Wow.

It begins with a potent metaphor and pretty much carries on that way for over two glorious hours. I have no great regard for the Hollywoodese of lumping film titles together to get an impression of a movie being pitched. Star Wars meets Jaws was hardly an adequate description of Alien if but you have to sell it, at least aim high. Try this lot, all of which are the well-watered roots which wrap around each other and collide in The Substance in the most sublime way… Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers and The Fly, Carpenter’s The Thing, Yuzna’s Society, Lynch’s The Elephant Man, and finally and most heartfelt by association, Mankiewicz’s All About Eve. Let’s throw in Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray into the melee. Curious? But you never get the impression that The Substance is, in any way, derivative. The core strength of the film is its artistic ambition which sweeps swiftly beyond being compared to its illustrious forbears. It is its own thing, not John Carpenter’s and all the more effective and darkly glorious for that.

Coralie Fargeat’s debut feature Revenge is a flag plunged bloodily into well-worn genre ground asserting proudly that even primal and violent emotional catharsis can be made with jaw-dropping craft and include ideas and a striking editorial palette that can invest even the familiar with a powerful artistic ambition. That this one-through line thriller led to The Substance is both surprising and inevitable, like all great narratives. A word of caution. Fargeat pulls as many punches in Revenge as she does in The Substance, that is to say absolutely none at all. She makes you feel every intrusive penetration, organic or mettalic, every bullet hit, every shard of glass slicing open flesh and whoever is responsible for the prosthetic skin effects deserves every penny and plaudit for their outstanding work. Revenge credits Pierre Emmanuel Kass, special makeup effects artist, Ghislaine Nejjar, makeup artist and Laetitia Quillery, special makeup effects artist. The latter, Quillery, joins 47 other such artists for The Substance’s extraordinary make-up and prosthetics. Despite justifiable claims that Revenge’s violence and its aftermath stretch credibility (I mean how much pain, injury and blood loss can a human animal take?), that is, in some way, missing the point. Fargeat creates cinematic worlds of her own, however familiar they are to us on the surface. The rules for these worlds are her rules, so sign up to experience (dare I say) the joy or at the very least, the satisfaction of primitive, retributive justice meted out to men who could not be more loathsome if they had pointed tails. They are deserving of every ounce of pain wreaked upon them. So let’s pivot to the plot of The Substance, another world where men are less violent but no less repugnant.

A terrazzo and brass star is constructed on show business’s self-congratulatory Walk of Fame on Hollywood Boulevard. Elisabeth Sparkle’s name – a frankly ridiculous but somehow perfect moniker for our leading lady’s character – is immortalised, embedded into the pavement. Real life parades past and over her cherished sign of career and public recognition. The star dulls and cracks with age (see where we’re going with this?) and a foreshadowing splatter of ketchup and burger is ignominiously scooped off it. This puts an end to the foreboding single shot-from-above sequence, a chronicle of a life foretold, indeed. After leading a televised Jane Fonda-esque, sexually-charged, aerobic dance class, Elisabeth sneaks into a cubicle in the men’s room as the women’s is out of order. In walks the first of a parade of truly grotesque men, potent signifiers and delivery boys of Elisabeth’s angst and insecurity. She overhears the signal of the end of her career in Tinseltown. She’s just turned 50. She may as well be dead.

On her way home, distracted by a billboard of herself being ripped apart and replaced, she is blindsided and her car is flipped over several times. She finds herself in hospital. There, she is patched up and on leaving she finds in her coat pocket a surreptitiously placed pen drive with a phone number on one side and the words ‘The Substance’ on the other wrapped in a scribbled note saying “It changed my life.” At home, looking through a giant window over the city, behind her is framed a huge publicity poster from which the younger Elisabeth smiles perkily. It’s clear from her behaviour that Elisabeth is having a full, if contained, psychological breakdown. She cracks and calls the number. Retrieving a box from a high tech, sterile vault buried in a seedier part of Los Angeles (yes, I know, that’s about as unspecific as it gets), Elisabeth returns home and samples the goods. Well… We are about 25 minutes in. Do you really want me to go on? From the list of reference films in the second paragraph, you may have an inkling of what’s coming but not of its focussed and monstrous ferocity and its onslaught of meaning birthed along the way. Let’s just say that one becomes two and leave it at that.

