It’s hard not to think about David Cronenberg’s early high-concept body horror films and Nicolas Winding Refn’s LA-set, beauty obsessed The Neon Demon when watching The Substance. And yet, the film is wholly the work of a singular filmmaker. A filmmaker who seems to have a philosophical belief in cinema as a weapon. 

Before the story even begins, writer/director Coralie Fargeat establishes a unique and semi-fantastical world. A long held aerial shot of a Hollywood Walk of Fame star from creation and celebration to just another piece of filthy floor includes a brief moment where the star is covered in snow, alerting viewers to the strangeness of the world. If that doesn’t convince you The Substance doesn’t take place in our world, there’s the fact that network television is big, culturally relevant business and at the center of that business are fitness shows centered on women in legwarmers doing aerobics. 

That worldbuilding marks the film as something distinct. But the film’s harsh contrasts make The Substance transcendently auteurist. Fargeat and cinematographer Benjamin Kracun juxtapose static wide shots and firmly rooted slow pans with disgusting extreme close-ups of faces as they talk and eat, sometimes simultaneously. Production designer Stanislas Reydellet’s often uncomfortably spotless and sterile interior sets clash with the putridity of much of the film’s body horror and, once again, images of food as a nauseating necessity. The Substance is an assault on the senses at all times, either in its chaotic intensity or in its overwhelming and off putting moments of “calm” that are hard to look at for how flatly vivid their single-colored (orange, yellow, sky blue) or white backgrounds are. 

The content at the center of all this bravura form is one of the broadest, almost aggressively simple critiques of beauty standards, attitudes towards aging, and the mill of young women that is the entertainment industry. Dennis Quaid’s sexist, greedy, predatory super producer is named Harvey (as in Weinstein), “were” fills the screen in a closeup of a card for recently let go actor/show-leader/fitness instructor Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), and then there’s the premise. The “substance” is a mysterious discovery/invention (it’s unclear) that causes cells to replicate allowing any human to inject the substance and birth another, “younger, better” version of themselves. 

An almost upsettingly beautiful nurse (Robin Greer) passes along a flash drive to Elisabeth containing a hilarious exposition dump video that lays out the rules of the substance: you inject it, you grow a new self, every seven days you and the “other self” have to switch. The switch allows one of the selves to exist freely in the world, while the other hibernates with a needle in their arm providing exactly seven days of liquid nutrition. 

Elisabeth throws the drive away after watching, but soon after digs it out of the trash, orders the substance, and “births” her younger self: Sue (played with a chaotic joy in her desirability by Margaret Qualley). While every piece of information from the providers of the substance emphasize the importance of switching and the oneness of the two selves, Sue quickly begins to abuse the system, which has repercussions for Elisabeth’s body. The rest of the film plays out bouncing between the two women, one a stunning starlet who skyrockets to success and fame, the other an increasingly resentful and reclusive living portrait of Dorian Gray. 

In the Elisabeth sections, Fargeat manages to include some emotionally potent scenes that ground the film’s broad satire. A sequence of Elisabeth preparing for a date and repeatedly changing her outfit and makeup when faced with a giant billboard of Sue until she finally gives up on going all together is heartbreaking. Sue’s segments on the other hand are like a cranked up version of the rise part of every rise and fall story, with montages that bombard viewers with close ups of tight butts in aerobic motion. 

Things eventually come to a head of course. But far from a pat synthesis of the thesis and antithesis posed by Elisabeth and Sue, or a defeat of the false self by the true self, Fargeat opts for a sequence that stands among the great ecstatic moments of cinema. It’s not exactly unlike anything we’ve ever seen (especially for fans of 80s body horror), but it brings together disparate parts with an infectious delight.

In almost every aspect, The Substance is the most. It wants to smash a giant, indelible footprint into viewers’ minds and, by every metric I can think of, it succeeds.