The Substance (Coralie Fargeat, 2024)

[zedz]

You haven’t actually seen this film, have you?

[Peacock]

You haven’t actually seen this film, have you?

No I’m not a big spaghetti western fan.

[Matt]

I'm glad I'm not the only one to be complaining that there's a fantastic 95-minute film to be had in here. I paused it after a good while to feed my cat and groaned audibly when I saw that the movie wasn't even half over. It thankfully got better after that. The third act, however, had me repeatedly laughing out loud, especially when

Spoiler

the title card "Monstro Elisasue" came up, when she pastes the face on herself, when she vomits up the boob, and during the Carrie-esque climax.

Finch's reference to Stuart Gordon is right on the money.

I really could have done without the slavish Kubrick visual homages and the "ironic" needle-drops and Dennis Quaid's character who's essentially a "Powerpuff Girls" villain.

I wasn't a big fan of Fargeat's Revenge until the finale of that film either. So she's proving herself a master of the over-the-top third act, she just needs to get her first acts under control.

[tenia]

Rewatched this for an upcoming video review : I might have been too harsh scoring it 4.5 out of 10, since I did have some fun again with it, but man, it's just. so. long.
I have the opposite issue than you Matt, in that by the time the third act arrives, my mind has already checked out.

[pianocrash]

Picked up the 4K release today and couldn't help noticing that the blu-ray disc (older technology with less definition) has a picture of Demi Moore, while the 4K disc (newer technology with higher definition) is Margaret Qualley.

This is a reach.

What's the reach? I never stated it was intentional, I'm simply stating the factual display of the discs. Or are you arguing that blu-ray is neither older technology nor lower definition than 4K? I believe those are also facts.

Let's be honest here: a Reach ain't nothin' but a toothbrush to Coralie Fargeat, as per her scripts.

Biggest haha takeaway from this half-argument about the discs (which are definitely a choice by the director, who is very much in the literal pocket of the company who released it) is that the film was shot on 4K, then downgraded to 2K and up back to 4K to soften the photography, overall. So I suppose we are all reachin' 4 a new refutation of time & space (1993, respectfully), sometimes jokes just don't land, and it's not like anybody buys physical media anymore, amirite?

[captveg]

Rewatched this for an upcoming video review : I might have been too harsh scoring it 4.5 out of 10, since I did have some fun again with it, but man, it's just. so. long.
I have the opposite issue than you Matt, in that by the time the third act arrives, my mind has already checked out.

Just finished it and this was my experience - by the 1 hr 45 min mark I was fairly checked out. The absurdity of the final 20 mins helped a little, but at best this just isn't to my tastes. A movie like Seconds has many similar ideas/themes and is more my vibe.

[Brian C]

There is a brief moment of this film when I thought it was actually relatable - sometime after the first switch back to Elisabeth, when the film focuses, just for a moment, not on her vanity but simply her loneliness. It's about the time that she meets the old man in the diner, and of course the film explicitly verbalizes this theme when it doesn't have to, like it does all its other themes. But in that moment, I connected to it and to Moore's performance, and the feeling of waking up one morning and realizing that no one in your life seems to have much use for you anymore. It's incredibly bleak but it's something real and for just a minute or two, and for the only time, genuine sympathy for this woman bleeds through.

If there's a second thing I related to, it's the complete lack of helpfulness you get anytime you call customer support with even basic questions!

Other than that, this movie seems to hate pretty much everyone and everything, not least of all its two/one main character(s). It hates the self-pitying by Elisabeth and the empty vanity of Sue. It hates the entertainment business, it hates the entertainment product itself, and it hates the audiences that watch it. It hates the decay of being old and it hates the arrogance of youth, and it hates the vapidness of fame while it also hates the normies. It's just so bitter about the world.

I was prepared for the gore, but I wasn't prepared for how ugly the soul of the film is. I thought I was buying into a film making a simple-minded feminist point in an over-the-top way, and I skipped this in its initial release because that sounded tedious to me. But what I got was a film that's way worse, one that's disgusted by the woman/women it portrays and externalizes that disgust with a bunch of gory effects.

Completely repellant.

[Beloved Aunt]

Oh Brian, we here at this forum find you useful, and interesting, and welcome!

PS,

If there's a second thing I related to, it's the complete lack of helpfulness you get anytime you call customer support with even basic questions!

is this really everyone's experience most of the time, or just a leftist trope? I've definitely had a few bad customer support experiences, but mostly I've found them helpful and I get what I'm looking for.

