The Substance (of) Antiviral

So far this year, one film that has had the most profound effect on me must be The Substance.

Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, and Dennis Quaid, are masterful in this sinister, darkly funny, gross and disturbing feature directed by Coralie Fargeat.

What value we place on individuality, perfect ideals, impossible hypocritical standards, and sense of self worth, must be scrutinised ever closely especially today in the wake of cruel invasive media, psychologically harmful filters, societal pressure, and the collective delusion we participate in when we decide to pay close attention to celebrities.

This overexposed, vivid, beautiful, gory, cool and shiny movie with flawless skin, high contrast lynchian liminal scenes, rapidfire shot switching, and hyperealistic repulsive prosthetics is stunning in its own right with an oozy, ominous soundtrack beat.

Demi Moore, in her sixties, continues to wow us with her keenly scrutinising, versatile, and even comedic range where a former movie star (Elisabeth Sparkles) realises at the age of fifty that her career is coming to an end.

She takes drastic steps to arrest its decline, with immense consequences.

Elisabeth hits rock bottom after being fired from her tv aerobics role when she is involved in a car crash. In that vulnerable moment, she is inspected, squeezed, and sultrily propositioned by a handsome young doctor to “call this number” and reclaim her former glory.

“You. Only better in every way.”

It doesn’t take too much subsequent deliberation for her to decide to call it.

One of the more amusing features of the movie has to be where Elisabeth, clad in a gorgeous immaculate designer yellow coat and oversized sunglasses, arrives at a suspect nondescript location covered in graffiti and is forced to crawl under a jammed roller shutter door into a derelict premises to discretely collect her “package”.

Within it, bold single line instructions. No fine print. Hose tubing. A fluorescent green vial. Empty casings. Abundant plastic. Syringes.

She injects The Substance.

She collapses. With horrifying effects that I won’t spoil for you here.

Later awakens a young beauty from her body, born on the clinical sheer white tiles of her bathroom.

Our newest iteration of her, “Sue”, soon strives to claw back her old career in a modern sexualised spin under the greedy salivating gaze of older rich men, even when it squeezes Elizabeth out of existence.

But this film hits harder and sharper when you juxtapose it against a predecessor sculpted from the same concerns.

Antiviral.

The 2012 debut film of Brandon Cronenberg, son of acclaimed director David Cronenberg.

In this frightening window into a near future, wan vapid city dwellers pay to inject viruses borne by their favourite stars into their bodies in order to experience a biological connection to them. The Lucas Clinic is all too pleased to fuel the collective hysteria that elevates these elusive radiant people in the minds of lonely, aimless people and promote shared experiences of flu, herpes, and more, to allow you to experience empathy for an idol you will likely never meet face to face.

Cue the quiet, restrained furious misery of Syd March in this desaturated, overexposed snapshot of the future where religion takes a backseat to celebrity worship.

Syd (Caleb Landry Jones) maintains a meagre existence. He returns home from his employment at the Lucas Clinic, greets the landlord glued to her television screen where celebrity gossip runs ceaselessly, then withdraws a vial of his blood and analyses it within a machine secretly stashed away in his wardrobe.

Our sickly, emaciated protagonist is a mule.

He sells the copyrighted, non-replicable virus to the black market.

But when you see his monochromatic apartment, there’s no luxury to be had. A mini-fridge next to his bed holds nasal swabs extracted at the height of his shared celebrity sicknesses. His kitchen fridge is filled with sandwiches and orange juice to arrest the severity of the sickness. At home and outside, he keeps a thermometer in his mouth as a perverse pacifier, constantly ruminating on the effect this cycle has on his wellbeing.

It’s unclear what motivates him.

Syd eschews the mass hysteria surrounding these radiant figures he “sells” to desperate people, and snidely likens the lab-grown copies of their muscle stem cells as steaks in his local butchers to cannibalism.

In this opportunistic and questionable establishment, he sells his smuggled viruses and openly explores his intent to stop using his body as an exhausted vehicle for cheap illegal pathogens.

That doesn’t stop him from a cataclysmic snap decision one fateful day, however, when he is rostered on to collect a bloody sample from the most famous of them all, Hannah Geist.

“She’s perfect somehow, isn’t she? More than human”.

Lying unblemished, doll-like, surrounded by bouqets like Snow White concealed by an eye mask in her bed, you could be forgiven for questioning if she was ill at all. Syd, almost visibly sweating in his prolonged attempts to smoothly extract a blood sample without arousing suspicions from this idol, undertakes the entire exercise in silent intensity.

Then he injects it into himself.

The consequences rapidly reveal themselves.

He suffers intense symptoms and hallucinations with shocking body horror in the tradition of a bona fide Cronenberg film. His ReadyFace machine breaks when he tries to analyse his tainted blood. Geist passes away soon after.

Syd is left to clean up the mess.

Our ruthlessly determined, spindly, sharp suited, befreckled, unblinking “hero” never fails to see the bright side of a business opportunity and I wonder if a single character in this film ever takes a second to see the human side of the ones they elevate in their consciousness to stardom. Rather than mourn their lost Geist with sincerity, they crave the “closure” of witnessing her slow decline in conjunction with devouring her cloned cells on a dinner plate.

“We gotta get this thing finished and on the market while people still care”.

Caleb Landry Jones is relentless, spectral and cold in his performance, fittingly joined by his own character inspiration, the Clockwork Orange star Malcom McDowell in a few stingily brief scenes, and Sarah Gadon.

I’m enjoying how these clever films build upon each other to develop important questions about what we value, the weaponisation of aesthetics to create effective horror in terms of set design and body morphism, the use of music to lodge these ideas deep into your consciousness, and their irony. After watching, I’m grateful we haven’t sunk so far quite yet but it seems only a stone’s throw away.

Last thoughts from me on this. I’m sick of celebrity fandom.

* No stars! Watch this duo and decide for yourselves.

The Substance is available now from local cinemas in limited doses.

AntiviralGayle O’Leary. If you’d like to catch up on more by Gayle here on Fremantle Shipping News, look right here!

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