“It’s done. My life is over. I’m going to be erased from the society.”
Ever since she turned 40, French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat has been grappling with these chaotic thoughts that will be recognizable to many women navigating their middle ages around the world. “It was like a super depressing collapse in my personal life,” the now 48-year-old filmmaker remembers during a recent conversation with ELLE.com.
Those “powerful and very violent” internal battles eventually became the gnarly, uncompromising and purposely angry-as-hell body-horror epic The Substance, Fargeat’s sophomore feature that wowed at the Cannes Film Festival last May, and is now in theaters from MUBI. With shades of John Carpenter’s The Thing, Brian de Palma’s Carrie, and Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession—as well as mischievous winks at Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining—Fargeat’s sensational genre outing is among the most unique and out-there horror films in recent memory, one that grasps how urgently political the horror genre has always been and culminates in an ending as violent and vulnerable as the familiar feelings about aging that Fargeat has braved.
In a way, her award-winning debut feature Revenge—a thriller that flipped the script on the rape-revenge tropes on Fargeat’s terms—signaled her leanings towards both genre filmmaking and feminist storytelling all the way back in 2017. Though, Fargeat admits she wasn’t consciously thinking about the latter aspect at the time. “When the movie screened, people commented on its [gender] statements,” she recalls. “I wasn’t rationalizing them yet, but I started to read a lot about the societal imbalances and [considered] those seams in a more intellectual way.”
Coralie Fargeat poses with the Best Screenplay award for The Substance at Cannes Film Festival in May 2024.
From those reflections emerged the deliberately feminist nature of The Substance, a film about the merciless way women—ahem, of a certain age—are discarded in culture and the impossible beauty standards that they (we) are constantly subjected to at any age. More disquieting in the film is its truthful reckoning with what we do to and expect from ourselves in light of all the misogynistic and unhealthily youth- and-beauty-obsessed mechanisms that are still deeply rooted in society. Suffering in their margins in The Substance is Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore, in perhaps the boldest and toughest performance of her career), a Hollywood star who’s on her last legs of fame despite having an actual Walk of Fame star to her name. Leading an ’80s-style aerobics show for a TV network (ran by a committed Dennis Quaid’s slimy Harvey) and living in an ultra-modern apartment with the bleakest subway-tiled bathroom, Elisabeth discovers that she would soon be tossed aside by her job for new blood. It’s around that time that a mysterious encounter introduces her to “The Substance,” a freaky, self-administered injection that births (through a gruesome, spine-splitting sequence) an alternate and much younger version of herself we’ll come to know as Sue (an electric Margaret Qualley). There are only two rules to follow. First, she has to remember that the two versions are still one person—there is no individual “Sue” or “Elisabeth.” And the second is, only one version will be out in the world at one time, while the other hibernates in a coma-like state. At the end of each week, it’s time to switch. Absolutely no exceptions can be made to this 7-day cycle.
Elisabeth (Demi Moore) in her apartment overlooking an billboard of Sue’s (Margaret Qualley) new show, which replaced her own.
Game for the rules at first, Elisabeth slowly falls into the trap of youth through Sue’s immediate rise to fame as America’s new sweetheart, with a reclaimed sense of invincibility, which she soon becomes addicted to. And the further she dangerously breaks the rules of “The Substance” in order to hold onto Sue a little longer, the more viciously deranged the process becomes, mercilessly taking away from her older self—speedily deforming her body and skin, mutating her to unthinkable shapes, pushing her to the deep end ruthlessly. To Fargeat, visually representing that blatant cruelty was crucial for staying true to her own experience as a woman. “The violence in the movie was really a way to take out all the violence that I felt within me,” she explains. “I felt the need to express all this regarding how you are seen and what your body looks like. You keep comparing yourself and evaluating your value based on that. And I said, ‘Okay, this is the right time for me to take the horror genre to express this violence.’”
In an era when it’s been tougher than ever to get a movie made, Fargeat (also a producer here) instinctively understood that she had to be as detailed on the page as possible about her risky vision, in order to set realistic expectations with every stakeholder about the extremes she wanted The Substance to explore, both visually and thematically. “I knew that it was going to be a journey to preserve that in an uncompromised way, and that the success of the movie would depend on it being a hundred percent sincere. So I wanted the script to be super specific. Because you can sell an idea, but everyone projects different things on an idea. And then your project gets stuck.” Being precise and communicative helped ensure that she made The Substance on her own terms: in France, with the crew she wanted, through the priorities she set. “We invented the way we were going to shoot. We had our own rules crafting the many prosthetics. In every movie, the toughest part is communication. I told my crew, “I don’t care if this is impossible in reality, because this is The Substance’s reality.”
