Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance” is a body horror film with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. It smashes you over the head with its ideas and imagery, making even the fleeting moments of supposed beauty its characters are desperately chasing into something gloriously gruesome. It’s also great fun, pushing itself to greater heights and increasingly ludicrous lows at every turn as it riffs on the perils of youth and aging. It’s a lurid, loud and lewd film that comes at you.
The garishness of it all is Fargeat’s way of taking society’s often painfully narrow beauty standards and turning them all inside out.