The Substance

November 13 & 14

7:00 pm nightly
1:30 Thursday Matinée
18A — 2hr 17min
2024 ‧ Horror / Drama

The Substance is the best and maddest film of the year, as long as you like a full portion of body horror and are happy to be spattered head to toe in blood and mutant body parts. A self-confessed fan of David Cronenberg, French director Coralie Fargeat has taken his seminal, gory-gooey aesthetic and amped it up to the delirious max. And just when you think she can’t possibly go any further, along comes an even bigger tsunami of twitching, writhing flesh. It’s Cronenberg on steroids.

Demi Moore (brilliant and bold) plays ageing Elisabeth Sparkle, one-time Hollywood starlet now holding on for grim death to her Jane Fonda-esque workout goddess TV glory. Chance leads Elisabeth to the secretive, mysterious ‘Substance’, a treatment which promises to renew her to her best, youthful self – but better. It’s a spine-splitting, eye-popping ‘birthing’ of this wonder version of Elisabeth, who appears in the form of Sue (Margaret Qualley). The only catch: Elisabeth and Sue have to alternate every seven days, one living in the real world while the other is dumped as a carcass in Elisabeth’s bathroom. Any slight divergence from this routine and there’ll be merry hell to pay.

Director Coralie Fargeat works with the flair of a grindhouse Kubrick in a weirdly fun, cathartically grotesque fusion of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Showgirls. The Substance is the work of a filmmaker with a vision. She’s got something primal to say to us. What makes all of this original is that Fargeat fuses it with her own stylized aggro voice (she favors minimal dialogue, which pops like something out of a graphic novel), and with her feminist outrage over the way that women have been ruled by the world of images. There’s a lot of full-on nudity in The Substance, to the point that the film flirts with building a male gaze into the foundation of its aesthetic. Yet it does so only to pull the rug of voyeurism out from under us.