[Brian C]

Well, I meant it as a little bit of a joke to lighten my very cranky take on the film, but honestly ... mostly yes. My typical experience is that I can usually get what I need, but only eventually, after a lot of jumping through hoops and often talking to multiple people.

Something like this recent (true) scenario:

ME: I'm calling to report an internet outage at my apartment.
CS: I don't see an outage in your area.
ME: Yes, I saw on the online coverage map that it's not showing an outage. That's why I'm calling to report it.
CS [after a half-hour of resetting router, time on hold while they make calls on their end to other depts, etc]: OK, we've confirmed an outage in your area and we are dispatching someone to investigate, ETA is within 72 hours.
ME: Thanks, but 72 hours????

Just a ton of effort and I had to push them into even confirming the outage. Didn't even realize this was particularly a leftist trope.

[tenia]

It's incredibly bleak but it's something real and for just a minute or two, and for the only time, genuine sympathy for this woman bleeds through.

Same for me here, I did feel, both during my first watching and the second one, that it suddenly was a much better scene than anything before, something both more relatable but also deeper and more in-line with the Very Serious Movie Fargeat was seemingly wanting to do. But then, the movie doesn’t really know what to do with it anyway and goes back to normal without thinking about it ever again.
This being written :

Other than that, this movie seems to hate pretty much everyone and everything, not least of all its two/one main character(s). It hates the self-pitying by Elisabeth and the empty vanity of Sue. It hates the entertainment business, it hates the entertainment product itself, and it hates the audiences that watch it. It hates the decay of being old and it hates the arrogance of youth, and it hates the vapidness of fame while it also hates the normies. It's just so bitter about the world.

It IS bitter about the world, but I don’t think it’s aiming that much directly to the characters (at least, not the main ones) but rather what the society they’re living in kinda forces them to do. It’s about performances and masks, the hoops the society makes you go through, or at least the ones it makes you believe you have to go through, and the myths it creates about how people should behave, how they should look, what they should be and do. I don’t think it’s disgusted by the women it portrays, however, but rather at what powerful people like Harvey makes them go through, to the point someone like Elisabeth will believe she needs to go through The Substance even if the movie really never clarifies why it is exactly that it brings to her (both because there are quite a few plot holes regarding that, but also because it’s quite clear she could stop all this self-destructing experience but can’t resort to “just because”). In the same fashion, Sue doesn’t really have to be vain, but it’s what the world around her expects her to be : some kind of feminine ideal that can’t be anything else, because of course such a gorgeous woman cannot be anything else than a sexualized fantasy with no brains.

But I think your feeling about this rather goes towards the gap between the ideas behind the movie and their execution. One of my main issues with it, for instance, is that the movie has countless butt shots for instance, and while they’re supposedly pastiching male gaze, it’s actually tough on-screen to set them apart from this. And sure enough, Fargeat might say the team was careful about the shots used for the movie’s marketing, in order to avoid such shots getting reduced to that, but I’m not surprised they were : because they actually can. It’s like those mediocre comedies that supposedly subvert clichés but actually just repeat them. And I might have been more forgiving with a movie that’s not 2h20 long, because such a duration allows for the time to frame such things correctly, but the movie doesn’t.

[colinr0380]

Well, I meant it as a little bit of a joke to lighten my very cranky take on the film, but honestly ... mostly yes. My typical experience is that I can usually get what I need, but only eventually, after a lot of jumping through hoops and often talking to multiple people.

Something like this recent (true) scenario:

ME: I'm calling to report an internet outage at my apartment.
CS: I don't see an outage in your area.
ME: Yes, I saw on the online coverage map that it's not showing an outage. That's why I'm calling to report it.
CS [after a half-hour of resetting router, time on hold while they make calls on their end to other depts, etc]: OK, we've confirmed an outage in your area and we are dispatching someone to investigate, ETA is within 72 hours.
ME: Thanks, but 72 hours????

Just a ton of effort and I had to push them into even confirming the outage. Didn't even realize this was particularly a leftist trope.

