The Substance (Coralie Fargeat, 2024)

[zedz]

I'm opening a thread for this because I'm sure a lot of people will want to talk about it once they see it.

My take:
This is quite possibly the least subtle film ever made (and I've seen a bunch of Gaspar Noe's). Ridiculously stylized in the most obvious way, it's like a music video director trying to do Dario Argento trying to do David Cronenberg. On those terms, it's very entertaining.

The plot is boilerplate bizarre, but don't worry about not being able to follow it, because every plot point will be repeated at least a dozen times through the repetition of events, audio flashbacks, visual flashbacks and onscreen text. Not so much expository dialogue. though, because it's really not that complicated, and the film could probably play silent without losing any clarity. (Is it actually a cacophonous silent film?)

Much will be made about the film's (hardly) underlying themes, such as the mean old misogynist entertainment industry and women othering their own bodies, but these are driven in over and over like the film is repeatedly smashing your head against a bathroom mirror, so nobody gets any brownie points for spotting them.

Much will also be made about Demi Moore's performance, which is 20% acting and 90% gameness, but she deserves the kudos for just how insanely game she is. Margaret Qualley gets a lot less to do, but she's an effective blank slate.

Totally ridiculous but often hilarious, and well worth a couple of hours of your indulgence.

[Mr Sausage]

It's not out near me for another month, but I plan on getting to it. Looks wild.

[zedz]

It's certainly that. A lot has been made about how gross and graphic it is, but there's nothing you won't have seen before (though maybe not in this quantity!)

Trigger warnings for:
needles, sutures, wrinkles, teeth, fingernails, jazzercise, broken bones, blood, flashing lights, piercings, rotting food, male gaze, arthritis, fish-eye lenses, vomiting, Dennis Quaid, taffeta, pus, violence, nudity, language, immature themes.

[Mr Sausage]

Trigger warnings for:

...jazzercise...

I'm out. I go to the movies to have a fun time, not watch people exercise.

[Aunt Peg]

Demi's bright mustard coloured jacket is to die for.

[Red Screamer]

I can't really disagree with anything zedz said, but I found the whole experience punishing. In theory, I can appreciate the movie's one-note relentlessness, but it all felt joyless to me, unless you count Fargeat's aggressive button-pushing (needles, gore, puking, screaming, needles, gore...) The repetition is really what brings everything down for me, as the whole movie takes place in three or four (intentionally) hideous greenscreen-sweetened sets, where a single scenario plays out over and over, and, by the end, I had the impression that the script totaled only a dozen or so lines of dialogue which were just repeated ad nauseam. Speaking of, as someone with a strong stomach, I can't say a movie has ever made me nauseous like this one did—probably half-due to an early morning screening time and a theater that cranked up the soundtrack, which is already an overloud bombast fest with bass hits thumping at every dramatic beat and gore shot—which it seems is the most the filmmakers were hoping for? I'm sure it will thrive at campus film societies for the next two decades as a Cannes-approved Troma replacement.

[Aunt Peg]

For me (I saw it last June) I don't think I've seen I film filled with such much angst since Brian De Palma's Carrie (1976) which this film also plays homage to with it's all out blood letting towards the end. Talk about 'Carried' away.

My favourite film of 2023 so far. I can't wait to be assaulted by it again when it goes into general release.

[therewillbeblus]

I'm more or less in zedz' camp on this - there were aspects I loathed like Red Screamer, and elements that were so audacious I'd give it a cautious rec. What's most puzzling to me is the Cannes script win, as the screenplay might be the least-worthy part to praise. More than any other influence (tonally, not formally), I was reminded throughout of Verhoeven's more baldfaced satires - of which I'm usually a fan - only here it's without the rich directorial subtext, essentially nullifying the strengths he brings to create a deeper, affecting satire (and Joe Eszterhas is out there somewhere sincerely wishing he could make Quaid's character the hero of a new movie). I dunno, I was game to like this campy flick, but not even the high-wire third act stirred me too much. There's a 90-minute early-Cronenberg-style version of this that could've been something special.

[JamesF]

I didn’t hate it, but you could have fit all of this in a Tales From The Crypt episode in a sixth of the bloated runtime.

[MichaelB]

I certainly wouldn't put people off seeing it - the first half is really good - but my wife and I were both very disappointed by it overall, and completely lost interest in the last half-hour or so. Not only was the supposedly "batshit mental" ending pretty much entirely predictable if you're at all familiar with far more genuinely batshit films by David Cronenberg, Jan Švankmajer, Shinya Tsukamoto or Andrzej Żuławski, but by that point any interest we had in the protagonist had evaporated completely.

Which was a major problem because...

SpoilerShow

...all the supporting characters are – deliberately – utterly grotesque one-note caricatures (with the possible exception of the old schoolfriend Fred, who isn't around for long enough), which means that we have no choice but to focus on Elisabeth – and this works very well for as long as Demi Moore is still physically recognisable. But when she gets largely replaced by Margaret Qualley and both get increasingly buried under a ton of make-up effects, the emotional engagement that the film had been steadily building up started to dissipate.

