The Brooklyn Rail

In a 2004 Artforum article, James Quandt complained that a wave of French directors were making “willfully transgressive” movies. Filmmakers like Gaspar Noé and Bruno Dumont, he suggested, were part of a trend he called the New French Extremity, “determined to break every taboo, to wade in rivers of viscera and spumes of sperm, to fill each frame with flesh, nubile or gnarled, and subject it to all manner of penetration, mutilation, and defilement.” The same sentiment could be applied, this time with enthusiasm, to Coralie Fargeat’s new feminist body horror film The Substance (2024), a Cannes darling whose style highlights an ongoing resurgence: an exuberant penchant for the putrid more commonly associated with early aughts New French Extremity than with modern multiplex fare. While the New Extremity across Europe is often associated with men (like Noé and Lars von Trier), The Substance serves as a timely reminder that it was also originally spearheaded by women. Directors like Catherine Breillat and Virginie Despentes weathered controversy and bucked taboos around violence and sex on screen to deliver feminist messages full of rage and horror with films like Fat Girl and Baise-moi, respectively.

Over the course of two decades, the avant-garde violence of the New Extremity—alongside its more overtly commercial American sibling, torture porn, and the work of the no-longer-embattled arthouse body horror maestro David Cronenberg—has gone mainstream, leaving room for ickier, stickier filmmaking in the indie and art film realms. Thanks to the widespread acceptance of so-called “elevated horror,” Gaspar Noé himself, much to his chagrin, received an unexpectedly warm and wide reception for his balls-to-the-wall acid-freakout, Climax. The genre’s posterboy, Ari Aster (of Hereditary and Midsommar fame,) has never shied away from a graphic sex scene or an exploding head or two either. New French Extremist Julia Ducournau’s car-fucking, trans-horror-classic-in-the-making, Titane, even won the Palme D’Or in 2021.

There has been no shortage of squishy stuff at the movies this year either, from the explosive testicular manslaughter of MaXXXine to the anatomically inadvisable new yoga positions of In a Violent Nature. And much of this raucous violence has come from women directors, who, inspired by the previous generation, are taking aim at the patriarchy. Arkasha Stevenson’s The First Omen tells its tale of profane intervention by way of anatomically graphic recreations of images drawn from Possession and Rosemary’s Baby. Rose Glass’s amped-up lesbian neo-noir Love Lies Bleeding takes its cues from Cronenberg as well as the NC-17 licentiousness of Paul Verhoeven. The flick’s steroidal antiheroine Jackie (Katy O’Brian) gets stretched (in more ways than one) to the limit on screen. She has raw-egg covered sex; kills with muscle-flexing abandon; and eventually births herself on stage in a triumphant, squelching puddle of sweat, vomit, and body oil.

This fall, Coralie Fargeat’s deeply Brechtian sophomore feature The Substance brings this ongoing trend’s feminist orientation into clear focus once more, combining slick, elegant satire and no-holds-barred Grand Guignol body horror to deliver a potent takedown of showbiz misogyny. The film is methodical in its synthesis of these two contrastingly extreme and extremely feminine styles—one poised, one abject—taking its time before twisting a knife that might appear surgically-smooth, but proves jagged, rusty, and cruel.

The film follows yesteryear’s starlet, Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), on a journey over the hill and into a quest for continued relevance after her sleazy TV station boss (Dennis Quaid) illegally fires her from her aerobics show on her fiftieth birthday. “Rejuvenation is inevitable,” he tells her through a greasy spray of shrimp guts at lunch. “At fifty, it stops.” The shock of this betrayal is too much for Elisabeth, who gets into a car crash on the way home. At the hospital, an eerily camera-ready young orderly slips her a thumb-drive and a brief note: “It changed my life.”

The drive contains an ad for a mysterious service, simply called “The Substance,” which offers the customer a Faustian bargain with the cold, “clean” aesthetic panache of an Instagram ad for upscale Botox injections or a Goop yoni egg. The Substance provides its user with a younger, sexier, more beautiful clone for half the time, so long as the two versions switch every seven days, without exception. Finding herself unceremoniously left by the wayside and caught in the crosshairs of two virulently ageist fields (the health/wellness and film/television industries), Elisabeth succumbs to her loneliness and picks up her first box from a warehouse better suited for a drug deal than a contactless pickup. This parallel is one of the film’s many allegorical strengths: The Substance itself (essentially internalized misogyny as a unicorn startup) is addictive like heroin and TikTok, as well as television. The latter furnishes Fargeat with the settings she takes as a metaphoric, satiric playground. By drawing these comparisons, she turns a rhetorical 0.5 iPhone lens onto the culture, presenting her dystopian telehealth service as user friendly, SEO-optimized, illicit, and deadly. Soon, Elisabeth’s shooting up Mountain Dew–colored liquid and lying prone on her expensive bathroom floor, violently pushing a new version of herself out of her body, Love Lies Bleeding–style, hoping to start over.