It could be worse: I had BT say they were pulling out of the landline business around December 2023 reported by my local ISP, who said they would take over the phone line and in the process upgrade me to a fibre connection too. Awesome! But after cutting me off the internet completely for ten days in February last year (at which point when I called to ask how they were doing the lady in the office angrily said "if you don't like us find another ISP!"), they said that fibre thing couldn't happen because of the lack of infrastructure in my area, which they had not thought about when initially offering it. Then whilst waiting for them to 'seamlessly' change my phone over in October I got a surprise "we're sorry to see you go" letter from BT and my phone was cut off. I went to the ISP to ask about this and they said "sorry but we had you down to move over in our next tranch of customers in January 2025, but you had a new neighbour move into your street and I accidentally told them to cut your phone line off instead". Six months later I still have no landline, and presume they are in no hurry to connect one.

So I share your despair about 'customer service', particularly regarding communication providers, Brian C!

[mfunk9786]

The layer of this film that really appealed to me is its open-ended commentary on the ways in which our behavior as young people impact who we are as older people. Who do we alienate? How do we treat our bodies? What are we willing to do to our minds? Are we able to establish an inner foundation that holds up to inevitable changes and disappointments?

At its best, The Substance feels more like a Charlie Kaufman homage than the more obvious David Cronenberg comparison. Because of the tug-of-war between Elisabeth/Sue, the film is thought-provoking instead of just indulgent, but mileage is going to vary on its indulgence - that stuff is a hoot too, but obviously isn't going to be everyone's cup of tea.

[colinr0380]

I finally sat down with The Substance following its first UK TV showing on Friday evening. It is very relevant to the current Mounjaro fad moment in some ways. And whilst the culture surrounding the main character is responsible for (or facilitating and pushing towards in all sorts of ways from the mental to the physical) the main character's split decision and the male figures running the business are repulsive (and more importantly are allowed to age disgracefully and repulsively without being discarded on the scrapheap for the newer chew toys on the scene), that a lot of the criticism comes from the notion of being unable to let go of what you once were as defined by your youth and move into a different phase of life. Elisabeth here is just left bitterly hoovering her apartment and watching Infomercials (like Ellen Burstyn's character in Requiem For A Dream in some ways!), just waiting her allotted days out before she gets to become Sue again, and suddenly regains a sense of agency (and Agency jobs). In that sense, whilst the film condemns the horrible male talent scouts and Studio bosses for their shallow callousness, brutal treatment of people like better or worse cuts of meat, and pick up and drop attitudes to the latest piece of talent, in that final moment of Elisabeth's Lynchian sparkly Hollywood reverie of going beyond the infinite (which is also weirdly similar to the ending of The Incredible Shrinking Man!), she is still looking for external validation and praise that she is perfect and unique, and most importantly irreplaceable, or at least will leave people bereft by her absence. When unfortunately all it will take is a bit of thorough scrubbing (maybe a little more than the norm) by the hired cleaning staff and overworked dry cleaners to get everything back to a placid normality again.

Also, watching this in the wake of Fargeat's previous film, 2017's Revenge, is really interesting, because Elisabeth/Sue's apartment, with its emphasis on its weird liminal space back corridors as a transitionary space behind the main presentable face of the apartment is where a lot of the most graphic and blood spraying horror occurs is a concept that also happens in Revenge as well. Maybe Fargeat has a thing about destroying the safest of spaces of ultra-luxurious apartments, or showing the hollowness underlying the plastered-on cladding? And in terms of fixtures and fittings both Revenge and The Substance have moments focusing on something rather upsetting occurring outside the wall of windows, or just beyond the sliding patio doors (that billboard is very Amores Perros-esque). And there may be an essay to write on the difference between the usage of showers versus baths in the film - the shower being the practical and pro-active way to clean yourself ready for a hard day's work ahead; whilst the bath is just a place to dump your body into and wallow for a week, or more. So long as you don't get too wrinkly in the process.

The main difference between Revenge and The Substance is that the external male aggressors fall away in The Substance to become more about the battle between the two sides of the main character getting horribly literalised. I have not read through many of the reviews (or indeed through this previous thread as yet for a while - EDIT: Having now done so more thoroughly than just skimming, I particularly like twbb's drug addiction binge-purge cycle comment on page 2), but have many people made the Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde comparisons with The Substance? With the twist that it is really about Elisabeth's self-hatred (and lack of self worth beyond her career) coming to the fore, and literalised through the liberating form of Sue (but one that doesn't represent a re-birth and second chance to try something different; but just an opportunity to live out all of the same decisions that brought Elisabeth to her lonely final resting place), that fuels the conflict of the film.