THE SUBSTANCE **1/2
Coralie Fargeat2024
IDEA: An aging, washed-up Hollywood star takes a black-market drug that produces a younger, more physically perfect version of herself, but there are unwanted side effects.
BLURB: The Substance is the kind of boldfaced satire that forsakes subtlety, nuance, and realism in favor of pile-driving home its message in as uncomplicated a way as possible. There is almost nothing about that message that can’t already be gleaned from a plot synopsis, leaving the film to stretch out and embellish a pretty basic cautionary tale - be careful what you wish for! - for a gratuitously distended two-plus hours. Because the universe of The Substance is hardly congruent with anything resembling the real world (friends, family, and curiosity apparently don't exist in the life of a celebrity), Fargeat basically forces us to take her film less as the incisive social satire it sometimes pretends to be than as the big, dumb, sardonic, occasionally inspired, über-polished exploitation picture it really is. And on those grounds, it’s fairly successful. A triumph of visual and sonic design, the film furnishes an indulgent, pungent sensory experience befitting its corporeal obsessions. Marvel at the spacious, ominously antiseptic Kubrickian rooms! Immerse yourself in a symphony of squishy body sounds! Give over all your senses (and the contents of your stomach?) to the lurid, uncannily convincing makeup and prosthetic effects, putrid masterpieces of rotting, deformed flesh and oozing entrails. It’s certainly a spectacle, and by the time it reaches a splatter-fest of a denouement that would undoubtedly delight David Cronenberg and John Carpenter, one that feels far more content with being just that than anything that might dig deeper under the skin. Is it unforgivably ironic, or ironic by design, that The Substance doesn’t exactly have that much of it?
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