Director Coralie Fargeat’s command of her frame, her cut and her actors’ performances is as impressive as it seems to be absolute. I’ve been on a Zoom call  with her as a guest recently and the woman is so commanding a presence with such a fierce intellect that you’d be surprised if film studio heads are not lying supine before her just dying to throw money at any of her proposals. Genre films like The Substance are not known for their stellar box-office or even proven money making potential. Cult status is one thing. Turning a profit? Quite another. Those with the power to grant a green light must know that these sorts of films are guaranteed not to make big money but then Eric Fellner and Tim Bevan of Working Title Films (still the classiest production company name for my money) have sustained a decades long career betting on some of the most singular and artistic films of the last twenty years… I can find it in my heart to forgive them for Cats… And they are still in business. Their commercial mega-hits like Four Weddings and a Funeral, Bean and Notting Hill must have provided a financial safety net in case some of their riskier choices didn’t pay off. So what about the $17.5 million production cost of The Substance? Well, I’m happy to announce that there are enough tasteful and appreciative souls out there who have enabled this extraordinary film to bring in almost five times its cost during its cinema release which, even given the marketing costs, must have resulted in a very tidy profit.

The two leads playing Elisabeth and her younger alter-ego Sue, have committed so profoundly to their roles, the word mesmeric pales as an adjective. Here Demi Moore, playing a character a full decade younger than herself with scant regard for vanity or body-conscious modesty, evokes in Elisabeth a desperation born from rejection and concomitant self-loathing. She doesn’t drink from the fountain of youth but injects its fluid into her body. Taking such a wild risk with no knowledge of what may come from this leap of faith, this psychological freefall, is really at the heart of the movie. She does not know. Neither do we but at least we know to be afraid. On her shoulders sit thousands of years of female disempowerment and subjugation. She channels this exquisite unfairness with bouts of petulance and steely determination not to be ground into the sun-soaked Hollywood sidewalk. For those who have seen the film, yes, I know. But those who’ve not won’t mind an oblique reference to puzzle over. Moving on. Moore, the highest paid actress in the mid-90s, fell from grace, step by Prada Slingback step, private plane demand by private plane demand, getting a reputation as a diva and despite a full and varied career, showing that she was still a very talented actress, she didn’t get cast in a role that landed with the cinema-going public as much as those in her ‘popcorn’ years. It’s a term she uses herself to describe how her talent was claustrophobically pigeon-holed. The Substance has allowed the artist in her to flourish. In this stunning performance, featuring unflattering, wide angled shots of her vulnerably splayed out naked on her bathroom floor, confirmed that this was an actress committed to her art, pushing front and unapologetically centre a parody of the woman she once projected as her media-fuelled, self-obsessed self. There’s not been a performance by an actress I’ve seen in years that prompted the cliché that youth is wasted on the young as much as this one. It seems wisdom from experience is mutually exclusive with a youthful naivety. Wisdom is earned while youth is burned away with a scant perception of it ever going anywhere until it is consumed by time and before you know it, your body becomes a petri dish for ailments, some of them trivial, some of them not.

Speaking of youth… Born from the back of Elisabeth’s inert body, Sue, embodying unwavering and confident resolve, is played intensely by newcomer Margaret Qualley. The young, pert, firm-fleshed fantasy of not only lascivious men but of Elisabeth too in terms of how she desperately wants to be seen again, thrusts herself into the limelight and is courted by the same monster who so quickly dumped his middle-aged star. But there’s a catch. The substance and paraphernalia that goes with it (including the needles and stitches required to deal with gaping wounds!) can only work if each woman lives exactly a week of life every other week. No exceptions. So what happens if an intoxicated, seductive Sue with a boyfriend in tow is late with the changeover ritual?

