The Substance is a grim fairy tale, a horrific bedtime story with one goal in mind: to show men what it’s like to be a woman and live in fear of the day when they become undesirable.  For Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), she’s confident that she hasn’t reached her “best by” date yet and tapes her daily aerobics show as normal.  Unfortunately, her incredibly chauvinistic television executive Harvey (Dennis Quaid) decides that Elizabeth is too old and angrily tells a colleague that it’s time to replace her with someone younger.  Elizabeth accidentally overhears Harvey’s side of the conversation, and knows that they won’t be discussing new opportunities during their lunchtime meeting.  Sure enough, Harvey glibly fires Elizabeth while she sits transfixed by the sight of him devouring a bowl of shrimp.  When it comes to men like Harvey, women are the same as food: something to be consumed and tossed away.

Crushed that she’s been shoved out the door, Elizabeth gets into an accident while driving home.  At the hospital, a handsome orderly tells her that she would be a good candidate.  When she arrives home, Elizabeth finds a USB stick in her coat pocket with “The Substance” emblazoned on the casing.  She plugs it into her television and it plays an advertisement for a treatment plan that promises to deliver a younger, better version of you.  (The movie never mentions what it costs, by the way.  This movie is about broad strokes and will infuriate nit-pickers to no end.)  Elizabeth tosses the stick in the garbage, only to retrieve it later when she sees an advertisement in the newspaper (!) announcing auditions for the “new Elizabeth Sparkle”.  Furious, Elizabeth calls the number for The Substance.  A voice that sounds artificial answers, gives her an address and promptly disconnects.

The address leads to a filthy back alley, with an electric doorway that only partially opens.  Seeing Elizabeth crouch down to enter the shadiest treatment center ever imagined reminded me of news reports of women who choose to be injected with Botox or Collagen by “doctors” on the cheap, only to find out later that their bodies were filled with toxic gunk.  Elizabeth retrieves her package and returns home.  The package contains a vial of green labeled “Activator”, pouches of “food”, needles and plastic receptacles marked one through seven.  A handy instruction guide outlines the rules.  Only activate once.  Remember that you are the matrix.  Respect the balance and transition every seven days.

Elizabeth proceeds to her bathroom and stares at herself in the mirror.  Men would condescendingly describe her as being “in great shape for her age”.  She sadly surveys her body, noting what once was perfect is no longer so.  Deciding that this is the only to regain her relevance in a male-dominated world, she injects herself with activator fluid.  Elizabeth falls to the floor and the screen is filled with imagery that rivals 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Then   another person emerges from Elizabeth’s body.  This alternate version of Elizabeth (Margaret Qualley) is younger and beautiful, and she marvels at her body’s bright eyes, full lips, toned limbs and curves that defy gravity.  Elizabeth v2.0 hooks up her older self to a feeding tube and leaves for the audition.

Unlike before, everybody notices this version of Elizabeth. Men stare at her on the street, and the men taping the auditions are paralyzed by her beauty.  Harvey greets her later and excitedly tells her that the job is hers.  When asked what her name is, she replies, “Sue”.  Sue accepts the offer under one condition: she has to leave every other week to take care of her old, sick mother.

Sue’s show, titled “Pump it up”, consists of stripper gyrations performed with revealing clothing.  The director’s camera examines every aspect of Sue’s body, with extra emphasis given to her buttocks.  (This movie fixates women’s posteriors throughout.)  Sue is what every man–young and old–wants in a woman.  She’s young, thin and exudes a playful carnality that men find irresistible.  Sue hungrily accepts all of the gifts that men willingly offer, namely opportunities, attention and sex.  Her experience is in stark contrast to Elizabeth, who had none of those things before taking The Substance.  Sue is having a great time, but there’s the little problem of switching back to being Elizabeth after seven days.

Sue decides to extend her stay by a few hours, but her greed comes with a cost.  Elizabeth awakens and discovers that one of her fingers has become arthritic and shriveled.  The Substance support line says that what has been transferred can’t be reversed, meaning that Elizabeth is stuck with her old finger forever.  (Read as: plastic surgery mishap.)  Elizabeth is angry at Sue, but won’t terminate the process because she’s convinced that she’s nothing without her.  However, the arrangement has made Elizabeth incredibly self-conscious and she can’t leave the house as her older self.  Elizabeth’s double life has reduced her to being a shut-in until it’s time to switch places.

Sue, however, loves her life and extends her stay by taking more and more from Elizabeth, who awakens to find other parts of her body severely aged.  When Sue decides to extend her time by several months, the results are devastating for Elizabeth.  If you’re a fan of classic horror stories, you know where this Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde-inspired tale is headed.  The last thirty minutes of the movie, however, are not for the squeamish.  (Fans of gore will love the bloody climax, however.)

