“Have you seen The Substance yet?” My friend asked me on Bluesky. “You should really see it in the theater if you get a chance.” He was not the only person to ask me about that movie. From the moment it came out, The Substance garnered a lot of buzz, and not the usual kind of buzz horror movies usually get. It is now one of only a handful of horror movies to be nominated for an Academy Award.
Buy The Substance Blu-rayI finally caught up with it this week, though sad to say not on the big screen, but on a much smaller one. The one in my bedroom. I did get to watch it while lying down in my pajamas, so that’s a plus. I liked it a lot. As a horror movie, I thought it was pretty terrific. But I’m not so sure about the Oscar buzz. While Demi Moore deserves all the accolades she can get for her performance, the film is a bit too obvious, a bit too bludgeoning in its messaging.
Elisabeth Sparkle (Moore) was a celebrated, Oscar-winning actress. But with age, she’s becoming forgotten. When she loses her job as a Jane Fonda-esque exercise queen, she takes a black-market drug that promises to bring back her vitality. What it actually does is create a new, young, vivacious woman who literally rips herself out of Elisabeth’s back. This new person calls herself “Sue” (Margaret Qualley). She immediately gets Elisabeth’s old job on the exercise show and becomes a smash sensation.
I do find it hilarious that in this film the signs of success are a 1980s-style exercise program. Later, Sue will get an even bigger break by being offered the hosting job for a New Year’s Eve celebration.
The substance comes with a catch. Or rather multiple catches and rules. Elisabeth and Sue are two parts of the same person. While Sue is awake, Elisabeth lies asleep. She must be kept alive with a feeding tube. After seven days, Sue must awaken Elisabeth and sleep for seven days herself. There is also a stabilizer that is taken out of Elisabeth’s spinal cord and must be periodically injected.
While Sue immediately becomes a rising star, Elisabeth finds herself sitting alone in her apartment watching TV and eating junk food. The film is pretty vague in terms of what the substance actually is and how they are connected. While the two women are connected in some way, there isn’t a psychic link. Neither person knows what the other is doing. But in one beautifully grotesque scene, Sue reaches into her stomach and pulls out a chicken leg Elisabeth at the night before. Elisabeth feels no joy seeing Sue on the television. Sue is only repulsed looking at the shell of a human Elisabeth has become.
Naturally, Sue begins bending the rules, keeping herself awake for longer periods of time. When she does sleep, Elisabeth wakens to find her body rapidly degenerating, becoming more and more eaten away, becoming deformed. She’s becoming even less attractive not only to Hollywood but to randos walking down the street.
Dennis Quaid is Harvey, a producer who stands in for every sleazy, Harvey Weinstein-type in Hollywood. He’s all flashy suits and smiles when the ladies are performing well, but he drops Elisabeth like a sack of manure the moment her ratings dip. There is a scene where he’s eating shrimp so disgusting it rivals Denethor’s sloppy meal in The Return of the King.
Director Coralie Fargeat revels in the film’s body horror. It is filled with goopy, gory, practical effects. I loved that aspect of it. I did not love the blunderbuss approach to its messaging. Criticizing Hollywood for the way it chews up and spits out young actresses once they hit a certain age is not new. The Substance‘s attack on the subject is blunt-force trauma. It is an important subject and certainly one that Hollywood has barely gotten better at (just look at Demi Moore’s career trajectory for example) but not one I need to be smashed into my face so brutally.
She does use the male gaze in interesting ways. The camera loves to linger on both Elisabeth’s and Sue’s bodies. Demi Moore spends a good chunk of her screen time completely naked. The camera moves in closely showing her wrinkles, the cellulite on her rear end, and her slightly sagging and misshapen breasts. Don’t get me wrong, Demi Moore looks fantastic for a woman in her 60s, but even she’s showing signs of age. Juxtaposed to her is Sue. The film shoots her exercise show segments like a horny music video with plenty of close-ups of her much younger, much tighter body (and it is here I realize why my friend was so insistent on me seeing the film on the big screen, the pervert). All of this is intentional, I think. Fargeat is rubbing our face in the usual, casual misogyny so many movies and television programs delight in. But again, for me, that’s too much of a blunt object to be meaningful.
But that’s the film critic in me. The horror hound loved it.
