A scene in the 2004 comedy Mean Girls finds the Plastics, the trio of mean teens at the film’s center, standing in front of a bedroom mirror lamenting their individual physical “flaws”: “huge” hips, ugly calves, “man shoulders.” After a few moments, they turn to look at their silent new recruit, Lindsay Lohan’s Cady Heron, expecting her to chime in with her own expressions of self-disgust. The best she can come up with is morning halitosis.
It’s doubtful Coralie Fargeat had Tina Fey’s skewering of teenage girlhood in mind when dreaming up her deranged body horror tale The Substance . Still, the essence of that satirical scene courses through Fargeat’s cri de cœur against the idealization and demonization of women’s bodies – how a misogynistic culture teaches us to hate ourselves for not looking a certain way and to accept the fate of becoming all but invisible upon reaching a certain age. Many artistic movements have sought to push back against these restraints; The Substance ’s weapon of choice to address such ills is a straight-up wrecking ball often exhilarating and occasionally tedious.
The Substance begins turned up to 11, cheekily unbridled in its visual and narrative un-subtlety: bright, bold color schemes; big and broad performances; bodies torn asunder. Demi Moore is Elisabeth Sparkle, a Jane Fonda-esque aerobics TV star who turns the big 5-0 and is promptly ousted from her gig in Hollywood. Dejected, she drives home, only to get distract.