And even that might have worked if Sue had been a more rounded and nuanced character. I totally understand why she has to appear utterly vapid, shallow and looks-obsessed in front of the men responsible for her TV show, but my problem is that she's equally vapid and shallow when the cameras are no longer pointing at her; I never once believed that at base she was the same woman that Demi Moore was playing, and to me that's a pretty fundamental flaw. That scene in which Elisabeth makes it absolutely clear that she despises her alter ego would have had far more emotional resonance if we had any sense that both women (or both aspects of the same woman) were having to deal with the same core problems. Which of course they were.

And I made precisely the same final observation as therewillbeblus on Facebook; there's a great 90-minute film potentially buried in there, but there's not the slightest reason for it to have been padded out to 141.

Oh, and my medical-professional wife was extremely unimpressed with the quality of the suturing, although she concedes that since the reason for the suturing involves a clear biological impossibility this perhaps isn't the sort of film to get overly picky with on technical grounds. (She was, of course, utterly unfazed by the gore, but this is a woman whose favourite telly viewing is things like Blood and Guts: A History of Surgery – possibly the goriest thing ever broadcast by the BBC – and Inside Nature's Giants, where they get a large animal and cut it open to see how it works.)

[Finch]

Cannes really ought to have a Palme D'Or for Technical Achievement or Special effects because that would have been a fair award to give to the film. Somewhere in heaven or hell, Stuart Gordon is smiling appreciatively at the sight of a monster that would have been right at home in From Beyond. The Cannes screenplay award is ridiculous. The men are caricatures which in and of itself doesn't have to be a problem but the film also doesn't make me care about Moore or Qualley either. It's enervatingly broad and obvious and feels three times as long as it is.

[tenia]

I'll be seeing this next week, with a Coralie Fargeat intro, and followed by a 20 min Q&A session. The more I read about it, the more it feels like it's going to be a veryyyyyy long showing.

[tenia]

So yeah, it was exactly that : I punched out at around 70 min, and then was looking at my watch what felt like every 10 min. It's a long movie with interesting themes but that doesn't do much with them despite its duration. I also wonder how much of it was supposed to be laughed at because of how grotesque it is, but the room I was in laughed A LOT. I can't fault the direction or the cast, but it's running on fumes very quickly, and since it wore me down progressively, the now-notorious hysterical last half hour left me cold. Not that there's anything new nor very interesting in it anyway. On the contrary, it felt to me like the moment the movie definitely goes full-grotesque without caring anymore, except that it's preceded by almost 2 hours of style-over-substance (pun intended), so I too didn't care anymore.

Also : there probably is a limit to how much needle shots' shots an audience can sustain. Also possibly too numerous shots : butts butts butts butts. Everywhere. Not sure when it stops being a critic of women's objectification and when it does that too.

Side notes from the Q&A :
- Fargeat never saw Society and didn't know what I was talking about with Screaming Mad George's style
- She always thought the movie would not be short because the screenplay is 140 pages long, and she wanted to ensure the pace of its scene and the evolution in intensity of the movie was progressive enough. She has no idea the movie can be felt as self-indulgent with its runtime.

[domino harvey]

Side notes from the Q&A :
- Fargeat never saw Society and didn't know what I was talking about with Screaming Mad George's style

I’m sure you already gathered as much, but I doubt she actually has no idea. I see her interacting with a lot of fans on Twitter and a lot of them name check Society. It wouldn’t surprise me if she hadn’t seen it before filming, but there’s no way she hasn’t seen it mentioned after the film came out

[Mr Sausage]

I also wonder how much of it was supposed to be laughed at because of how grotesque it is, but the room I was in laughed A LOT.

To judge by her previous movie, Revenge, it's definitely intended. That one also used exaggeration and grotesquerie to provoke uncomfortable laughter. I saw it in theatres not long before seeing The Substance, and I saw a lot of the same comic techniques in both (and heard a lot of laughter). I think I also read a quote from her that she likes to use comedy to make all the crazy extreme stuff go down easier.

[zedz]

I would be worried for Fargeat's sanity if she didn't realize how comical much of what she's doing is. Every cut to Demi Moore's face in the final half-hour (or so) - and there are a lot of them: nothing in this film is said once when it could be said a dozen times - seems set up as comic punctuation. Certainly not pathos.

For me, it's the only level at which the film actually worked, and even then it was run into the ground so thoroughly that it stopped working well before the film shuddered to a close.

[The Narrator Returns]

My audience, including my dad, laughed a fair amount during it and it was always obvious as everybody being in on the joke. Though I was probably the only one to laugh at maybe the funniest part, the last shot of Dennis Quaid where he only seems disappointed by what's going on.

