OCTOBER 19 — Horror films are, by their very nature, highly divisive. More often than not, they’re intentionally made to provoke extreme reactions from their audiences.
Outside of a select few acknowledged classics like Rosemary’s Baby and Don’t Look Now, both of which were made by directors (Roman Polanski and Nicolas Roeg) associated with more “serious” films like Chinatown and Walkabout, it is indeed very rare for us to encounter a straight-up horror/genre film that’s universally acclaimed by both audiences and film critics.
It’s more normal to encounter a horror flick that’s beloved by both horror fans and horror film critics, but with lukewarm reception from normal audiences and cinephile critics.
So, when a film arrives and manages to unite all these camps in their praise and admiration, it definitely is a cause for celebration.
That film is The Substance, a Best Screenplay winner at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, from director Coralie Fargeat, who first made a name for herself with the absolutely brutal and divisive Revenge a few years back.
Arriving on digital platforms recently, after a late September theatrical release that has seen the film collect a pretty impressive US$12 million (RM51 million) in US box-office takings and almost US$31 million worldwide, The Substance has been the subject of many viral posts on the internet, making it one of the major talking points on social media in the last few weeks, with audiences discussing their takes on the movie, with most people highlighting the yucky body horror aspect of the movie as their main takeaway.
It tells the story of a once very successful and now ageing movie star named Elisabeth Sparkle (played fearlessly by Demi Moore in the sort of performance that one would normally only associate Nicolas Cage with) who now runs a fitness TV show called Sparkle Your Life.
In one of the film’s many brazenly unsubtle moves, the film’s opening credits roll over a time lapse shot of Elisabeth’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, from its installation towards its current state to symbolise her current status as a Hollywood movie star.
And if you’ve seen enough movies, you’ll know what the film’s final shot would be (which is of that same star, of course, in its latest state).
Crisis arrives when the show’s vulgar producer Harvey, played with delicious glee by Dennis Quaid, plans to replace Elisabeth with a younger and hotter starlet, a plan that she overhears him talking about out loud on the phone, in the women’s toilet.
A chance encounter with a doctor afterwards leads her to being introduced to something called The Substance, which she found in a USB drive slipped into her pocket with a note saying, “It changed my life.”
This is the high concept hook of the film, wherein The Substance, through a process that involves various syringes and tubes, will create “a new you,” which is literally what happened as it created a totally different and much younger body for Elisabeth.
The biggest catch is that Elisabeth will need to switch between these two bodies every seven days, and of course, take good care of both of them because, as she’s often reminded by the unknown voice behind this programme, “you are one.”
There are 3 main stages in the process — Activate, Stabilise and Switch — and, like all good cautionary tales, these stages must be adhered to strictly, with no exceptions.
They may sound easy, like the instruction in Gremlins to not feed the cute and cuddly creature after midnight or let it come into contact with water, but life and human nature will always conspire to make it hard for us to adhere to these instructions.
And so while everything started off dandily, with Elisabeth’s new body (now named Sue, played fearlessly as well in a star making performance from Margaret Qualley) snagging the new job as the lead in Harvey’s highly sexualised new fitness show called Pump It Up, things start to get ugly once Elisabeth gets high on Sue’s newfound fame and slowly starts to break the seven-day switch rule, and later on the Stabilise and Activate rules as well, leading them to be involved in a darkly comical battle of wits that we all know will end in nothing but disaster.
An exhilarating exercise in both low and high taste, I’ve seen plenty of film critics name dropping David Cronenberg, David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick in their description of this movie, and I can see where they’re coming from as there are very obvious visual homages and plot devices borrowed from films like The Fly, The Elephant Man and The Shining here.
However, for me, this movie is surely one huge love letter to the icky cult classics from Brian Yuzna and Stuart Gordon, especially Yuzna’s unforgettable 1989 shocker Society and Gordon’s 1986 classic From Beyond, both much beloved within cult horror circles but have never been held in any sort of high regard within the cinephile community.
To see a Cannes Best Screenplay winner paying obvious tribute to these two low-budget 80s horror cult favourites is something I’ll cherish forever.
* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
