The Substance (2024) Movie Review
The Substance (2024) Movie Review
Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley ask the mirror, "who's the fairest?"
3 stars out of 5
Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) is a successful star in the final act of her career, living alone in a loopy, highly stylized version of Hollywood. When TV executive Harvey (Dennis Quaid) pushes her out as star of a Jane Fonda-like workout and fitness show, Elizabeth must come to terms with her aging body and fading beauty.
As fate would have it, Elizabeth is given the opportunity to participate in a self-rejuvenation program. She injects herself with a serum called The Substance, which causes her to give birth to a younger, more vigorous version of herself from a fissure in her back. The terms of The Substance program require the new, youthful version, Sue (Margaret Qualley), to live for a week while Elizabeth is unconscious, then they must swap places every seven days. Each version's "down-time" allows the inactive woman to recover, important because the active version must receive "Stabilizer" from the other's spine each day or else begin to physically decay.
While Elizabeth and Sue are separate beings, the movie firmly reminds us that they are also one person. Sue claims the lead role in the fitness show left by Elizabeth's ouster and is an immediate success. Through her, as her, Elizabeth gets to experience adoration again. But as the movie continues, Elizabeth becomes jealous of Sue, Sue begins to resent Elizabeth's sedentary lifestyle and eating habits, and so begins a slide into horror. There are rules in this universe, strict rules. Inevitably, Elizabeth and Sue must learn the gory consequences for breaking them.
The Substance is a fun ride. The story moves along at a brisk pace, even if things play out in a more-or-less orderly fashion. The sets, camera angles, and colors are carefully conceived and unsettling, with unnerving, Shining-style carpeted hallways, an upscale apartment replete with symbolisms, and plenty of disorienting, inescapable close-ups.
Demi Moore is great in the lead role. As an aging Hollywood actress herself, it's fascinating to watch Moore in particular suffer through the events of the film. She has several emotionally compelling scenes, though these become slightly less effective when she's required to act through thick layers of prosthetics.
Margaret Qualley shines as Elizabeth's perky doppelganger, literally born to be the center of attention. Both actresses provide extended nude scenes and the camera spends several surprisingly unerotic minutes studying their bodies -- a necessity for a movie obsessed with beauty standards and the relationship between female sex-appeal and the audience.
Importantly, at 59, Moore is still beautiful, and early on, the movie requires us to study her physicality. And here is one of the more interesting questions the filmmakers raise: whose obsession with beauty is it, anyway? Since Elizabeth has no friends or family in the movie, and in fact has no interactions with other females apart from her young twin, the movie doesn't ask whether women as a whole are complicit in this arrangement.
Are women required to be beautiful to please Men, who here at least are displayed as grotesque, witless caricatures? Are women required to be beautiful to please their Selves, who here are conflicted by jealousy, selfishness, and contempt? Are women required to be beautiful to please The Audience, who here reward them with admiration? And if so, is it the audience in the movie or the movie's audience? When given the opportunity to quit while ahead, Elizabeth says no. Her own vanity seals her doom.
It's clearly a choice by writer / director Coralie Fargeat for The Substance to never be delicate or subdued. It's over-the-top, on-the-nose, and subtle as a neon brick. An audience must be able to suspend its disbelief in order to enjoy a story. If we're not able to set aside the fact that a full-sized woman can't come out of another woman's back, there's no point finishing the movie. This is an allegory, after all. But The Substance tests this contract. The whole thing is SO raunchy, gross, and committed to sticking things directly in your face, some scenes become unintentionally funny.
Early on, we see extreme close-ups of Harvey stuffing his mouth with shrimp, and when the movie returns to food again and again, it does an excellent job of making that food as disgusting as possible. In a world where beauty is all important, thinness and fitness are imperative and consuming calories is experienced as its own kind of horror. By the time Elizabeth begins to use cooking as a weapon against Sue, the nature of food itself has become laughably hideous. If nothing else, The Substance could be prescribed as part of a diet program.
The dialogue in this movie is intentionally sparse and unnatural, and clunky lines are often repeated in flashback voiceovers. When Elizabeth examines a present Harvey had given her earlier in the movie, Fargeat feels it necessary to repeat Harvey's words, as if the audience can't be respected to remember scenes they recently watched. Several times in the movie, the director seems to assume the audience is neither engaged nor attentive.
There are also some odd inconsistencies. For example, one minute, Elizabeth's leg is so swollen, she can't get out of a chair, and the next minute she's running around and dragging an unconscious body along the floor. Still, overall, The Substance is a hoot. Everything that can be dialed is dialed to 11. When Sue kicks Elizabeth, it's a superhero kick. When someone's face gets smashed, it gets smashed 10 times. When there's blood, there's blood enough to cover an auditorium.
Throughout the story, I was anxious to see what happened next, and sometimes I was surprised, mostly by Fargeat's unrelenting audacity. Once it starts, the body horror never stops. When it's silly, The Substance is still fun, with plenty of laughs and scares. Sure, it left me pondering whether beauty is an edict of industry, our human culture, or something eternally unsatisfiable within ourselves. But mostly I enjoyed the movie as a depraved spa day: two wacky hours slathered in a torrent of misshapen flesh and spectacle.
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