Enter Sue (Margaret Qualley), a largely wordless, rosy-cheeked naïf with a penchant for lollipops and pastel hoop earrings, a ready-made ingénue with the toned, curvy body of a video vixen—or a YouTube yoga instructor. Fargeat’s unabashedly objectifying, distancing camerawork and parodically on-the-nose dialogue, already on display in Revenge, are perfectly in sync with this material. She turns this character into an abstraction, an advertisement for her own youthful body, both in the film’s show stopping dance numbers and in more casual scenes. These moments are consistently shot—mostly from behind—to highlight her paradoxically sexualized-yet-aesthetically-innocent body. Sue’s perfect figure, squeaky-clean smile, and provocative aerobics routine earn her Elisabeth’s old part in her first week of existence. She quickly rockets to stardom, making herself comfortable at the center of Elisabeth’s universe.

Vindicated by Sue’s success, Elisabeth marks her own days of their shared life with angry black X’s, like time wasted, while Sue’s are lovingly labeled with her name. While this scenario would imply that the two women share a consciousness, this is not the case. Fargeat’s parable hinges on the cruel vicariousness of her scenario. Elisabeth remains unconscious for Sue’s days and vice versa, meaning the only pleasure Elisabeth gets from her functionally halved existence comes from watching her own double on television (like a daytime soap equivalent of Showgirls or All About Eve) and cleaning up after her parties, an unwilling den mother stuck watching the tube and growing progressively more embarrassed of her own clearly conventionally beautiful but aging body.

The scenario soon sours—as in any good döppleganger story. Elisabeth’s youthful, vain fantasy-self grows greedy for her time as well. Resentment builds between the two by proxy, and Sue starts using Elisabeth’s body like a vending machine for extra time, leaving the older woman with random pieces of wizened, mottled flesh and days missing from her life whenever she wakes up. Moore’s performance during these stretches is masterful in its progression from vulnerable woman to disapproving matron to full-on wicked witch, a crone whose bitterness is tart and unconstrained and furious.

Calling customer service is no use—the cool voice on the other end reminds both women in turn that they are each other. “Beauty” and “fame” for women are, the film suggests, separate from the self, a warped product made from human viscera at cost. Like one (real) Botox ad on Instagram unsettlingly promises its viewer, the version of you with Botox is “still you,” a slogan that innately implies a troubling, uncanny need for reassurance in the first place. As the hoary side effects of The Substance and the Kafkaesque purgatory of Elisabeth’s days remind us, the döppleganger may still be “you,” but so are cancer cells. Playing by society’s aesthetic rule book becomes a crushing dividing line between what’s organic and innate to Elisabeth (cooking, going on dates with old friends, getting smile lines) and the televisual version of herself, uncanny, uncaring, and unrecognizable, imposed from the outside in the form of a body born to sell Coke with that classic uncanny marketing chestnut: “It’s the real thing.” By the end, Fargeat asks us whether that kind of distinction matters at all, lancing that carefully constructed binary like a ripe boil.

The final act of The Substance is an exercise in fevered extremes, employing a style Fargeat herself has cheerfully called “excessive”. Her assertion manages to feel teasingly understated. The graphic edge that runs not-quite-subliminally throughout the film’s first half, baked into its jarring cuts and occasional flashes of violence and repulsion, ramps up, finally exploding outward with the introduction of a new fantasy image. Fargeat ultimately reaches for a maximalist style unmatched since the climax of Luca Guadagnino’s 2018 Suspiria. Her work in this film resonates with the other directors in this ooey, gooey, sexy current wave of multiplex extremity for women. Here, she has created the high-femme equivalent of Maximus’s famous cry to the emperor in Gladiator: through a haze of blood, sweat and tears, women reaching for beauty ask us, “Are you not entertained?”