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| Lookin' kinda rough, there, Demi. |
2024's "The Substance" is directed by Coralie Fargeat, who had directed the over-the-top and unrealistic "Vengeance." Like "Vengeance," "The Substance" is mostly a French production, even being filmed in France despite ostensibly taking place in America. From the beginning, I felt a sense of displacement: the main character (Demi Moore) is a famous woman who presumably lives in Los Angeles and has made a fortune for years as an aerobics workout guru, but the film's idea of Los Angeles, an urban space with almost four million people, makes the city out to be a desolate wasteland that contrasts the very rich and the very poor, with few people visible on the streets at any given time. In fact, the studio where Elisabeth Sparkle (Moore) works is often more densely populated than the outside world.
The basic premise of "The Substance" is that Elisabeth Sparkle, managed by her smarmy producer Harvey (subtle, right?), has turned 50, and she's feeling her age. Finished with an aerobics session and forced to use the men's room when the ladies' room is shut for maintenance, Elisabeth overhears Harvey (Dennis Quaid) yelling into his phone about how Elisabeth has grown too old and lost the magic, and the time has come to find new blood to keep the gravy train running. The movie is vague about many things: where exactly Elisabeth lives (presumably somewhere populated by the rich), what studio she works for, who exactly Harvey is (aside from being a producer-manager-headhunter-like entity), what channel Elisabeth's show is broadcast on, etc. It's all left very vague. Feeling depressed after hearing Harvey's rant about her, then sitting at lunch while Harvey explains that Elisabeth is out of a job, Elisabeth drives home distractedly and gets T-boned by another vehicle. She is miraculously unharmed, but her distracted funk makes her largely unresponsive to the doc who tries to be friendly with her. The doc, sensing the depth of her depression, leaves Elisabeth alone with a nurse assistant, a man who slips a USB drive into her coat with a note: "It changed my life." Curious, Elisabeth goes home and plugs the USB into her computer, booting up a video ad for something called The Substance. The ad promises a new, improved, "more perfect" you, prompting the viewer to call a number if s/he wants in on the product or service (the ad is coy about what The Substance actually is). Tempted, Elisabeth calls the number, and a mysterious voice answers. There's a perfunctory exchange; Elisabeth receives an electronic key card in the mail and is given an address in a dodgy part of town.
The exterior of the address is dirty, graffiti-covered, and nondescript; Elisabeth cautiously stoops to enter through a gate that lifts only partway, requiring her to lower herself: vanity must first pay the price of humiliation, a metaphor for the casting couch. Inside is more of the same squalor until she suddenly finds a high-tech, well-lit room that is as sleek and clean as a Mac store. Having used her key card to raise the recalcitrant gate just outside, Elisabeth uses the card again to open a locker containing a box. Having been advised by the mysterious phone voice that The Substance would require certain maintenance steps from her to maintain a "balance," Elisabeth opens the box and discovers a set of instructions and equipment. She comes to understand that, once she "activates" the procedure, there will be a younger version of herself who can be conscious and function for exactly one week before the old Elisabeth returns to herself again for exactly a week: old and young must take turns. Some of the equipment is mysterious to Elisabeth, but she shrugs and begins the Substance procedure anyway, naked in a tucked-away bathroom in her luxurious apartment. Injecting herself with the "activator" solution, Elisabeth instantly becomes pregnant with a young-adult version of herself through a form of radical cell multiplication (how this works is never explained), and she gives birth to her younger self through a bloody slit that opens where her spine is. The perspective then shifts to this new, younger self (played by Margaret Qualley, daughter of Andie McDowell). Elisabeth's consciousness has shifted to this new body, and the young woman—who eventually renames herself Sue—now has exactly one week, 168 hours, in which to do whatever she wants. Sue immediately goes to audition for the role forcibly vacated by Elisabeth, reveling in her youth and the return of her beauty, but conscious of the fact that, just as Cinderella's chariot must once again become a pumpkin, Sue must transfer herself back into the body of Elisabeth, whom Sue had hooked up with a week's worth of liquid "food" to keep Elisabeth alive for the week that Sue would be out and about. There are shades of "Being John Malkovich" in all of this, and mind-transfer is never explained except to suggest that Sue and Elisabeth remain essentially the same person, with Elisabeth being "the matrix" from which Sue has arisen, both physically and mentally.
