Film Society x The Student: “The Substance”

“The Substance,” 2024’s most anticipated body horror flick, stars Demi Moore as Elizabeth Sparkle, a past-her-prime celebrity whose world is turned upside down when her long-running aerobics show is canceled. When she learns of a mysterious drug called The Substance that promises to produce a better version of herself, she resorts to desperate measures to regain her lost youth.

If the premise sounds familiar, that’s because it is. Hollywood is no stranger to movies about women destroyed by their pursuit of unattainable beauty standards. And this theme is about as old as they come — think Cinderella’s ugly stepsisters chopping off their toes to squeeze into the glass slippers.

Within this tradition, there is an even more specific subgenre of body horror dealing with the intersection of beauty and pain. “The Neon Demon,” a 2016 film about an aspiring model sabotaged by jealous peers, and “Helter Skelter,” a 2012 Japanese film about a young star who experiences disturbing side effects from her numerous cosmetic surgeries, are perhaps visually and tonally closest to “The Substance.” However, 2010’s “Black Swan,” despite often being categorized as psychological horror, epitomizes the genre with its portrayal of a ballerina who experiences a startling physical transformation while striving for perfection in her role in “Swan Lake.”

Ironically, these films are produced by the very institutions they claim to oppose. Without a hint of shame, Hollywood critiques the beauty standards and gender roles it produced in the first place. So, to what extent does this genre of “feminist” body horror actually dismantle problematic ideals for women, and to what extent does it simply reproduce them?

As much as I want feminist horror films to succeed, I find that they often fail miserably, and unfortunately “The Substance” is no exception. Despite being directed by a woman (French director Coralie Fargeat), “The Substance” is a lazy regurgitation of misogynistic tropes. The film offers nothing fresh or exciting, and yes — it has no substance.

The film begins with a timelapse of Elizabeth Sparkle’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, starting off shiny and new but growing increasingly worn over the years as tourists walk over it. Point taken: She was once a hot topic, but now, at the ripe age of 50, she’s old news. This is just a taste of the heavy-handed symbolism that proves to be Fargeat’s signature in the film.

“The Substance” is not a subtle movie — every point is driven home with the precision of a sledgehammer. At first, it’s fun and camp. It’s meant to be a satire, which I didn’t realize until watching it. Elizabeth only learns about The Substance after she gets distracted by workers tearing down a billboard advertising her show and crashes her car. She ends up in the hospital, where a creepy, Ken doll-like nurse performs an unauthorized exam on her and then slips her a card labeled “The Substance” with a phone number and a scribble saying, “It changed my life.”

The over-the-top imagery quickly grows irritating. The film shows constant flashbacks of Elizabeth’s chauvinistic boss (Dennis Quaid) at the studio telling her she’s too old, making sure the viewer knows without a shadow of doubt why she would willingly take The Substance.

The reveal of what The Substance is therefore loses its shock factor. After Elizabeth calls the number on the card, a gruff voice gives her an address to a sketchy alleyway, where she finds a dropbox that contains the drug that will ruin her life. We learn that The Substance works by replicating cells in the user’s body, creating a separate, “younger, more beautiful, more perfect” version of yourself. Elizabeth’s “more perfect” self, Sue, is played by up-and-coming star Margaret Qualley, who is introduced in a grisly scene as she claws her way out of Elizabeth’s back.

The catch is that Sue and Elizabeth must switch places every seven days. When one is awake and conscious, the other is passed out on the bathroom floor being sustained by an I.V. drip. At first, Elizabeth/Sue finds no issues with this arrangement. Sue gleefully takes advantage of her youthful good looks, applying to replace Elizabeth as the studio’s new aerobics show host. She skyrockets to fame as Hollywood’s newest sex symbol, demonstrating the effectiveness of a pretty face.

Despite attempting to criticize society’s preoccupation with appearances, “The Substance” itself is only surface-deep. The characters are almost laughably two-dimensional: Elizabeth has zero backstory beyond her fall from grace, and Fargeat only gets away with this because the plot is so predictable. The topic she tackles is a tale as old as time and she doesn’t add anything new to it.

While the film intends to satirize women’s desperation to make themselves beautiful, it isn’t especially surprising that a fitness show host like Elizabeth would be terrified of aging, to the point of undertaking a painful and risky procedure. I would be more interested if “The Substance” was about a woman whose concern for her appearance was more unexpected — say, an overworked mother of five or an academic renowned for her brains. It would be far more impressive if Fargeat managed to show that even normal women whose careers don’t depend on their looks experience self-hatred due to unrealistic societal expectations.

The film’s tired tropes become even more bothersome due to its incredible two hour and 20 minute runtime. An hour into seeing the movie at Amherst Cinema, even on their biggest screen, I was ready to throw my hands up and leave. The film’s constant repetition of its message treats its viewers like they’re stupid. It’s hard to believe that it’s been met with widespread critical success, with 91% positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes.

“The Substance” easily could have been a fifty-minute “Black Mirror” episode, and the story probably would have been more thought-provoking if it had been produced for the show. Fargeat fails to delve into the deeper, darker aspects of technology and the modern human condition that the British sci-fi anthology excels at. Somehow, the film never considers whether Elizabeth and Sue, her idealized alternate self, share a consciousness. Are they even the same person? It never really explores the connection between Elizabeth and Sue at all, despite the faceless masterminds of The Substance frequently reminding them that they “are one.”

Although it’s been said by other reviewers, the plot has other glaring holes. How much does The Substance cost? How does Elizabeth/Sue have enough medical knowledge to effortlessly insert an I.V. and suture the massive incision down her back? How does no one realize when she is missing for a week at a time? How does a Hollywood celebrity have apparently zero friends, family, or associates — not even an agent or a cleaning lady who checks in on her? To be fair, “The Substance” is meant to be satirical. The world in which it takes place is not meant to be believable, yet its more absurd elements felt sloppy instead of intentional.

