'The Substance' is an experience that's not for everyone
MUBI
It depends what you want: If you go into “The Substance” hoping for a complex examination of not just how it feels to be a woman getting older in the U.S. — especially in the public eye — but the choices performers make despite certain inevitabilities about the future, please exit your theater and walk into “The Last Showgirl” (opening Jan. 2025). If you want a visceral nightmare of envy, of grabbing recklessly toward the impossible, of a late-night descent into the grotesque, then that’ll be two for the 1 a.m. showing, please.
Oh, baby. Instead of thinking about it, “The Substance” just bloody goes for it, which will frustrate/horrify some and drive cackles in others.
For many years Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) has been an icon of fitness, and to watch her show you probably wouldn’t think that anything was wrong. But suddenly head honcho Harvey (Dennis Quaid) wants someone much younger ASAP, so when Elisabeth learns of a hush-hush treatment that supposedly allows you to recapture a “better” version of yourself, she doesn’t see it as much of a decision. Never mind the details about how you and your alter ego have to alternate living seven days at a time, or that the pickup location is five kinds of shady, or that whole nagging too-good-to-be-true cliche. Elisabeth becomes case #503, and suddenly she is Sue (Margaret Qualley), many decades Elisabeth’s junior and, well, much more youthful in all the places that a person perpetuating a certain viewpoint of physical beauty would pay most attention to.
Just as “The Substance” progressively becomes a kind of battle between Elisabeth and Sue (despite the powers that be behind their mysterious product asserting repeatedly that they are not distinct from each other), writer-director Coralie Fargeat almost creates a conflict between concept and story. The intensity, the physicality of what these women experience, and the actresses’ tremendous embodiment of all this, also needs some incident behind everything, and in Fargeat’s hands that results in a forced recklessness, or a generic desperation, that lacks the psychological depth that would take “The Substance” from escalating body horror to a disturbing social examination. It will spark thoughts of plenty of other movies (from the deliberate reference to the rug of “The Shining” to a bodily escape seen recently in the underrated “Men” to, yes, “The Toxic Avenger”) but most importantly struggles to get past a less than novel point about the value placed on the sexualization of young women’s bodies — no matter how successfully Fargeat captures Harvey’s sloppy, insatiable disinterest in human emotion or manners.
When it could be deepening or surprising, the quite squishy “The Substance” instead repeats and shocks, which earns points for memorability and points off for ideas. That’s a pretty clueless title for an ultimately shallow story that doesn’t even really help us feel what Elisabeth is feeling as Sue, or go farther into the powerful and/or potentially dangerous position the latter finds herself in.
So maybe this is a bad movie I liked, or a very well-made short film that runs 134 minutes. Either way, good luck.
C+
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