I wonder at what moment in The Substance (originally titled: The Substance) the general public will feel that this is not a typical Black Mirror episode. Because following the first few minutes, we can unsuspectingly think that we are seeing yet another scary tale of technology, seen a thousand times, regarding someone who wants big and then fails big: Elizabeth Sparkle (the wonderful Demi Moore) is on her way out of the entertainment industry because of her age, his bosses fire him, his fitness program is cut. One day, however, he receives a tip that might change his life. With the help of a mysterious substance that he injects into himself, his perfect copy (Margaret Qualley) is born. Their consciousness will be one, and the needs of the body require that they change places every week, while one lives his fantastic life and the other rests at home. Ideal, isn’t it?
I began to suspect that there would be much more to it than a simple educational story, when we can watch the first transformation, the camera goes into Demi Moore’s eyes, where we can witness the DNA going crazy as a mini-experimental study, and then the screen bursts into flames, the flames form hearts , and Two bodies, one soul is literally born from one of the spinal cords. Which is exceptionally as if not one of David Cronenberg’s films, which is clearly regarded as a hero and role model, has a Hungarian title, but this one as well. This is not Black Mirror, this is something very special.
This is the second film by the French Coralie Fargeat, and anyone who was lucky enough to see the first one in 2017, called The Revenge, knows that she is no slouch. Revenge also went beyond the limits of its own genre, the revenge of the raped woman was filled with psychedelic visions, amazing images and a lot of blood. But as extreme as that film was in a country where the New Extremity is a separate line, no one might have been prepared for what the drug A would be like. I wasn’t either. I don’t think there is any way to prepare for this.
The drug is a grotesque horror overflowing with creativity, visual bombardment, exaggerations, and a very cool style, in which the images follow each other with such speed and effectiveness as if they were drilling with a hammer, rather than just entertaining. After a short introduction, when he outlines his bizarre, hyper-colored world reminiscent of the nineties and creates the horrific conditions for the beautiful image (I’ve seen so many penetrations into human flesh with a needle in a long time, let’s say, why would I watch such a thing), Fargeat hits the nail on the head, turns up the intensity, and shows what happens to the human body when we disobey the instructions of a mysterious company.
Fargeat reaches for every source that depicts women in recent decades: eighties fitness videos, the reel video clip of Call On Me, the front pages of fashion magazines, porn films, billboards, and it combines everything with its hectic editing, its brutally effective music, and its continuous visual stimulation. And in the middle of the whole tornado, there is Demi Moore, over sixty, who has a career very similar to the main character, without whom it might be impossible to imagine The Drug. The film begins with the casting of a Hollywood star into the asphalt, which people take pictures of with enthusiasm not long following its inauguration, but following a few years, then decades, passers-by no longer remember who it is. After the superstardom of the eighties and nineties, Moore went to the parking lot in the nineties following Striptease and GI Jane, but The Drug is such a brave comeback that it seems to hit the screen straight through each screening, courage is almost not enough.
I apologize in advance for this sentence, but I can’t put it any other way: it’s very interesting to see Demi Moore naked once more in a movie almost thirty years later. While in Striptíz this was a story that kept the tabloids alive for weeks and months, in A szer it is a completely different sign that he shows his body. For one thing, it has to, because Fargeat’s story is regarding the maddening difference between an aging body and a tight body. Moore is completely naked in several scenes, but her vulnerability is much braver than her nudity – the results of plastic surgery are visible on her face, and in a longer scene she desperately tries to somehow hide her true age while applying make-up. It’s a no-nonsense role.
In contrast to her, there is Margaret Qualley, one of the newest actresses, a savior to use a terrible expression, who has already worked with Tarantino (Once Upon a Time…Hollywood) and one of the Coen brothers (Runaway Girls) in her career that started not so long ago, and all signs point to that. , that he was included in the permanent cast of Jórgosz Lánthimos (Poor Couples, Kinds of Grace). Fargeat’s camera drools over Qualley’s body so much that it made me feel ashamed. The drug perfectly reproduces the kind of drooling that the mass media, or those who control the mass media, can show with young, ideal bodies. Like here, for example, the disgusting TV producer named Harvey, who is played by Dennis Quaid as if he wants to win the gold medal in the middle-aged men’s competition. Fargeat first introduces Quaid’s character in a men’s bathroom, as he starts from afar and steps into close proximity to the camera, then pulls down the toilet. He practically chokes the audience.
But the point is not Harvey’s character, but the tension between Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley, more specifically the two Elizabeth Sparkles. Or as the producers of the serum in the film say: there is no him, only you, the two bodies are the same consciousness. The mind can still split, and then the body goes along with it – The drug brings together such an amazingly heavy last third that even as a fan of horror movies who have seen a lot, I watched it with my mouth open. Physical and mental degradation is one thing, but Fargeat does not turn away from any disgust, in fact, we can watch the most brutal details either from close up or from the point of view of the sufferer. It’s a strange feeling if, even for a few moments, we identify with someone whose body parts are rotting.
I don’t want to rush too far, but it would actually be difficult. The drug’s strength is not only its story, but it really says something regarding how the media distorts our relationship with the body, how this distortion can spread into self-loathing, and what extreme solutions are needed to deal with self-loathing, only to have it return in a different form.
But The Drug, especially the second half, is a series of eye-popping, nail-biting horrors, where the audience nestles and laughs in agony, because it cannot really process what it sees. Fargeat turns the exaggerations to the maximum, both in pictorial solutions and abomination. At a certain point I felt that this kind of audiovisual, abstract siege was almost approaching the high bar of the genre, the original The Texas Chainsaw Massacre – and from there it escalated for almost half an hour. While maintaining his absurd humor throughout, he does not lose sight of his goal at all, and brings together such a serious finale that it is difficult to stand up followingwards. Long, brutal, not for everyone – but something very special.
The premiere of the drug was in the competition program of this year’s Cannes film festival, we saw it in Karlovy Vary. It will be shown in Hungarian cinemas on October 10.