The big plot twist, which occurs about thirty minutes before the ending, makes the film’s satirical humor its downfall. When Sue continuously abuses the terms of the drug (she and Elizabeth have to switch every week, but Sue, like any typical teenager, wants to stay out later and later), Elizabeth faces the consequences by becoming more and more hideous. Sue literally drains the life from her, causing parts of Elizabeth’s body to age rapidly every time Sue extracts “stabilizer” fluid from Elizabeth’s spine to maintain her younger body. Eventually, Elizabeth devolves into a wizened crone (drawing from the classic misogynistic horror trope, “hagsploitation”) and Sue, desperate to never return to the horrifying shell of her older self, injects herself once more with The Substance’s bright green “activator” fluid, despite strict instructions that it’s “single use.”

Here comes the film’s big moment: After Sue ill-advisedly uses the “activator” a second time, Elizabeth morphs into “Monstro Elisasue,” a “Tusk”-like mass of flesh and superfluous appendages. She reveals herself to the world by showing up onstage for Sue’s New Year’s special, disgusting the live audience expecting a perky, nubile young woman in a pink leotard. Fargeat is proud of this dramatic turn of events — she told Vulture that she always knew she wanted the film to end with a “liberating climax.”

I’m not sure who this French Extremity-inspired ending liberates, however. By transforming Elizabeth at the last minute into an object of mockery, the film lowers itself from satire to parody. It abandons what little subtlety and nuance it had and undermines every feminist message it claims to uphold. By concluding with Elizabeth’s metamorphosis into a repulsive monster, “The Substance” suggests that women should be ridiculed for their obsession with perfection. Elizabeth receives no second chance — she never gets to grow as a person and prove that she is more than her external appearance.

In the last few minutes of the film, Monstro Elisasue escapes from the auditorium and explodes into blood and guts on the pavement. Something shifts in the gory mess, and I thought for a split second that Elizabeth might be reborn out of Monstro Elisasue and return to her original appearance, now grateful for the body she had so despised. This might have been a slightly empowering conclusion. Instead, she is reduced even further into a red, jellyfish-like blob that slowly inches its way to her Walk of Fame star, where it dissolves into a pool of blood. Elizabeth is at last put out of her misery, but only in a juvenile scene that seems to have floated out of the brain of a nine-year-old boy.

Earlier in the film, Elizabeth does have a chance at redemption when she agrees to go on a date with a former high school classmate, an awkward but earnest man she initially dismisses. But even this opportunity to change her destiny is rooted in male validation. She decides to reach out to him not because she’s truly interested in him but because he told her she’s “still the most beautiful girl in the world.” He’s the same as all the other men in her life who only value women for their looks; the only difference is that he continues to find Elizabeth physically attractive in her “old” age. Ultimately, we never find out if he poses an alternate path for Elizabeth — she sabotages herself before the date, frantically smearing the makeup off her face in one of the movie’s most unsettling scenes.

Of course, the joke is that Demi Moore looks incredible, for any age. The scenes in which Moore examines her body, appalled by its supposed flaws, are ludicrous because, at 61, she is still the pinnacle of Western beauty norms. Yet, proving the film right, I suppose, Moore’s real life has mirrored her character’s. Though she was once the world’s highest-paid actress in the ’90s, made a household name by her roles in “St. Elmo’s Fire,” “Ghost,” and “G.I. Jane,” her career has since trickled to a stop. Her role in “The Substance” has proven to be her first real comeback.

As praiseworthy as Moore’s performance is, it says something about the movie industry that such a talented and multifaceted actress could only revive her career by taking on a role that fixates on her aging and parodies her diminishing relevance. It seems that Hollywood hasn’t improved much since 1962, when faded silver screen stars Bette Davis and Joan Crawford were forced to play caricatures of themselves in “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” Actresses who are considered too “mature” for desirable leading roles (especially romantic ones) continue to be typecast as embittered crones nostalgic for their glamorous pasts.

Interestingly, Margaret Qualley also appears to reflect her character, Elizabeth’s younger self, in real life. Qualley is the daughter of a different ’80s and ’90s leading lady, Andie MacDowell, and her career has recently skyrocketed with roles in Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time… In Hollywood” and Netflix mini-series “Maid.” Hopefully, she will prove “The Substance” wrong by building a career based on her talent instead of her temporary youth.

Nonetheless, my biggest issue with “The Substance” is its embrace of the male gaze. Like Claire Denis’s “Trouble Every Day” and Mika Ninagawa’s “Helter Skelter,” being directed by a woman doesn’t make gratuitous nudity and sexualized violence subversive or even okay. It seems like every other frame in the film is either a close-up of Qualley’s rear end or an invasive shot of Moore doing full-front nudity under clinical bathroom lighting.

While The Cut’s Emily Gould applauds Moore and Qualley for their commitment to “frank unsexual nudity,” she sadly seems to forget that many male viewers love horror because of its portrayal of unsexy nudity. Fargeat delivers precisely the graphic images of women vulnerable, being tortured, and in pain that make so many horror films problematic. Although she could have used point-of-view shots or other cinematic techniques that center the woman’s experience, she decided to indulge in horror’s traditionally voyeuristic angles, creating yet another eroticized depiction of violence against women.

During the film’s climax, there’s a memorable moment when Monstro Elisasue sprouts a breast from her body that plunks to the ground and rolls away, to the horror of onlookers. The monstrous breast captures everything that’s wrong with “The Substance.” It makes the female body grotesque and laughable, and renders Elizabeth as nothing more than the sum of her parts.