Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance opens on a wordless encapsulation of nothing less than the entire lifecycle of stardom – particularly for a famous woman. Fargeat sets her camera a meter above a footpath and holds her shot looking down for the first few minutes of the film. This is no ordinary footpath, but rather, the Hollywood Walk of Fame. We see hands preparing a square bed into which they will lay a familiar gold star bearing a name – Elisabeth Sparkle, whom we will soon meet – and before long, the star is cemented into place and revealed in all its glory. Much hoopla ensues. But over time, the marble around the star cracks, its letters weather, even though Los Angeles doesn’t have much weather to speak of. Eventually, no one walking over this star pays any attention to it, until, in the final indignity, some schlub drops his hamburger on it, smearing its guts in a lame attempt to mop up the mess.

This bravura sequence serves as a thesis statement and all-around table setter for what’s to come: one of the most excoriating metaphors for the fight against ageing ever committed to film, framed as a Hollywood satire replete with body horror. It never gets a bit more subtle, and it needn’t. This curdled portrait of fame, and the cretins who profiteer off it, is the sort of electric filmmaking that’s better off indulging its every visual whim. Although Fargeat has some sympathy for Elisabeth Sparkle, she finds the fading star equally complicit in this grotesque pageantry, which mightn’t exist without the malevolent male gaze that’s propelled this industry from its beginnings.

In a jaw-dropping comeback performance, Demi Moore fearlessly embodies Elisabeth, and that choice of verb is no accident. Moore’s 61-year-old body is on display to the camera throughout, in various forms of disrepair, both natural and plot-driven. She’s also willing to place the cosmetic work she’s done on her face as a real-world exhibit of what an actress or other celebrity will do to remain viable, often having the inverse effect. She’s got a sinister younger partner in Margaret Qualley, and Dennis Quaid as the symbol of all that’s vile at Hollywood’s management level, shoving seafood into his gob with a gleeful disregard for collateral damage to neighbouring diners.

Elisabeth Sparkle was once an Oscar-winning actress who is now leading a popular dance fitness show. Any similarities to Jane Fonda seem coincidental, but the out-of-time quality of popular dance fitness shows lends universality to a film that also has one foot in the future. Elisabeth is just turning 50, and her previously supportive bosses are ready to celebrate that milestone by putting her out to pasture. In our first introduction to his monstrosity, we see an extreme close-up of Quaid’s braying executive in a gator skin suit relieving himself at the urinal, while shouting into his mobile about Elisabeth having won her Oscar “in the 30s, for King Kong.” He might have been only a tad more tactful in his language, but possibly not, if he’d known she had snuck into a men’s room toilet before he came in, hers being out of order.

Distracted by her own TV’s show’s billboard being taken down, Elisabeth gets into a car accident. As she’s being treated for minor injuries, an unnerving nurse slips her a flash drive with information on something called The Substance. This mysterious service promises its customers a more perfect version of themselves, and Elisabeth is primed to receive this message. She calls the phone number and is sent to an obscure building under a staircase in the worst part of town, whose rolling gateway only opens halfway. In her personal deposit box she gets her starter kit, which contains a variety of tubes, vials, syringes, minimal instructions in authoritarian block letters, and the substance in question: a green fluid that will give birth to a new, younger version of Elisabeth, whom she will call Sue. (Any similarity to the actress Elisabeth Shue also seems coincidental.)

Sue is the ideal combination of innocent and sexy, the type of fresh face who might give Elisabeth’s brain another 30 years of stardom. There’s a catch, though. Their shared brain can only animate one of the two bodies at a time, and they must switch on a strict weekly schedule. Any violation of this timeshare, not to mention a daily maintenance routine, has dire consequences.

Giving anything beyond the basic setup of The Substance would deprive the viewer of ghastly surprises as well as some wicked dark comedy. The Substance is not a comedy in any traditional sense of the word, as it feels too viscerally confronting to be anything other than horror. The fact that Fargeat is able to extract both from the movie is proof of her grasp of this slippery tone. She’s also pulling off a challenging trick by leering at the sculpted body of the young Sue, who gyrates on her own new version of Elisabeth’s dance show. Here she approximates the hunger of a male audience that objectifies women on screens, pointing a finger back at them in a way that wouldn’t read the same way coming from a male director.

The substance of The Substance is thematically rich, even if those themes have a history in Hollywood satire. The director’s visual approach blasts new vitality into these themes, as Fargeat, veteran of the stylish 2017 film Revenge, drops one unexpected delight after another. In an example that can’t possibly seem telling unless you’ve seen the film, Fargeat demonstrates her lively eye just in the way she shows various items clattering around rubbish bins – used vials, but also the flash drive that Elisabeth initially discards before fishing it out, which lands with the words “THE SUBSTANCE” visible through the bin’s translucent bottom. This is a filmmaker who is not content to tell us anything – there’s relatively little dialogue here – when she has such a repertoire of methods for showing us. Remarkably, she does this without ever once seeming like a film school poseur. (The French spelling is appropriate for this French director.)

The Substance is the sort of thrilling film experience that challenges word counts for a traditional review. But we’d be remiss if we didn’t devote some time to what these actors bring to the writer-director’s themes. Elisabeth is not a role many actresses would want, as few want to admit they’ve made plastic surgery decisions that have left them metaphorically monstrous to their fans – something this film literalises, whether that monstrosity is physical or emotional. Moore herself has never been particularly accused of plastic surgery fails, but she wouldn’t be so convincing in this role if she had just allowed herself to age gracefully – and she knows it. This movie exposes her in many different ways, and she embraces all of them, giving us a fierce, brave performance that won’t soon be forgotten.

Qualley, on the other hand, finds a new level by existing in a milieu of purposeful falsity and symbolism. The actress has sometimes fallen down in realistic and comedic roles – she was downright painful in Drive-Away Dolls – but her more surreal work with Yorgos Lanthimos and here with Fargeat finds her in a wicked sweet spot. She’s as much the villain of this piece as Quaid’s own brand of fatuous insensitivity, itself glorious, and Qualley makes us simultaneously fall for Sue and despise her.

The Substance finishes on a wild note that further divorces any moments of incidental realism from the overarching symbolism of its images and themes. And while some climactic wild notes compromise what’s come before, this one only reinforces the twisted fantasy Fargeat has been giving us for well over two hours. The fact that the movie is as long as it is, while still never straying outside the tight narrative constraints of essentially three characters with any meaningful dialogue, just proves that in the hands of some filmmakers, more is more.

 

The Substance is currently playing in cinemas.