Vague Visages’ The Substance review contains minor spoilers. Coralie Fargeat’s 2024 Mubi movie features Margaret Qualley, Demi Moore and Dennis Quaid. Check out the VV home page for more film reviews.

Given the bloody and abrasive nature of Coralie Fargeat’s 2017 feature debut Revenge, the polarizing reactions to the French filmmaker’s sophomore film, The Substance, make perfect sense. Hailed by some critics as an unflinching feminist take on the body horror genre and derided by just as many for being every bit as misogynistic as the culture it sets out to send up, the 2024 Mubi release occupies an awkward space in-between when viewed through sober eyes. The more Fargeat goes for broke with the practical effects, the more effective The Substance becomes, even as it dumbs down an already simplified analysis of how society treats women past middle age. However, the thriller is far less assured when it comes to sharing anything approaching a substantive thesis about the hot-button topics of ageism and sexism in the media, and could very well be the most shallow and underwritten film ever to have its screenplay awarded at Cannes.

Warning signs emerge in The Substance’s first act. After an elegant, economical introduction to the waning celebrity of Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), the character appears in the present as the outgoing host of a morning workout show. It’s the kind of cultural marker that feels deliberately outdated — a suggestion of a woman who is no longer a celebrated actress, but rather a washed-up and largely forgotten industry figure. After being introduced to “The Substance” — an underground serum that will create a “younger, better” version of the user taking it — Elisabeth uses her new alter ego, Sue (Margaret Qualley), as a means to simply get her old job back, and become a younger version of the daytime TV host she already was.

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It’s no fault of Moore or Qualley that Fargeat never gets under the skin of her protagonist, with both actresses excelling the more they lean into the genre’s most over-the-top trappings: the former with a Hagsploitation-indebted turn, the latter with a Cronenbergian transformation. The fear of aging is broadly alluded to as the reason for Elisabeth’s need to take the serum, but the personal rationale is avoided altogether. The protagonist has nobody who would notice her lengthy disappearance, which feels less like an illustration of her loneliness than it does narrative convenience, never ringing true that such a public figure — living in the heart of Hollywood no less — could be ignored. Yes, Fargeat makes a strong allegorical point about middle-aged women being “forgotten” by the industry and society at large, but a cinematic metaphor needs some semblance of narrative logic to work. The director never develops her protagonist — uninterested in probing her fears or desires — and only emphasizes the cruelty in this approach with Elisabeth’s suffering never providing a greater understanding of what motivates her.

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There’s a similar underbaked bluntness to the way Fargeat’s camera (via cinematographer Benjamin Kracun) follows Qualley after Elisabeth’s transformation, ogling her naked and scantily clad body in a way that it doesn’t for Moore, even as the character just goes about her daily routine in an identical fashion. Part of the reason The Substance runs long at 140 minutes is the amount of time dedicated to “Pump It Up” — a fitness show that’s a hyper-sexualized iteration of the one Elisabeth hosted. I doubt viewers will complain about Qualley’s dancing, but watching extensive homages to the Eric Prydz music video for “Pump It Up” might be an exhausting endeavor for some.

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“Pump It Up” never once resembles a real TV show, and The Substance never justifies why such a bizarre daytime TV program would make Elisabeth an overnight celebrity. If Fargeat’s movie were an 80s period piece, the protagonist’s instant fame at a time when such brazen sexuality was rarely depicted onscreen would make sense, but it’s set in the modern day. A show like “Pump It Up” wouldn’t get much traction due to the plethora of far more explicit content one could access online at the touch of a button. It’s one of many world-building factors that implies Fargeat wrote in a second language about a culture not her own. The Substance feels weirdly outdated, despite the writer-director’s many provocative attempts to demonstrate how misogyny and ageism play out in contemporary media. Perhaps if the film were set in France, and not a Hollywood that seems frozen in another era altogether, the director’s approach might ring true.

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Fargeat’s social satire only works when it commits to the repellent body horror implications of its conceit, embracing its status as an unholy hybrid of The Picture Of Dorian Gray, David Cronenberg’s remake of The Fly (1986), Brian Yuzna’s Society (1989) and the maligned Doctor Who season 2 episode “Love and Monsters” (2006). The underwritten nature of the two leads — who increasingly act as contrasting personalities, with no knowledge of the other’s actions, despite early exposition stressing this would not be the case — becomes irrelevant and the broad silliness of the script’s thesis takes over. What better way to poke fun at the fear of aging than to liken a starlet who has just turned 50 to a literal monster, in an industry where youth and good looks are the only currency? It’s these simple, bloody thrills that pack the biggest punch in The Substance. If only Fargeat didn’t try to convince viewers that she has more than shallow observations to offer.

Alistair Ryder (@YesitsAlistair) is a film and TV critic based in Manchester, England. By day, he interviews the great and the good of the film world for Zavvi, and by night, he criticizes their work as a regular reviewer at outlets including The Film Stage and Looper.

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