I had no business enjoying The Substance as much as I did.  As a straight, middle-aged male, I’m the intended target for its argument.  Over and over again, the movie points out how harmful the male gaze is to women, and I had to agree because it’s true.  Men don’t want a sixty year-old woman (Demi Moore) who is in good shape; they want a twenty-something version of her instead (Margaret Qualley).  The male gaze is also the reason why actresses of a certain age (Moore) no longer get good roles in Hollywood productions.  Instead, they are relegated to playing the mother, the aunt or the grandmother.  This ruthless cycle is perpetuated to satisfy men like me at the expense of actresses who find themselves put out to pasture before they are forty.  Men like Dennis Quaid, however, have no problem working steadily into their seventies and eighties.

I suspect that women will have a completely different take on The Substance than I did.  They’ll approve of the jabs it takes at men, but what will hit women the hardest is how it puts every woman’s fears on display for all to see.  First the movie forces women (and men) to reckon with how time ravages a woman’s body (Moore) and how their undesirability makes them disposable to men.  Then it shows us how that situation forces women to go to extraordinary lengths to retain their desirability at all costs, even at the risk of being permanently disfigured.  That last point, which is driven home repeatedly, would have turned this movie into an unbearable diatribe if it weren’t also savagely funny.

Thankfully, writer-director Coralie Fargeat is equally capable at making us feel uncomfortable as she is at making us laugh.  Her pitch black sense of humor pairs well with the movie’s  in-your-face visual style, the combination of the two make it possible to simultaneously marvel at her audacious technique while nervously laughing at the horrific situations she puts her characters into.  Fargeat’s movie is a spiritual ancestor of Darren Aranofsky’s Requiem For A Dream on many levels.  Both films are cautionary tales about the descent into drug addiction  that personify the director’s unbridled confidence in their artistry.  Both directors share a willingness to depict ugly truths with the subtlety of an autopsy.  Unfortunately, Fargeat’s over-the-top conclusion is more grotesque than shocking, and lessens what had been a brutally funny take-down of men and their notion of beauty.

In line with Fargeat’s take-no-prisoners approach, her actors respond with suitably unforgettable performances.  Dennis Quaid gleefully transforms himself into a character so repugnant and entitled that I couldn’t help but laugh at his antics.  Quaid has been good in comedic roles before, but I never imagined that Quaid could be this over-the-top and nasty.

Demi Moore’s acting is simply extraordinary.  Her performance hits like a lifetime of anguish released as an extended primal scream.  The raw vulnerability she exhibits throughout is sometimes painful to watch, and her willingness to completely denude herself for this film is nothing less than courageous.  Few actresses with Moore’s pedigree would ever go where this film asks her to go, and she delivers one of the best performances of her career.

As the personification of male desire, Qualley is an eyeful.  It’s fun watching her in full swagger mode, wielding her newfound power over men to reclaim what is rightfully hers.  But it’s when her rapacious narcissism takes over that her character becomes compelling.  Qualley has always been a compelling dramatic actress (see: Netflix’s Maid), but her sultry performance here convinced me that she has untapped star power as well.

As a hard-R horror movie with several gross-out moments, The Substance is not for everyone.  That being said, I loved its audacity, confrontational nature, indelible performances and wicked sense of humor.  Writer-director Coralie Fargeat’s preference for excess over subtlety does make for a wearying experience at times, and the movie conspicuously goes off the rails in the end.  Regardless, the movie is a wild ride that I’ll never forget.  Recommended.

Analysis

Men are pigs.  I’ve heard that phrase uttered several times over the course of my life and I’ve always laughed it off.  Yes, men’s behavior around beautiful women can be questionable, even disgusting.  The excuse often given for this behavior is that it’s how men are wired.  Besides, looking isn’t harmful–it’s just looking.  All guys do it, to the point where it’s expected even when it’s least appropriate.  The meme of the man staring at a woman passing by while his girl glares at him in shock works because we all know that that is what men do.  The Substance angrily calls men out on their BS.  It takes a harsh view of male behavior and states that it is far from innocuous–it’s actually harmful it is.  Women who see this movie will probably find it honest and nightmarish in equal measure.  Although the two movies couldn’t be more different, The Substance is like Barbie in that the viewer’s reactions to it will be a reflection of the viewer’s gender.

An Ode to the Tush

The scene that establishes the focus of the movie is when Elizabeth inspects her body just before taking The Substance.  Despite having minimal body fat, her figure has all of the telltale signs of aging.  Her skin sags in spots and her belly button no longer looks cute.  Her breasts hang asymmetrically.  And worst of all, her backside is flat with a crooked smile.  Even a woman as physically active as Elizabeth can only keep the twin ravages of time and gravity at bay for so long.