The level of detail and attention to such is highly valued by this particular writer. A cellophaned bouquet sits in Elisabeth’s apartment. You can just about make out the message from hyperactive Hollywood monster Harvey which includes the words “You were amazing!” on the card. As Elisabeth stares out across the city, we cut in a close up of the word “were”. On the nose perhaps but it still works to keep the theme of the film coursing through its substance-filled veins. All the close ups in the film impart strong emotions. Whether it’s the needle puncturing the substance vial tops or skin to the indeterminate imagery only made explicit after an action (the stabbing of an olive by a cocktail stick). Many directors use similar close ups as transitions or to accordion time within a sequence. One of the best users of this technique (off the top of my head) is David Fincher in Alien 3. There is a perverse beauty in seeing something that you can only see this way via a cinema screen. Close ups also allow you to form impressions, very strong impressions, of character. Dennis Quaid (cast after Ray Liotta died, both actors incidentally perfectly suited to the role of Harvey) does an unselfconscious job of investing his character with true ugliness as he strides into the men’s room and in lurid close up, spits out his instructions to fire Elisabeth. He’s even more despicable in unflattering extreme close up as he orally de-shells what seems like a mountain of shrimp. The heightened sound effects make the act all the more disgusting. I used to like prawns…

In order to make the case for the unfairness of the standards women have to live up to (in Hollywood, granted. Not everywhere else, one hopes), you cannot have men parading around heroically or even being slightly likeable. The harmless Fred, an ex-school friend of Elisabeth’s, one with whom Elisabeth tries to establish a normality of behaviour by arranging a date with him, still gives off unwholesome vibes. The less said about her neighbour the better for all of us. The production design, by Stanislas Reydellet, is expressionistic and stylised but not so much that the spell of the world of The Substance is ever compromised. The endless lengthening corridors shot symmetrically become a signature design feature and cannot help but evoke none other than Stanley Kubrick. The real exterior location shooting (France standing in for L.A.) pulls you up short, an invasion of ‘real’ in a film designed to be virtually real or reality italicised. No sooner are we on the streets than we’re in the stark, sterile substance delivery room, nestled back in the production designer’s powerful sphere of influence.

Despite the physical deformities and excessive gore that have attached itself as the USP of the film (compare the slicing off of the cop’s ear in Reservoir Dogs, in which you see no such thing), it’s Elisabeth’s preparation for that normal date that is the stand out scene of the film. This is a lesson in how you take the most prosaic incident (woman puts make-up on) and turn it into a terrifying glimpse into the turbulence and incipient madness that is engulfing the heroine. It is a knockout performance that can’t help evoke thoughts that Demi Moore is scrubbing away her popcorn years and emerging older and wiser as an actress of some power and standing. And she’s doing it while hating herself for having been socially forced to put on a made-up face in the first place. You feel every mote of frustration, every atom of self-loathing, every tick of the clock. Those clock face inserts are not only reminding you that she’s going to be late for her date. It’s another (ahem) striking metaphor for the jackbooted march of time that only seems to trample women into the ground while older men enjoy labels like ‘distinguished’ or ‘commanding’. I’m not an older woman so while I empathise, I can only fail to get psychologically close to that gnawing of the constant need for cosmetic shielding for and against judgement, clocking those ubiquitous eyes on a body’s curves and the same male gaze that may turn out to be either a lurid, gossamer-thinly veiled compliment or an open dismissal. But we must acknowledge that sometimes that gaze is sought after and welcome. It all depends on whose eyes are doing the gazing and what’s being done with a woman’s consent to her face and body to lure that gaze towards her. A minefield, for sure. It’s believed that make-up can take a few years off and enhance desirability but women are not in control of who gets to make those judgements. This ethical and moral area of interaction between men and women these days is much more of a struggle to navigate, a fact that doesn’t faze me now that I won’t ever have to worry about it anymore, being of a certain vintage beyond the need of further romantic adventures.