[The Curious Sofa]

In terms of creature design and what happens, two beings gradually fuse into one fleshy (latex) mess, this is more Cronenberg's The Fly than Society. Add Death Becomes Her and Frankenheimer's Seconds and you've got The Substance. I thought this satire was all surface, with no subtext or depth. It spells out its theme early on and then proceeds along without surprises. The characters are so one-dimensional that they might as well be cartoons, and I also laughed at the gross-out gags. Fargeat gives a special thanks to the extras who got splattered with blood in the credits.

[MichaelB]

We had someone laughing hysterically throughout, including during a scene that I can't imagine was ever intended to be funny - the one where it's made clear that Elisabeth is watching Sue on TV and makes it all too clear that she loathes her alter ego. If there's any pathos at all in this film, it's in that scene - but it's hard to appreciate it on that level with someone loudly going "HUR HUR HUR" just behind me.

(He was the only one laughing at that point, and it was quite a full cinema.)

[reaky]

I saw a preview of William Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth, with Oldroyd present for a post-film Q&A. There’s a scene where the lovers shoot and kill a horse. A couple in the row in front of me guffawed at this point, and in the Q&A asked Oldroyd if he’d intended this scene to he funny. No, he replied, as aghast as the rest of the audience.

I have noticed that laughter is sometimes a coping or distancing mechanism for viewers watching scenes that are too intense or visceral, particularly with younger audiences.

[MichaelB]

I seriously doubt that that was this guy's excuse.

[tenia]

Let me rephrase what I meant : the movie certainly is meant to be funny in several sections. What I'm unsure is if everything we laughed at was meant to, or if some of those were a cursor issue between the serious subtext and the grotesque aspect Fargeat chose to use. There is a difficulty in getting the setting right, I felt like it was going overboard multiple times, and I don't think all of those moments were conscious, but some of them at least were just, well, flaws.

(We laughed A LOT at the final Quaid decomposed "ah crap" stare)

Side notes from the Q&A :
- Fargeat never saw Society and didn't know what I was talking about with Screaming Mad George's style

I’m sure you already gathered as much, but I doubt she actually has no idea. I see her interacting with a lot of fans on Twitter and a lot of them name check Society. It wouldn’t surprise me if she hadn’t seen it before filming, but there’s no way she hasn’t seen it mentioned after the film came out

I asked her yesterday evening, and she didn't tell me she hadnt seen it prior to making The Substance, but hadn't seen it at all, that this is a movie and a name people recommended to her multiple times but she still has to take a moment and look at.
I asked her during a short signing session after the Q&A, so she answered that to me directly.

[MichaelB]

I don't think it has very much in common with Society at all. You might as well throw the middle of Jan Švankmajer's Dimensions of Dialogue into the mix if the common ground is "bodies warping and fusing into new shapes".

[mhofmann]

I had high hopes for "The Substance", especially after hearing a lot of the early praise. Coralie Fargeat is clearly a very talented filmmaker with a distinct (visual) style. Having liked her previous feature "Revenge", I was curious what she would do with the plot premise and the notion that the film would eventually descend into body horror. But, alas, I couldn't help but end up disappointed.

While the first half of the film was still engaging, the second half exposes "The Substance" for what it essentially is: a big pile of nothing that wears the patience of its viewers thin long before it ends.
The world could have used a smart, even if unsubtle, satire that criticizes society's fear of and disgust with aging and its attempts to reverse it. But obvious plot holes aside, it's completely unfathomable how the empty end result could win a coveted best screenplay(!) prize at Cannes.

The main issue with "The Substance" is that, all gore aside, it's not a smart satire at all. There is zero subtext or nuance beyond the paper-thin premise. All of its characters are comically distorted archetypes that are not just unrealistic (they might not need to be) but insult the viewers' intelligence. What the film is trying to tell us is both so drawn out as well as endlessly repeated that its message completely deflates by the end. Yes, we have long gotten the message, and yes, it wears really thin throughout the lengthy runtime. By the time the film ends, it has treated its viewers like idiots for most of its second half.

Ultimately, and sadly, the film reduces itself to a collection of blood, gore, skin, and butts. Which I wouldn't mind per se (heck, e.g., Joe Begos's "Bliss" is a stone-cold masterpiece of grime and gore) if the film weren't so overlong while not actually achieving to tell us much. What doesn't help its case either is that "The Substance" wears the influence of many better and smarter films on its sleeve.
On the plus side, "The Substance" does a lot of things well on the visual level. But comparisons to the works of other filmmakers like David Cronenberg are completely overblown.

Maybe it should just have cut its runtime to half. Could there be a 70-minute masterpiece hidden inside this 140-minute mess? Possibly, and, with a better script, likely.

[black&huge]

So I gotta ask the dumb question here but what exactly is judged for a screenplay to win best screenplay? Don't a majority of films get altered during the filming process anyways be it changing dialogue or entire scenes? So how exactly is a screenplay judged by just how good it reads?

that being said I don't understand why this film didn't deserve to win best screenplay.