At the studio, Sue nails her audition and makes changes to her exercise show, introducing a more dynamic, energetic, and sexier form of aerobic dance while also accepting whatever new opportunities come her way through a delighted Harvey (who, incredibly, speaks of his wife and kids and never once lays a hand on Sue). The question is whether Sue will, in her returned youth and attendant unwisdom, remember to maintain "the balance" by transferring herself back into Elisabeth's body in time, and whether Elisabeth, back in her 50-year-old body, will remember to do the same. As it turns out, when the young Sue slips up and stays conscious a few hours longer than a week, Elisabeth pays the price as some of her body parts begin rapidly aging, starting with an index finger and part of a hand. Elisabeth and Sue develop almost a mutual kind of Picture of Dorian Gray dynamic, an antagonistic symbiosis.
I'll stop the narrative here, close to the movie's halfway point, right before everything starts to go to shit for both Elisabeth and Sue, because you really need to watch the rest of the movie for yourself. "The Substance" has been billed as a body-horror film in the tradition of David Cronenberg's "The Fly." Yes, the film lives up to this billing, and the carnage reaches a point of such Grand Guignol intensity that I couldn't help but laugh and laugh at what I was seeing. (It's a quirk or flaw of mine that horror movies never frighten me, but they do make me bust a gut as I ponder the stupidity and moral turpitude of the characters in the story.) "The Substance" has strong echoes of Cronenberg, but the mysterious voice on the phone reminded me of "Squid Game," and the first scene in which Elisabeth's consciousness jumps into Sue's body is almost as visually trippy as "2001: A Space Odyssey."
The moral issues dealt with in "The Substance" are obvious from the get-go thanks to some very heavy-handed, on-the-nose visual metaphors. We open with Elisabeth Sparkle's star being put on some Walk of Fame somewhere (we can guess it's Hollywood), and we watch as the star develops cracks over time as people walk over it, showing neglect and mirroring the waning star power of Elisabeth herself as she hits 50. One major issue is the vanity and superficiality of celebrities; in this movie at least, Elisabeth is only too eager to make a devil's bargain to recapture her youth even if it costs her her looks and her soul. Along with this issue is that of the "male gaze": this being a French-made film, director Fargeat is not shy about portraying female nudity (as for male nudity, we get one off-putting shot of a well-toned but extremely hairy male ass), so we initially see Demi Moore in all of her naked glory—nipples, pubic hair, breasts, the works. The camera is no less shy about showing us the younger Sue and her round, firm ass. But also as with many French films, this portrayal of female nudity is so frank, so out there, that it's not sexy at all. If it's meant to be sexy, it accomplishes the feat at the cost of merely arousing prurient interest and its associated feelings of shame and guilt (which are not the same thing). Issues of aging and self-worth, of the pressure-cooker ambience of Hollywood life and the coldness with which the industry will cast you aside, of the vanity and idiocy of both youth and age, are all here to be pondered. But not deeply.
And what is "The Substance" essentially about? One critic I watched wisely noted that the movie will mean different things to different people depending on one's angle of approach. Some people will see a feminist critique of a patriarchal society and how it pressures women with a relentless beauty myth: the voice on the phone is male, Harvey is male, the nurse who gets Elisabeth hooked on the Substance is male, etc. But the film's final moments show us that Elisabeth, despite the hell her body goes through—to the point where she is no longer even human but more like a slimy, crawling horror from a del Toro film—even now hasn't learned any moral lessons from her misery: she's still marinating in pleasant memories of her past fame, hearing the echoing accolades of the sycophantic fans who had once loved and worshiped her. So the film could be seen as an antifeminist critique of the women who choose to participate in such an industry (Fargeat affirms Elisabeth's power of choice), one that revolves around the axes of pride and vanity. Come to think of it, the movie's title, "The Substance," is ironic because of the story's relentless focus on the importance of surface appearances to these celebrities—poor suckers with no understanding of moral reality who are easily trapped by the Devil into living lives of slavery, servitude, superficiality, and unsatisfiable desire. If anything, "The Substance" is about a pervasive lack of substance. And naming Dennis Quaid's character Harvey constitutes a huge, rigid middle finger to Hollywood, to what it does to people, and to the kinds of people it attracts. So yes, this is like all of those inadvertently ironic "use technology to condemn technology" type of movies. Fargeat uses studio-made film to condemn studio-made films. The industry is a meat grinder.