To be clear, Elizabeth’s decision to take The Substance is because of how disappointed she is with her entire body.  However, the movie is noticeably obsessed with her tush, as well as the tushes of other women.  Sue’s aerobic outfits are designed to reveal as much of her backside as possible.  Her show’s cameraman captures it from a multitude of angels, as if providing evidence to its gravity-defying qualities.

The movie’s obsession with derrières reaches its apex during the filming of the New Year’s Eve program, which conspicuously includes showgirls wearing g-strings.  Of course, the notion that a television show produced for general audiences would feature showgirls in revealing costumes is ridiculous.  However, their presence provides the exclamation mark to the statement writer-director Coralie Fargeat had been making since Elizabeth stared at herself in the mirror.  A woman’s rise and fall in desirability can be traced back to the physical state of her buttocks.  When it droops, men immediately lose interest.  Note the scene where Sue sees a mass on her buttocks and stops the show.  The director thinks he “saw something” and asks for the footage replayed frame-by-frame in search of a flaw.  That footage consists entirely of closeups of Sue’s backside.

Women can arrest the damage done by time and gravity by getting a “butt lift”.  But plastic surgery is painful and sometimes dangerous, a point Fargeat makes when Elizasue’s showers blood on the audience and the showgirls on stage.  One shot is a closeup of a dancer’s perfect derrière being splashed with Elizasue’s blood.  Fargeat uses that image to say that the blood we see being emitted from Elizasue is the result of men’s limited ideal of beauty.  In other words, the blood that is spilled is (figuratively) on men’s hands.

Requiem of Demi Moore’s Career

As much as The Substance is about women’s fear over losing their desirability, it’s also about how Hollywood caters to men’s desire by constantly replacing “older” women with younger versions.

Demi Moore was the Margaret Qualley of her time.  She became an “it girl” after starring in St. Elmo’s Fire (1985) and About Last Night (1986).  When Moore starred in Indecent Proposal (1993), she was thirty, approximately the same age as Qualley in The Substance.  (She’s twenty-nine.)   She kept getting premium leading roles until Striptease in 1996, a role she acknowledged getting breast augmentation for.  Her last starring role in a significant Hollywood production was in GI Jane (1997), when she was thirty-four.  At that time, she was too old in the eyes of Hollywood to portray the object of a leading man’s desire and was relegated to supporting roles.

This is why Moore’s performance feels so personal.  It’s as if she channeled all of her pent-up feelings about how she has been viewed by Hollywood into the part.  Of course, Moore is a great actress who can effectively communicate rage and sadness as required for a role.  However, the depths of the emotions she conveys as Elizabeth feels like more than acting.

Reinventing Legends

The Substance is the latest example of a filmmaker reinterpreting a classic horror movie monster with a feminist angle.  First there was Leigh Whannell’s Invisible Man (2020), then Laura Moss’s take on Frankenstein in Birth/Rebirth (2023).  While I can’t say this for certain, an inspiration for Fargeat must have been Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”.  The timid and repressed Elizabeth fits as Jekyll, while Sue shares Hyde’s rapacious appetite for bad behavior.  2025 will continue this trend with Leigh Whannell’s Wolf Man and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride.

What kind of movie is this?

Defining or categorizing The Substance has turned into a parlor game on social media.  The easy route is to file it under “body horror” alongside David Cronenberg movies like Rabid, The Fly and eXistenZ  Others find similarities in Fargeat’s approach with the monster gorefests by Stuart Gordon (Re-Animator) and Brian Yuzna (From Beyond).  The dual mind premise has also been explored recently in the Apple TV series Severance.  Someone also claimed that The Substance isn’t a horror movie at all, but I find that assessment to be too clever by half.  Personally, the climax reminded me of Sam Raimi’s first two Evil Dead movies, where blood flowed by the bucketfuls.  Good times!

A Wonderful Mélange

While watching this movie, bells kept going off in my mind whenever I recognized what I suspected was another one of Fargeat’s many influences.  In addition to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, aspects of the movie reminded me of:

• Frankenstein
• The Fountain of Youth
• The Picture of Dorian Gray
• Wish-granting genies
• Snow White
• Cinderella
• The Matrix (obviously)

I’m sure I’ll find more when I watch it again, which is what I love about movies like this one.

Pump it Up

The craziest connection made in The Substance is with the “20 Minute Workout” television show from the Eighties.  In a movie filled with over-the-top imagery, Sue’s thirsty “Pump it Up” is actually a faithful  replica of an actual aerobics show that appeared on broadcast television.  See for yourself: