The Substance

On her 50th birthday, Elisabeth Sparkle–once a renowned actress, but now mostly famous for her aerobics show–receives devestating news, both to her career and to her self-image, as she is suddenly fired. Reeling from the sudden blow, Elisabeth is offered a mysterious substance, one which promises to transform her into an enhanced version of herself, and she accepts...

After a really fantastic opening sequence, featuring an egg and the lifespan of a Star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame, that not only perfectly demonstrates exactly what the Substance does, but also brings you up to speed on the arc of the main character's career and fame, the film is divided into three parts:

Elisabeth. Sue. And Monstro Elisasue.

It's a commonly heard thing that, as a woman, once you hit the age of 50, society begins to treat you as if you had become invisible, and that is definitely true for Elisabeth Sparkle.

Things have gotten pretty bleak for Elisabeth. Once a starlet glittering in the flickering light of a thousand flashbulbs, used to basking in the public's adoration, she is now the queen of the aerobic workout TV show scene, a once bright star gone dim, the ruler of a sad and fading little kingdom.

Or at least, she was.

On her fiftieth birthday, her loathsome pig of a boss fires her, disgusted with the audacity of Elisabeth to grow old. Suddenly unemployed, and forced to face the fact that her glory days are now firmly behind her, the universe decides to give her an extra kick while she's down, and she ends up in a car accident.

While recovering in the emergency room, a weirdly smoothed-faced human Ken doll of a young doctor examines her, and then makes an offer: Try the Substance. Turn back the clock. Curious, Elisabeth investigates, finding a vague sales pitch. It's fair to say that the Substance doesn’t have the best marketing department for a wider audience, but they’re definitely bold and intriguing. To partake, all you have to do is call a number, express interest, and wait for an envelope with a numbered card inside to arrive. Then you go down to the toxic-waste dump part of town, find a room of dropboxes at the far end of a refuse-strewn hall, match the number on your card to the number on a dropbox, claim your package, go home, and begin the process. Inside of your package is a vial of the titular Substance—a sickly-looking viscous green goo—and also a bag of baby food-like nutrients, some tubing, some ampoules, a spinal tap injector gun, and some simple instructions:

You activate only once. You stabilize every day. You switch every seven days without exception. Remember you are one.

Elisabeth injects The Substance. That's when things get a little bit gross in her frankly massive and blindingly white bathroom. She writhes in agony, and a new and younger version of herself bursts free from within her, splitting her open like Han Solo using a Tauntaun for temporary shelter. Now young once again, she finds herself looking down on her unconscious original body, torn open, and lying on the cold tile of her bathroom floor like a discarded towel.

First things first, there's the Rules. She must follow the Rules. Elisabeth can now transfer her consciousness between the two bodies, but only for a week at a time, and all while the other version lays unconscious, hooked up to the sack of nutrient goo that comes in the package. She also needs to take daily injections of a stabilizer fluid, extracted via spinal tap from the original body, or her new body will begin to deteriorate. Once that’s all done, she sews up the gaping tear in her original body, and that's it. Easy-peesey. She’s young and beautiful and good to go. The world is now her oyster once again.

What could possibly go wrong?

One week as the older her, shuffling around the apartment, biding her time. And one week as the new, vivacious, younger, super hot version. The younger version of her is an instant hit in Hollywood, by the way, and almost immediately, she gets handed Elisabeth's old job.

The younger version is known as... Sue.

Sue is an overnight sensation, celebrated all over town, the latest It Girl, spending her week making her new workout show by day and partying it up by night. She’s such a hit, she’s offered the hosting gig for the network's big New Year's Eve show. She’s living the dream, people. It’s wonderful.

Elisabeth‘s week is much less exciting.

She spends her days as a shut-in, depressed, slovenly, gorging herself on crap food while watching daytime tv, and her nights all alone, tired, ignored, forgotten, and unloved. She is becoming more and more resentful of her younger self, especially when she’s the one who has to clean up after a week of wild parties.

Eventually, Sue starts putting off the weekly switchover, first delaying it by a day or two, then a week, then for months at time. Each time Elisabeth awakens again in her original body, she finds that another piece of her has rapidly aged, growing wrinkled and crepey, bits of her becoming crone-like and necrotic. This is the cost of taking extra time. Upset with her greedy younger counterpart, Elisabeth makes an angry call to the managers of the Substance, but the flat and emotionless voice on the other end of the phone simply explains there are consequences to failing to adhere to the schedule, and that the results are permanent. What she has lost can not be replaced. When Elisabeth complains that Sue is the one who isn't adhering to the rules, they remind her that she and Sue are one.

But Elisabeth is beginning to feel that she and Sue are not one at all...

The day before the New Year's Eve telecast, Sue has had control for months, and her old body is now no longer producing stabilizer fluid. When she contacts the Substance's supplier, they inform her that she must switch back in order to get her original body to begin to replenish the fluid again. But when Elisabeth awakens in her original body, she finds an elderly hunchback staring back at her in the mirror. Fed up, and having had enough, Elisabeth decides to use the termination fluid, the fluid that will cancel out the Substance in her body, as well as her life as Sue, but in the end, she just can't. She craves the spotlight. She ends up resuscitating Sue, and for the first time, they are awake at the same time. But when Sue realizes Elisabeth tried to kill her, she beats Elisabeth to death in a rage.

