The Substance review: Demi Moore is sensational, but this body-horror yarn loses its way

Rage is the only colour in French director Coralie Fargeat’s palette. It stains and saturates. It eats away at thought and language. Both her debut, 2017’s self-explanatory thriller Revenge, and now The Substance, her body-horror statement piece on women and the ageing body, don’t speak so much as they feel – a split gut of emotions poured out and left to fester on screen.

The Substance doesn’t quite gel as it should, but it’s potent. It’s a fable, set in some Eighties coke nightmare of shiny leotards, teased hair, and gluttonous consumption. A garish, orange hallway stretches on, as if it were shot by Stanley Kubrick, and its rictus grins seem provided by David Lynch. Fargeat’s camera is always a little too close for comfort. If anyone speaks too passionately, they might spit on us.

Demi Moore, once the highest-paid female actor in the world, plays Elisabeth Sparkle, a former A-lister axed from her aerobics show by a grinning snake in a hideous suit, executive Harvey (Dennis Quaid, exquisitely foul). She’s presented with a last-ditch solution: “The Substance”, a Brat summer-green liquid which, when injected, forces the body to eject a younger, more beautiful clone.

The process is horrific. Every squelch arrives like a tsunami. But it births Sue (Margaret Qualley), who can fill Elisabeth’s old role as aerobics host, as long as she adheres to the golden rule: after seven days of shaking her perfect ass for the cameras, she must switch her consciousness back to Elisabeth, so that their bodies can replenish themselves and maintain the equilibrium. No exceptions.

Fargeat’s Revenge took a cinematic tradition forged in the hands of men, of women returning violence on their attackers, and rooted it deep within a feminine perspective. She does the same here, essentially, with the “hagsploitation” genre, stories of older women driven mad by their own faded beauty, launched by 1962’s What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?. Moore’s emotionally violent performance certainly bears shades of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford – it’s both powerful and embittered.

Yet “hagsploitation” is typically about repulsion towards some other woman’s aged body. The Substance is about a woman’s repulsion towards her own, about the monster in the mirror. And, at its best, it hits like a mallet to the heart. No one tells Elisabeth that she’s not beautiful. Demonstrably, she’s quite the opposite. But, as the years pass, she’s become aware of how men have slowly grown oblivious to her presence. When she blows a kiss to the camera, it’s harder now to do it with the same giggly, performative femininity as Sue – and Qualley delivers it with eerie vacantness.

It’s the violent tragedy of self-hatred, and Fargeat lets it burn with particular ferocity in a scene in which Elisabeth returns with increasing desperation to the mirror, retouching her lips, adjusting her outfit, but finding that nothing satisfies. She can’t even leave the house. It all feels painfully familiar.

But it’s hard, then, to square these images with what the director does next, as The Substance’s final stretch descends into a full-blown, blood-fountain homage to gross-out cult classics like Brian Yuzna’s 1989 horror film Society. It turns the body into a public spectacle and invites the audience in, a little too eagerly, to gawk at what has elsewhere been presented as such intimate, secret disgust. Still, cinema can only benefit from having a figure like Fargeat within its ranks. Sometimes, all that’s needed in art is an unfiltered, guttural scream.

Dir: Coralie Fargeat. Starring: Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, Dennis Quaid. 18, 140 mins.

‘The Substance’ is in cinemas from 20 September