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THUD!! Went the back of my seat, followed by a fluttering kerfuffle during a packed-out screening of French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance at the Astor Theatre during the Melbourne International Film Festival. A young woman had fainted in the row behind me, at the exact moment Margaret Qualley’s Sue – the Hyde to Demi Moore’s Elisabeth Sparkle/Jekyll – is ripped from her gaping spine.
Those more versed in the giggle-gasp-inducingly gory ways of body horror are unlikely to be as inadvertently moved towards the floor. But it’s part and parcel of The Substance’s wicked pact that it will entrap poor, unsuspecting souls nostalgic for the Ghost star’s spooky rom-com days, or millennials here for Qualley, little suspecting the magnificent obscenity they’re about to experience.
Sparkle is a former movie star whose days of commanding billboards are behind her, as an extended sequence focused on her Hollywood Walk of Fame star’s sorry fate suggests. Only she has not faded away. Instead, she is now the front of an ‘80s-coded dancercise show, in the mode of Jane Fonda’s Workout, the VHS-driven fitness sensation built on the back of her also-best-selling book.
She’s still a star, commanding good money in this neon-hued not-quite-our world. But The Outlook-alike carpeted corridor festooned with her framed portraits at the studio signals her future is not secure. And so it is that, on committing the unspeakable crime of turning 50 – Moore is actually 61 and stunning as ever – she is summarily fired by a cannily cast Dennis Quaid as Harvey, a sleazy, youth-obsessed exec who eats prawns in a gloriously icky way rivalling the unpalatable antics of Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover.
Fuming that she will be replaced by someone younger and supposedly more beautiful, Sparkle retreats to her paradoxically austere and chintzy apartment – props to production designer Stanislas Reydellet – after a (literal) car crash.
But a Faustian bargain presents itself in the shape of the Substance, a canary yellow elixir pushed by a male nurse at the hospital. A vial is procured on calling a cloak and dagger number and discussing the deal with an intriguingly obtuse dealer – an unseen Yann Bean. All Sparkle has to do is inject herself with it while hooked up to a week-long liquid food bag, because she’ll remain incapacitated on the bathroom tiles while this all-new-and-allegedly-improved version (Qualley) lunges from the older her’s supine form, not unlike Ridley Scott’s xenomorph tearing a new one from John Hurt.
Unleash the Furies
Despite my cinema neighbour’s reaction, this is far from the most gruesome image in a film that goes hard before we go home, from seeping injection sites putrid with puss to a beastly finale awash with enough blood and guts to make Carrie blush.
Now in control, Sue – essentially a splinter identity born of Sparkle, but with her own free will – has one week to do her thing before they must swap places on the chilly tiles, and on and on. Only Sue rapidly decides that her sparkly new life, replacing herself on the formerly Sparkle-led Pump It Up Show care of a salivating Harvey, isn’t worth letting go.
Continually draining more fluid energy from Sparkle than is allowed, the older woman starts to wither like the painting in Dorian Gray’s attic. When she does emerge to see Sue’s sneeringly smug visage staring at her from a billboard high above LA, Sparkle descends into a microwave meal-fuelled spiral of self-destructive despair, with nary a sign of friends nor family to pull her back from the brink.
Writer/director Fargeat (Revenge) relishes in the satirical shitfight ignited as this toxically co-dependent battle for supremacy lashes impossible beauty standards, internalised misogyny that sets one woman upon another and herself, plus the malignant mentality of an entertainment industry that could ever have undervalued a talent as singular as Moore’s. Emanating more megawattage than ever, she commands the film’s metatextual swordfight, set to a pulsating club score by Benjamin Stefanski AKA Raffertie.
If I haven’t always been as convinced by Qualley’s performances, then she disappears seamlessly into Sue’s narcissistic treachery, with a strung-out intensity to her bubble-gum personality that’s as fake as her acrylic nails, unable to stop before it pops. Quaid, too, eats up his odious turn as a troll whose grotesque hunger is the real villain of The Substance’s clusterfuck incoming.
High on its artificial reality, amplified by cinematographer Benjamin Kracun – it’s disappointingly counterintuitive most department heads on this film are blokes – The Substance works precisely because it is both a warped mirror that’s neither now nor then, and all-too excoriatingly accurate.
Far exceeding the flaccid fizzle of David Cronenberg’s desperately disappointing body horror bomb The Shrouds, Fargeat’s film for the ages unleashes the monstrous feminine, mainlining the mythological Furies and storming the screen in a malevolently magnetic masterpiece that’s demented, disgusting, diabolical and divine.
Elsewhere
On the horror front, I chatted with the delightful Scoot McNairy about starring in the Speak No Evil remake for FilmInk. You can read my Time Out review here.
Also for Time Out, I reviewed Victorian Opera’s latest outing for saucy Sondheim chiller Sweeney Todd.
Margherita Vicario, writer/director of Italian Film Festival highlight Gloria! spoke to me about making a not-quite musical over at the ABC. Plus I reviewed the first episode of documentary Making Lachlan Murdoch for ScreenHub.