Unfortunately, without Elisabeth, Sue's body begins to deteriorate. In a panic to make it to her big night at the New Year's Eve gala, she desperately tries to restart the Substance in her body, despite being warned to only activate once, and ends up creating... Monstro Elisasue.

The big night doesn't go well...

In the end, Elisabeth's face crawls from the wreckage of blood and bone that she used to be, and onto her neglected star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. And for a moment, she is happy, lost in the dream of the spotlight, and of days gone by, but only for a moment, as she finally melts away into a puddle of goo.

The next morning, the goo is cleaned up by a passing streetsweeper.

The latest film from French writer-director Coralie Fargeat, The Substance is an excellent follow-up to her first film, “Revenge,” a mean little rape-revenge thriller from 2017, and it has earned her Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Director, and Original Screenplay, all of them very well deserved. Like Dr. Frankenstein and his monster, The Substance is the story of an ill-advised indulgence of a selfish whim that quickly spirals out of control, which Fargeat uses to make a clear statement about the internalized oppression that comes with society’s expectations about women's bodies and aging, all while using the trappings of the body horror genre as the "weapon of expression,” as she put it.

Love that.

Dennis Quaid is simply incredible as Harvey, Elisabeth and Sue's asshole of a Producer, a towering and repulsive presence, cartoonishly loud and awful in every single scene he’s in. But it’s Demi Moore’s absolutely unhinged performance as a woman struggling with her deep-seated self-loathing, and her anger at feelings of being useless, as well as the hurt and confusion that comes from being rejected by a world that once truly loved her, but suddenly now at 50 sees her as a monster—a truism evident in the real world in the way the media is currently treating the now regularly makeup-less Pam Anderson as she promotes The Last Showgirl—and on top of that, Elisabeth has an addiction to a new miracle drug too.

The story is based in a wild premise, but it’s also an accurate reflection of our very ugly and broken modern day society. It’s practically a documentary, at least as far as its emotional fidelity is concerned. I mean, obviously, I’m not a woman trying to survive in this shitty fucking world, but I can certainly empathize with seeing how the world moves away from you with its demand for youth in society, as well as the futility of trying to stay young, and the feelings of betrayal that comes with getting older, especially when you suddenly discover that you have reached a stage in life where you are capable of injuring yourself by sleeping “wrong,” and how you just don't feel like yourself sometimes, as you hobble around, and all because you sat up too quickly.

Either way, Moore really makes the most of Elisabeth Sparkle, as she puts her whole self into a very brave, very demanding, very vulnerable, often times very unflatteringly naked role. In what is maybe the most lowkey, but also the most harrowing sequence, Elisabeth is getting ready for a date. It‘s supposed to be a night out that is meant to make her feel better about herself somewhat, to maybe make up for her recent personal stumbles, and she really looks amazing, but she just isn’t able to leave her apartment. She keeps returning to her mirror, and the more she stares in that mirror, the less confident she becomes, and her continued attempts to fix her hair and her makeup and her outfit grow increasingly frenzied, increasingly manic, increasingly self-abusive, as her self-loathing escalates.

It’s very simple and very shocking, and worst of all, it's horrifyingly relatable.

It’s really great work, and Moore recently won Best Actress at the Golden Globes for it. She has also been nominated for the Oscar and the BAFTA, and much like The Substance’s other nominations, it’s well-deserved. Will she win…? I’d say she has a good chance, but between The Brutalist and Emilia Perez, there's some other strong narratives out there. Although, it should be noted that both of those films are being dogged by some controversies that seem to be gathering steam, so yeah... she has a really good chance. Hollywood does love a career resurgence, after all, as they make all the out-of-touch pieces of shit who currently dominate the Academy Voters feel validated. But at the same time, while those same assholes hate movies, and barely watch them, they particularly hate genre films, especially horror, which they dismiss as common and low-brow, and The Substance didn't make enough at the Box Office to overcome that, so I guess we’ll see.

Either way, Demi Moore turned in a hell of a performance.

Best of all, while The Substance is clearly a commentary on the toxicity of a patriarchal society, as well as a critique on the sleazy and abusive entertainment business, not to mention all of the ridiculous “fountain of youth” bougie asshole bullshit of the wellness industry, with its myriad of dubious oils, pastes, creams, pills, injections, faddish diets, and dangerous nonsense like drinking raw milk or refusing vaccinations, it’s also a total blast.

It's a really good time at the movies.

The film revels in its use of the typical gory splatter and twisted visages that are part and parcel of the body horror genre, not only using them as a way to make a statement on how the idealized feminine perfection our society demands is just as unreal, just as ridiculous, and just as much of an absurd fantasy as something like Monstro Elisasue is, but it also gives us a fantastic and ridiculous climax, one that is literally soaked in blood, with the crazed abomination that is Monstro Eliasue dead center.

I loved it.

A kind of The Fly meets The Picture of Dorian Gray for the Ozempic era, The Substance touches on many different themes. The Male Gaze, the commodification of women’s bodies, the pressures of maintaining the feminine ideal, the perils of addiction, the evils of the patriarchy and ageism, the trap of nostalgia, the pathetic humiliation of refusing to allow yourself to grow old gracely, and the animosity that the Old hold for the Young and vice versa, to name a few… You put all of that together, along with a bit of light body horror to shock the shit out of mainstream audiences, and its message of how you can never truly escape from yourself, and end the whole thing in blood, violence, and heavy metal… and you’ve got yourself a pretty good time at the movies, my friends.

The Substance is definitely worth checking out.