Here is news: the screen industry treats women like garbage. This insight, such as it is, powers writer-director Coralie Fargeat’s second feature film, The Substance, which is set in an unnamed city that is clearly a version of Los Angeles, at an unnamed time that bears resemblance to the 1980s. Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), whose megastar radiance has worn off with age, is sacked from her television aerobics show the day she turns fifty by an orange-tanned executive named Harvey (Dennis Quaid). Yes, Harvey I-Can’t-Believe-It’s-Not-Mr-Weinstein is in want of a younger, more virginal object for his ravishment (and ratings).

Compounding her No Good, Very Bad Day, Elisabeth crashes her car, landing herself in an emergency ward where she is attended by a nurse so unblemished that he practically gleams. This weird specimen slips her a note about a life-changing thing called The Substance, which promises its users a ‘younger, more beautiful’ self. At first Elisabeth is sceptical, and who wouldn’t be about such West Coast wellness guff? But her desperation to retain a public presence – or better, turn the clock back to a time when her looks were fresh currency – quickly outweighs her distrust. The Substance, it turns out, is more potent than your average beauty serum, and the rest of Fargeat’s film is concerned with the mechanics of just how the promised alter ego – a young woman named Sue, played by Margaret Qualley – will be birthed and nourished in the world.

No good end comes to those who meddle with creation. If you have read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or watched a film by David Cronenberg, you will know what follows: gore and then more gore. (Then more gore.) The Substance is as subtle as butchery. No shot is restrained when it could be an extreme close-up, and no editing choice is unobtrusive when a hard cut can cleave a thought in two. The film’s score administers defibrillating shocks; soon I could be shocked by it no more. There are penetrative needles aplenty; blood for days; bikinis, billboards, and odd visual allusions to The Shining (1980) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). I say ‘odd’ because it is hard to determine what Stanley Kubrick has to do with any of this, apart from being a canonical director. Does alluding to his films make a feminist point about the canon? If so, then Greta Gerwig made the same point wittily in her blockbuster film Barbie (2023), which parodied 2001’s portentous opening scenes, and is a better film about the oppressive mechanism of feminine beauty ideals.

Demi Moore does her best with a role that faintly echoes the trajectory of her own career, from Hollywood darling to rarely cast, late-middle-aged actor. (The director J.C. Chandor wrung pathos from this fact in his superb ensemble drama Margin Call [2011], in which Moore plays a woman losing status in the only industry more chauvinist than film: investment banking.) Moore holds fast to dignity amid an accumulating snowball of effects and prosthetics, and it is telling that the film’s only moving scene is the one which shifts the emphasis from literal to perceived monstrousness, when Elisabeth, who has set up a date with an old friend, stands in front of the bathroom mirror, savagely scrubbing at her face. She doesn’t make it out of the apartment. The imprisonment of self-hatred will be piercingly familiar to anyone who has loathed their own reflection; if only The Substance had more substance like this.

Margaret Qualley as Sue courtesy of Madman Entertainment

But it’s Qualley who’s really sold short, with a role that requires little more than her looks. She poses, she smiles, as the industry requires. Cast as the new lead on Harvey’s aerobics show, she is governed by the camera’s lascivious gaze. I’m not convinced that The Substance avoids reinstating the misogyny it seeks to denounce, especially towards the end, when Sue-Elisabeth, ostensibly aspects of the same self, pits those selves against each other with predictably grotesque results. The audience that I was a part of – an audience of several hundred people – laughed gleefully, but at what or whom were we laughing? It seemed to me the joke was on the women who have failed – who will keep on failing – to inhabit impossible standards of perfection. It seemed to me the joke was cruel.

Fargeat won Best Screenplay for The Substance at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, where her film was also met with a lengthy standing ovation. It makes sense that such a bloody – and bloodily – obvious work should find plaudits on the overstuffed film festival circuit, where the loudest and showiest productions prevail. But the obviousness is irritating: it feels too much like starting again with an entry-level feminist critique that has been made many times, by many different filmmakers.

The counter to this argument would be that everybody starts somewhere, so why not with The Substance? The anger that motivates this film is justified, and Fargeat’s insight is correct: of course Hollywood hates women. But women have known that for a century, and it would be something to see a film as talked-about as Fargeat’s reckon with that history. This has also been a history of complicity, especially when beautiful white women have been favoured for so long over any other women in cinema. Quite recently, Kitty Green’s The Assistant (2019), which also involves a Weinstein figure, made a far more disturbing assessment of women’s participation in the misogyny which disfigures us all.

The Substance makes this disfigurement literal, and in doing so loses an opportunity to consider women’s treatment in anything but superficial terms. It’s a film that takes place in a nowhere made of other films; for all the cavities on show, it is depthless, and its violence is both numbing and fatuous.

The Substance (Madman Entertainment) is released nationally on 19 September 2024.