'The Substance' is a failed mashup of Coralie Fargeat's influences

by Mitchel Green - September 22, 2024

| mitchelgreen34@gmail.com source: The Movie Database

There is a minor detail in the opening sequence of Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance” that, while innocuous at first glance, is telling of the kind of movie you’re about to see. Coralie Fargeat doesn’t seem to realize it doesn’t snow in Los Angeles — not recently enough to be able to overlook it at least. That two-second shot of a Hollywood star of fame buried in snow succinctly lays out the film’s fatal flaw: Fargeat does not have as strong a grasp of the setting and culture she’s criticizing as she thinks she does.

What Fargeat does understand is movies, specifically genre movies from the 80s and 90s — the works of Kubrick, Lynch, Tarantino, and Cronenberg are all over “The Substance.” As a result, Fargeat’s idea of LA is stuck in the fantasy (or at least heightened realism) of movies like “Mulholland Drive” and “Pulp Fiction.” Fargeat isn’t subtle about these influences either, she lifts several shots directly from movies like “The Shining” and “The Fly,” hurting her own work by constantly calling attention to other, better films. The Los Angeles of this film is a place out of time, in which people use smartphones and smart TVs, but where people also watch network television by the millions and read print newspapers. It’s tough to get mad about realism in a science-fiction film but it distracts from the very real-world issues that Fargeat is trying to tackle.

While Fargeat’s apeing of popular influences might make for some briefly exciting technical filmmaking (which contains some of the most creative digital cinematography in recent memory), it does not make up for being a two-and-a-half-hour concept rather than a story. The extent of “The Substance”’s ideas about the male gaze in media and the treatment of older women in Hollywood doesn’t extend much beyond a general description of the premise. This is a film that is so overly confident in its social commentary that it begins to ridicule its own obviousness before it ever gets to any sort of point. If it does ever come to any conclusions, those answers are so obvious and occur so early in the film, that it only exists to justify the crass, grotesque, bloody finale.

Genre movies can’t just be genre movies anymore, they have to have something to say™, and that makes them viable artistic products. It means having a screenplay with Ideas is more important than expressing them in any new or profound way. This mess of a script winning Best Screenplay at Cannes is funnier than any joke in the movie and a stronger indictment of the current media apparatus than any barb “The Substance” throws at an industry it doesn’t understand.