The title refers to a singular fluid, but there are actually a great many other substances at play in Coralie Fargeat‘s feminist body-horror freak-out, almost all of them visceral to the point of discomfort. There’s the opening image of the film, a single uncooked egg, freed from its shell, and lying in a pool of its own albumen, a slender needle coming in to pierce the yolk, injecting a chemical that initially splits the yolk before forming two separate eggs. In the course of things, there’s also tears, marbleized concrete, hocked mucus globs, placenta jelly, vomit, snow-globe oil, and, naturally, a great deal of blood, spilled liberally on the floor, as a splatter on someone’s face, or, during the film’s completely unhinged ending, sent hurling into a crowd of astonished audience members as if from a firehose.
If the egg analogy isn’t clear enough (and it really is), Fargeat’s film concerns the idea of replicating oneself, only as the “best” version of themselves, free of scars, malformations, and most critically for our protagonist, the vicissitudes of aging.
Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) is a once-stunning actress, now, in her later years, trying like hell to hang on to the last shreds of her career, at this point, primarily as the lead, be-spandexed hostess for a dancerize show on network TV — the film dispenses with the complexities of modern television programming by reducing everything to a kind of generic oversimplification: a slick, snakeskin-suit wearing, cartoonishly horrible veteran TV producer, Harvey (Dennis Quaid), is simply referred to as an “executive” for a “network”; a new billboard promoting the network’s fare is dubbed “new show,” their holiday extravaganza becomes “New Year’s Eve Show” and so forth — who finds out she’s getting replaced by an as yet unspecified younger, more energized actress, and sent out to pasture, as it were.
Bitter and disappointed after her meeting with Harvey over lunch — one with Quaid’s character eviscerating a bowl of shrimp in extreme close-up that might put a dent in your future seafood considerations — she’s eventually driven to follow-up on a mysterious lead left to her by a strapping young intern at her doctor’s office. Calling a number given to her on a flash drive, she makes arrangements to pick up her initial package of drugs and materials for the Substance to work its wonders.
After picking up said materials from a minimalist weigh station down a derelict alleyway, Elizabeth unpacks the various vacuum-sealed apparati, injects herself with the initial solution, and soon collapses on the ground, allowing her new, younger, better self to emerge, as if from a cocoon, out of her spine. This young version, who eventually calls herself “Sue” (Margaret Qualley), is seemingly everything Elisabeth is not: Young, vibrant, beautiful, and full of life. The “Twilight Zone” style twist is that the new version and the old must switch places every seven days “without exception” or bad things will ensue.
It’s not long before Sue has taken the now-opened top-spot for Harvey’s new exercise “show,” by absolutely wowing the wretch, and has become the toast of Hollywood once again — even as Elisabeth’s body lies crumpled in a heap in a secret room built into the bathroom. As you can expect, it’s not long before Sue wants more and more time as the activated body, and each time she steals more than her allotted time from Elisabeth, the older woman suffers worse and worse physical deformities when she finally is awakened. The building rivalry, with both versions growing more and more resentful of each other, leads to a Cronenbergian donnybrook of a climax, where blood, entrails, and other assorted body parts are flying in all directions.
It’s not particularly difficult to discern what Fargeat is after here, in fact, part of the film’s raison d’etre is to make the film’s purpose so abundantly clear it half-drowns you in gore and body horror en route to its jarring climax. It is to the director’s credit that it dials everything up to such a degree it forces you to either take in the panorama of slick carnage, or be forced to look away from the screen (the cheery publicist who greeted me and my partner before the film, sarcastically referred to it as a great “date-night” picture on our way out).
It’s difficult, indeed, wrong-headed, to chide such a film for being too much, as it were, but things become so chaotic and gleefully transgressive I could feel my brain pretty much tuning it out towards the end. In this way, as with more than a few others, it is indeed redolent of early Cronenberg, who’s stomach-churning turns often felt like being overwhelmed with an adolescent’s gore-fest fantasia.
As when it premiered earlier this year at Cannes, there will be a great many people more on its wavelength who will find its over-the-top brand of entrail-displaying thoroughly gripping, but that level of mayhem is an acquired taste that never quite hits me right. It certainly makes its point, but unless you are a gore-aficionado or a surgeon, just don’t expect to enjoy dinner afterward.
