The opening couple minutes of The Substance are elegantly efficient — words that don’t much leap to mind during the remaining 138 minutes of this outrageous movie. A decade-spanning montage lays out the rise and fall of a Hollywood celebrity entirely through the condition of her star on the Walk of Fame. From an overhead vantage, we watch it cast in concrete and illuminated by flashbulbs.
As the years tick off, the camera angle doesn’t change, but its inanimate subject does — degraded by the elements and foot traffic, increasingly ignored by tourists (“She was in that movie,” one manages), this symbol of showbiz immortality is eventually symbolizing the opposite. It’s a ruthless little short film on the fickleness of fame, punctuated by a final indignity: a sloppy slice of pizza that lands on the star with a splat. A lot goes splat in The Substance , the most disgustingly wet movie you’re likely to squirm or hurl through this year.
Were this deranged nightmare satire somehow booked in America’s motion-synced gimmick auditoriums — its 4DX or D-Box theaters, where patrons get upcharged for the “pleasure” of getting rocked and spritzed in their seats — the audience would leave as drenched as the front row of a Gallagher show. But there is method to the moistness: In taking her own mallet to bodies and gag reflexes alike, French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat has made a movie as grotesquely flesh- and fluid-obsessed as the industry it savages. Its gore is mat.