“Until the movie’s 100-percent finished, you are the only one who knows the total vision of it,” director Coralie Fargeat says.
Still, it was tough at times, sticking with her inner voice about her daring and unusual film. “Until the movie’s 100-percent finished, you are the only one who knows the total vision of it. And it’s always a fight to step outside of the regular track.” Luckily, both her crew and cast embraced her outside-of-the-box ideas fully and collaborated inside the forthcoming environment that she forged. “We shook hands and said, ‘Let’s do this together!’” Fargeat remembers about the time she first presented the script to Moore and Qualley. Knowing that the two stars’ performances would be closely linked to the film’s prosthetic-heavy and constantly morphing visuals (which kept Moore in the make-up chair for hours every day), the trio thoroughly discussed every aspect of design and sound together, shaping the basis of the two characters jointly.
Fargeat admits, she was surprised when she first heard that Moore was interested. But then she read Moore’s memoir, Inside Out, which clicked everything into place. “I discovered a totally different side of her, which I didn’t know through her movies that I knew. She took a lot of risks during her career. She built herself by herself. She made some very bold choices in a very male-dominated industry. And she also overcame [some issues], worked on herself to feel good with who she is, the process of aging and her relationship with her body.” To Fargeat, Moore’s journey through finding that strength is the very thing that helped her be vulnerable on the screen. “That [vulnerability] wasn’t going to hurt her because she already has the resources. It was just going to serve the film. When I finished reading the book, I said, ‘Okay, Demi really rocks!’ I am so happy that her performance is given so much praise,” Fargeat remarks about the veteran actress’s critically acclaimed turn that might land Moore her very first Oscar nomination. “Because she took a lot of risks, shooting an indie horror in France with a crazy script.”
Demi Moore as Elisabeth Sparkle in The Substance.
Part of the no-holds-barred risk the film demanded includes nudity—sometimes, full-frontal nudity—something that Fargeat approached with utmost intention, discussing all aspects of the film’s matter-of-fact bareness with her cast. “There are two different relationships with nudity in the film,” she explains. “The one in the bathroom of Elisabeth’s home is the symbol of the relationship she has with herself. It’s the place where nobody looks at her, there is no gaze. She is just judgmentally facing herself in the mirror. Nothing is sexualized. This led me to shoot it in a very specific and internal way, in this white, transformational chamber that is her bathroom.” The second type of nudity was conceived in complete contrast to this, one linked to the outside world and its sexualized gaze. “You conform yourself to that perfect, hyper-sexualized ‘ideal.’ That’s what the body of Sue expresses during the dance scenes where she is multiplied in all those screens. Of course you enjoy being the center of attention. And yes, everyone looking at you is a powerful feeling. But that was a way for me to say, ‘It’s a fake promise.’ Her relationship to herself is totally different. It’s a never-ending quest, to always be something that people expect from you.”
The ending of The Substance is so shocking in the severe transformation of Moore’s form that it’s not for the squeamish—you feel the suffering inside of your organs. But that was the only way Fargeat was willing to consider making it; anything less would have been inauthentic and insincere. “I really wanted to express that when you’re a woman, your body is everything but natural in the public space,” she says. “It’s constantly scrutinized, judged, analyzed, fantasized, sexualized. And you can’t ignore it. It [also defines] how we are allowed to invest in the world,” she continues. “It’s a super powerful jail that prevents us from taking up space. That inequality is so internalized and the weapons that are internalized are the strongest ones. It was important for me to show that reality that is still a taboo to speak about, putting it outside with this amount of guts, blood, and violence and say, ‘Look at this!’”
Women’s bodies are “constantly scrutinized, judged, analyzed, fantasized, sexualized. And you can’t ignore it,” Fargeat says.
Even though Fargeat set her film in Hollywood, to her, what it symbolizes is something that every woman goes through in every country of the world. And having made The Substance, she feels liberated from those pressures, at least to a degree. “Nothing is easy in a totally magical way,” she says. “It’s a journey, trying to value who I am. It’s been freeing, but sometimes you have relapses. I still have to deal with all the contradictory things inside of my brain that the two characters represent. But the voices are lower and lower, and quieter and quieter.”
Tomris Laffly is a freelance film writer and critic based in New York. A member of the New York Film Critics Circle (NYFCC), she regularly contributes to Variety and RogerEbert.com, with bylines in Time Out New York, Filmmaker Magazine, The Playlist and Vulture, among other outlets. She has a special interest in the awards season, costume design and women in film, covers various film festivals throughout the year including New York Film Festival, Sundance and Telluride and tweets from @TomiLaffly.