TIFF 2024: The Substance Review

This will be one of many reviews during this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, to keep up with our latest coverage, click here.

Following up 2017’s rape-revenge-turned-survival-action Revenge with an ambitious body horror comedy film indebted to Cronenberg and Lynch may seem unexpected for writer/director Carolie Fargeat, but it’s a logical progression for a filmmaker just as fascinated by society’s view of women as she is by poking around inside some guts. For a concept that could have slipped into C-grade Black Mirror territory in lesser hands, The Substance stands as one of the year’s best films due to its careful tone, vivid visuals, dynamic performances, and desire to get its hands dirty.

Set in Hollywood, the film follows Elisabeth Sparkle (Moore), a 50-year-old former A-lister now performing as a television aerobics instructor. On her 50th birthday, Elisabeth is fired by her boss Harvey (Dennis Quaid), who demands a younger presence. Desperate to reclaim her youth, Elisabeth visits a hospital where she is offered an experimental drug called “the substance,” a drug that creates a younger clone and allowing their consciousness to switch between selves for seven days (pushing further can damage the older body). Elisabeth’s younger self, “Sue” (Qualley), immediately becomes Hollywood’s new darling, replacing Elisabeth’s old TV slot. As Sue’s success overshadows her own, Elizabeth’s excitement to relive her youth quickly becomes envious.

Ultimately a generational text on the disparity between beauty standards for aging women and the men who enforce them, the film explores how the camera’s idolization of women’s “perfect bodies” reinforces this dynamic, affects celebrities’ psyches, and influences women. Although thin as a Hollywood satire, where The Substance takes the most interest is in mirroring the pursuit of beauty with the destructive force of addiction, raising the stakes over the course of a squeamishly gory and hilariously absurd ride to its bloodiest conclusion.

Moore, navigates an incredibly bold and daring performance that goes to extremely uncomfortable places sure to make audiences’ jaws drop. Incredibly vulnerable work, she ostensibly plays as a career-analogue. Qualley is more in her wheelhouse with weird roles, inhabiting the “ditzy, picturesque woman” persona with greater self-awareness—a performance within a performance. Periodically rounding out the cast is Quaid who is radiating the evil of a comic-book supervillain to great comedic effect.

The cinematography captures grit beneath candy-coated colours with Kubrickian stares and wide shots that would make the master proud. Meanwhile, Lynchian, unsettling sound design heightens the monotony. Uncompromising and surprisingly hilarious in its embrace of bad taste, Fargeat’s style, malleability, and ability to blend a healthy dose of influences with simple, familiar narratives that emphasize the female role, deliver genre thrills, and never downplay audiences’ intelligence while weaponizing their perceptions of bodies has helped shape her material into definitive feminist texts, quickly establishing herself as one of our generation’s finest directors.

still courtesy of MUBI

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J.A. Birney

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