But while I acknowledge the depth of the issues the movie faces, I also found the film to be so obvious, so on-the-nose in its moralizing, that the didacticism was off-putting. The movie highlights and faces these issues but does little more to explore them in any profound way. I'm not seeing whatever it is that so many fawning critics saw in evaluating this story. The film took almost two-and-a-half hours to make points that could have been made in a ten-minute short. And while the over-the-top gore was often hilarious (indeed, a lot of the horror, especially toward the end, is deliberately played for comedy), a great deal of the splatter was, frankly, boring. It also didn't help that all of the actors seemed to be trapped (not their fault) in the exaggerated acting style of the 90s, back in the days of "Ally McBeal" and "Parker Lewis Can't Lose" when CGI was still in its youth, and characters tended to act cartoonishly. Dennis Quaid, as Harvey, is appropriately smarmy and disgusting; early on, the scene in which he informs Elisabeth that she's been fired contains plenty of gross closeups of his mouth as he chews down on cocktail shrimp, forcing us to watch Harvey slurp, munch, drool, and suck his way through his meal as he cheerfully, obliviously delivers the bad news. Visual metaphors in this movie never delve below the 101 level; Harvey's nasty eating scene is a direct callback to a similar scene in "Vengeance." At one point later on, Harvey's mouth, seen in closeup, looks exactly like a puckered anus. I'm pretty sure that's deliberate. Fargeat doesn't do understated. Maybe she doesn't know how.
Another thing I absolutely hated was how "The Substance" kept hinting that it was a combination of sci-fi and horror, but as quickly became obvious, there was no real science in the sci-fi. How the Substance works is never explained. Rules about "maintaining the balance" end up sounding more rooted in metaphysics than in science. You might argue that that's not the point of the film, and I might even agree, but that brings us back to the story's clumsily heavy-handed way of waving its moral lessons in our faces. Even Spielberg at his most annoying could be more subtle and artful.
The movie also shows a decreasing respect for the laws of physics as time goes on. Toward the end, when the old Elisabeth and the young Sue somehow impossibly confront each other, both awake and conscious at the same time, one character kicks the other clear across a room—a moment that reminded me of the ludicrously impossible self-cauterization scene in "Vengeance." Later on, Elisabeth, decrepit with so much of her life force having been stolen by her younger self, proves able to move about her apartment with an utterly unbecoming spryness and vigor. Then there's the problem of Elisabeth's slit in her back, through which she'd given birth to Sue: Sue clumsily stitches Elisabeth closed without any attempt at infection control and with a knowledge of suturing that comes from... where, exactly? Very late in the film, Elisabeth finds herself bleeding profusely, with what had to be a septic tankful of blood spouting out of one of her... appendages, raining warmly down upon a horrified audience. What body contains that much blood? All of these physics- and science-defying aspects of the movie took me out of the story and had me shaking my head in a combination of disbelief and cynical amusement.
That said, I have nothing but praise for Demi Moore, whose performance in this film has rightly been described as "fearless" for allowing us to see a very real vulnerability. In real life, Moore is no longer young (in 2024, she was 62 and playing a 50-year-old). She looks as though she's had plastic surgery; her eyes seem smaller and dimmer than they used to be, and the skin all around her thin-lipped mouth is wrinkled and puckered. Director Fargeat captures all of this unflinchingly: Tempus fugit. Memento mori. You can't get more open than being physically naked, but there's also a nakedness of the soul in Moore's performance that we can see and feel. As Elisabeth and Sue—despite being unified by the fact they they are still essentially the same person, sharing memories and affecting each other's bodies—come to realize that they each have very different agendas, a kind of war erupts between them, and Elisabeth, who can choose to stop her use of the Substance at any time, repeatedly chooses to continue with the program even after everything has gone so horribly wrong. One has to wonder whether Elisabeth even remembers her original reason for using the Substance. Moore convincingly portrays Elisabeth's frazzled state of mind.
So "the Substance" is a mixed bag. In many ways, it's an awful, sloppy mess of a movie that makes no attempt to respect science or physics, instead indulging in the exaggerated and the cartoonish. It's a very obvious morality tale about the traps and dangers arising from vanity, celebrity, aging, suddenly restored youth, the beauty myth, and the male gaze (and female assent it). The movie also seems to smuggle in some Buddhist lessons about the fleeting nature of life and fame, as well as how extreme attachment to something can cause profound karmic damage to oneself (strangely enough, the movie doesn't explore the damage the main characters do to others in any profound way; the movie primarily focuses on self-inflicted horrors). I'm still not sure how much I came away liking this movie. The ghoulish, Cronenbergian gore gave me a hearty laugh several times, especially toward the end, but I didn't come away thinking I'd seen anything deep. As I said: the points the movie was making could have been made in ten minutes. I can say this: See "The Substance" for Demi Moore's performance (and Quaid's, and Qualley's: they're both good, but not as searing as Moore). See the movie for blood and guts, which will remind you of "The Fly" and of the grislier parts of David Lynch's "Eraserhead." But don't see the movie for any deep messages: the messages are obvious, hammered home, shamelessly preachy, and understood within the film's first few minutes, making the rest of the movie effectively unnecessary. Think of "The Substance" as a substance-free treat for the eyes, not for the mind or heart.
