“The subgenre of visceral introspection through dilacerated anatomies has found a new queen. Or, perchance, a black-hearted jester.”

Hollywood has always had a propensity for solipsism, loving to regard its image in the mirror, be it straight or twisted. It might be vanity, but it can also manifest as disgust, a self-loathing that burns like acid down the throat. Even when Cukor framed Garland in roses in his musical take on A Star Is Born, the pain still seeped through the screen. And within these constant reflections about and into the self, certain archetypes have consolidated. The aging actress grown mad in her patriarchally appointed obsolescence is one of them. A favorite mythos, almost like a celluloid variation on the vanitas paintings of yore, it has given the screen plenty of legendary star turns, from Gloria Swanson’s Norma Desmond to Meryl Streep’s Madeline Ashton. At one point, in the dying days of the studio system, it even sprouted a gendered subgenre of its own – Hagsploitation, or the Grand Dame Guignol.

Coralie Fargeat’s sophomore feature The Substance draws from that history, serving a new take for the 21st-century cinema of digital gloss. Not that the French director, an outsider in the American entertainment system she observes, is especially interested in the specificities of modern celebrity. The Hollywood she presents is mostly unbelievable, trapped in the precepts of 1980s-90s stardom with little connection to the present. The most credible aspect may be the images Fargeat picks to bookend her movie, looking down at the Hollywood Walk of Fame as a new star is constructed, celebrated, banalized, and eventually forgotten. The star in question is twofold: the cracked concrete symbol and the woman it honors, one hilariously named Elisabeth Sparkle.

Played by Demi Moore, the woman is an anachronism in ways that go much further than her middle age. Somehow she is the face of a major network despite her popularity centering around a workout video-like show that airs weekly on TV, not streaming. Social media may not exist in her Tinsel Town for all we know, and her humble abode cum velvet mausoleum looks straight out of De Palma’s Body Double. Yet, she doesn’t seem disconnected from the world around her, whether in matters of text or visual cues. Often cohering with the general putrescence in highlighter shades, Elisabeth’s only distinction lies in the humanity she’s afforded by Moore’s performance. While Dennis Quaid mugs for the wide-angle lens and Robin Greer pantomimes a plastic hollowness, Fargeat’s leading lady is afforded the right to personhood, an interiority.

It’s faint, often couched in clichéd notions, but it’s there just the same. And like an anchor, it keeps the film from escaping the real pain of its grotesque imaginings, never drifting away from a core so vicious it would consign the movie to horror classifications even if the gore weren’t there to do the trick. But why would one want to experience The Substance without the gore? It is an essential part of the project’s cancerous charm and bad taste, so unabashed and silly it leans closer to Yuzna than Cronenberg when not inventing a new category for highly elaborate carnivals of carnage all on its own. The vomit-inducing nonsense starts when Elisabeth finds herself procuring the titular product, some fantastical chemical that will give her the chance to live as one’s best self. The idealization is birthed in flesh-tearing fashion, bursting out from the spine fully formed and ready to go in the form of one dewy-eyed, pink-lipped Margaret Qualley.

Of course, as in every Faustian bargain there’s a condition to the dream come true. Every seven days, the substance taker must return to their original body for another seven days, forever living in a cycle split between two identities. It’s immaterial that the powers that be keep reminding Elisabeth that there’s only one her. The younger, more beautiful alter ego named Sue may start as Elisabeth, but she quickly disassociates and disconnects, growing cruel to one who is essentially herself. In this, Fargeat has struck a nerve. It doesn’t take long, scrolling through any social media, before one finds beautiful people comparing pictures of them now to images of them then. The present is victorious over a past that is seen as less desirable and, thus, ontologically lesser. One must understand that to be perceived and wanted is a drug like none other, a life-altering high that beckons a disdain for the unwanted persona of yesterday and all those who haven’t yet achieved their best version of themselves. Sue is that contempt personified, unleashed into a world whose love fuels her hostility toward the woman she must become again at the end of each week. It is only a matter of time before the new star, the new Elisabeth, breaks the rules and starts taking more than she should from the matrix that is and isn’t her. As one might expect the results are catastrophic, incurring an escalation of decay that buries Moore’s faded celebrity in pounds of transformative makeup. In this and other matters, the extremes to which Fargeat is willing to go are commendable. While adding new elements to her genre mélange and satirizing the visual tenets of objectification, the director runs roaringly past the limits of decency to expand the body horror horizon. So wild are the results that it’s fair to say the subgenre of visceral introspection through dilacerated anatomies has found a new queen. Or, perchance, a black-hearted jester.