The star plays a middle-aged TV host who signs up for a drug to generate a replicant of her younger self in French director Coralie Fargeat’s blood-soaked satire
The female body is a horror movie waiting to happen. From puberty and the grisly onset of menstruation, in pictures such as Brian De Palma’s Carrie and John Fawcett’s Ginger Snaps, to pregnancy and childbirth – Rosemary’s Baby is the obvious example – women have provided a rich seam of inspiration for genre film-makers over the past half century. But look a little closer and two trends become apparent: the vast majority of female body-based horror deals with various aspects of the reproductive system, and it has largely been made by men (Titane and The First Omen, two recent examples of movies that harness pregnancy for horror, are notable exceptions). And this is part of what makes French director Coralie Fargeat’s gut-churningly visceral second feature so refreshing: The Substance not only offers a female perspective on women’s bodies, but also argues that things only start to get properly messy once fertility is a dim memory.
Of course there’s no shortage of horror movies that use the older female body for grotesque shock value. They’re a key element of the “hagsploitation” subgenre – think Mia Goth coated in saggy-flesh prosthetics in Ti West’s X. But the starting point for The Substance is not so much the body itself as a reaction to the idea of it. The story is triggered by the violent swerve in attitudes once a woman has turned 50 and hit what society deems to be her built-in obsolescence. It’s gleefully excessive stuff – a film that conjures up outrageous and monstrous images and then covers them all with yet more blood. It makes Fruit Chan’s 2004 film Dumplings look like a model of tasteful restraint (and that, you may remember, was a movie that served up a menu of human foetus-filled dim sum in its quest for beauty and rejuvenation). Deep within all the oozing spinal fluids and pustulant growths here, there’s a kernel of credibility: The Substance plunges us into the deranged, disorienting emotional carnage of menopause in a way that few other films have managed.
