Coralie Fargeat possesses an innate obsession with symbolism. Her pictures, for better or worse, adapt and relish on it through every creative choice of depiction and point.
Her 2017 masterpiece “Revenge” was, to me at the time, a revolution. It was a back to form, proper genre film. The type that appeared to be expected if cinema didn’t go on a hiatus of its most captivating artistic movements. What Revenge possessed was a concise genre and experimentation that while forward thinking, never overwrote other aspects of its own artistic vision. Everything Revenge is, is everything her revered and at last, mainstream, experimentation “Substance” isn’t, but it is everything it’s trying to become through its runtime.
Released in 2024, the picture experiments with its canvas as its character (s) ? Experiment with the substance. It separates a different plethora of influences for both casual film goers in its persistent obsession with Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch as it does with Fulci, Carnimel, other prolific Italian horror figures, and the obvious American ones such as Carpenter and Cronenberg.
What results of such varied influences is a movie that feels as the psyche of Elizabeth and Sue. Distilled. Progressively and to an extreme extent reliant on replicating different movies and taking you on a journey of cinema itself. “The Substance” has a vision, sensibility, and class that is not to be defined. Forever split in the proposed replication of each influence it adapts.
Fargeat, much like Elisabeth, goes on an obsession to keep a strict image, defined identity, only for it to fall apart in the name of what is expected of them. Any fool would say that the “message” or lack of complex subtext would fault the picture’s quality but while every choice Fargeat makes may be expected, her humanity too is ever present.
Substance is a film about images. It never explores the depth, psyche or spiritualism of its main figures as well as it appears it will at points, but it implies such in the replication of Lynch, just as it is not as horrifying or hauntingly cold as it implies in the replications of Kubrick. It is a picture that is split. It cannot be defined for the only way to depict its character’s dire need to be a cemented image instead of a living and breathing human, is to be split and distilled like her (or them).
At the end of the picture, Fargeat gives Elisabeth what she desires and as she returns to form, the picture returns to a straight image, as Elisabeth and Fargeat herself are once again defined and cemented as a strict symbol, a still, symbolic image, undeniable.
The Substance is a case study on symbolism and its absurd, nearly student level embellishment of movies from prolific, easy to recognise figures, serves as a point of Fargeat herself replicating tones and emotions without bringing much of herself into it. She herself, attempting to cement the picture’s style, as Elisabeth attempts to cement her own identity. Something that isn’t herself. That not of a beautiful woman but of an image. Validated, eternal, understood.
The Substance – A Few Easy Pieces
