The Substance ~ Review

The entertainment industry is a business built on consumption. In one form or another, you are either a consumer or being consumed. Women, in particular, are in this horrific ouroboros loop of consumption, their bodies, personalities, and very essence. This loop will continue and continue ad infinitum loop until eventually all that is left of a woman is nothing more than a shambling amorphous blob of body parts that explodes blood and viscera over anyone who you happen to come across.

Did that metaphor gross you out? If it did, avoid writer/director Coralie Fargeat’s disturbingly nutty and disgusting industry satire The Substance. Because all of that and more LITERALLY happens.

On her fiftieth birthday, fading starlet Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) is unceremoniously fired from her long-running aerobics show by network executive Harvey (Dennis Quaid) citing her “advanced” age as the reason. Heartbroken at the loss of her career and thus her reason for being, she turns to an experimental drug known as “The Substance.” Once this neon green glowing elixir is injected into you, a much younger copy of yourself will force itself out of your spinal column and take over your life for a week. The deal is that you will swap places with this copy every other week, your old body will drop dead being fed through an IV tube while the younger copy wanders around and does young people things. The following week the younger copy will flop dead and be fed through the tube. 

Elisabeth’s copy is named Sue (Margaret Qualley). She takes over Elisabeth’s show, which becomes a hit. Sue starts taking more and more time from Elisabeth…literally consuming her body in the process. 

The Substance is a bizarre movie. The film is a cross between The Picture of Dorian Gray and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. But it’s the tone of the picture that makes it so strange. It’s like a Twilight Zone episode crossed with Troma ultragross schlock, David Cronenberg body horror (Videodrome in particular), and Tim Burton and Terry Gilliam’s strange otherworldliness. The film is frantically edited with quick cuts, extreme close-ups, and just, truly gross, makeup effects. The sequence where Sue is born from Elisabeth’s spinal column is possibly the grossest scene I’ve ever seen and very nearly made me throw up. Valérie Deloof’s sound design has some of the most disgusting squelches I’ve ever heard in a major motion picture.  

Fargeat’s script is a satire with no subtext and is about as subtle as, well, an amorphous blob of flesh spraying gore and viscera everywhere. Every character is some form of unhinged and no one behaves like a real human being (this is intentional). This is a world where the top-rated TV program is an aerobics class.

Demi Moore gives an incredible performance that starts heartbreakingly sad and then morphs into unhinged madness as her youth (literalized by Qualley’s Sue) destroys her body. It’s a fearless performance, and if the Academy honored genre films, Moore would be in contention for an Oscar. Qualley is great, playing the narcissism of youth and she relishes being young and beautiful. Dennis Quaid devourers the scenery of every scene he’s in – an early scene where he eats crawdads in extreme closeup is…something.

Ultimately, I didn’t care for The Substance. I understand the metaphor of a woman’s body being consumed by the entertainment industry and the public at large. There's also a complicated idea of women wanting to be consumed and loved, but I don’t quite get why Elisabeth wants to be famous and young again. For an effective satire to work for me, there has to be a little kernel of humanity underneath it all. 

That all being said, this movie has some of the loopiest stuff I’ve ever seen on film, so I can’t not recommend it either. The wild insanity of it should be seen to be believed. Just don’t eat anything before going to see it. 

Two and a half out of four stars