sue and Elisabeth’s relation to one another on the most conscious level. A confusion made all the more ironic by the very idea which the articulators of the experience urge the characters not to forget: you are one.
Sue and Elisabeth are one in the same way that we are all one with impending decay and the destructions of the past, irrevocably connected with all figments of ourselves, present, past, and future. Forever forced to reap the rot we sow in the seeds of our vices, literally stealing from versions of ourselves to come.
‘The Substance’, at its core, plays with the fecund elasticity of youth and the distorted ‘living- dead-hag’ monster age contorts it to.
All the festering, perversely twisted fragments of the former self, pulped together to form the sheer, grandiose and spurting, absurdity of such a conception at all. It’s a cacophony of blood showers, bones, and butts which, in the endlessly elegant tongue of moans and drools, articulates the surrealistically demented nature of a life lived in the shadows of one’s own self.
It condemns the putrefied, slobbering systems which gorge upon youth in indulging the senses with camerawork that delights in its own incursions; pulling teeth, prodding beneath the skin, and refusing any reprieve from its own uniquely human motley of grotesqueries.
It is Lynch and latex, but, perhaps most pivotally, it is exactly what good horror should be: utterly and completely unafraid of itself.
Unafraid to make you laugh, retch, and stare, ‘The Substance’ hypnotizes you in the full throttle. From the opening scene, it relishes the art of the mess, the cracks that emerge and feed on both ketchup and guts.
It is this that makes Fargeat’s work shine in the way that it does, it treats the body as utterly alien, a hostile desert of flesh which with every tick of the clock consumes one more portion of itself towards the creation of embryonic amalgamation, an unrecognizable monster.
Whether this gradual, creeping liquefaction rears its head in the form of a contorted beast, wrought in the violent clash of bodily clays, or in the much simpler, more imminent, horror of a form made unrecognizable by age and diminished to worthlessness is all the same.
All the same in its unbridled, rampaging terror, and all the same in its incarnadine chiffon ludicrosity.
