2024 – The Substance
This was a strange, strange movie. I would have to categorize it as a body horror movie, first, a fantasy, second, and a social commentary, third. It stars Demi Moore as Elizabeth Sparkle, a celebrity actress and fitness icon, who is past her prime and therefore no longer desirable by the industry, which is represented by her TV show’s producer, Harvey, played by Dennis Quaid.
Now, I don’t mind watching a good horror movie every now and then, but I am easily disturbed by body horror. So the very genre of this movie didn’t really appeal to me, but I can appreciate many aspects of the film. It easily kept my interest, and even had me thinking about it days after watching it. The acting was good, especially Moore. The visual effects were pretty amazing, as were the makeup effects. The music, by composer Raffertie, was weird, but it fit the strange story quite well. And despite all the grotesque imagery on the screen, the film had an almost amused or campy quality that really came out in the last few minutes.
In a nutshell, here is the plot. Elizabeth is contacted by a mysterious company offering a black market drug that promises to make her younger and more beautiful. Here’s where the body horror comes in. The injected drug causes Elizabeth to fall unconscious. Her back splits open, and a beautiful young woman crawls out of the opening. In order to stabilize herself, the new girl, who names herself Sue and is still the same woman, now played by Margaret Qualley, must extract a fluid from the original body. She must also switch places with her every seven days so the fluid can replenish. Otherwise her own body will begin to break down. A balance must always be maintained. But Sue, in her lust for fame and success as Harvey’s new star, abuses that balance and extracts more fluid than she should, causing Elizabeth’s body to rapidly age into a deformed elderly crone.
That’s the premise, and I have to applaud the filmmakers for the originality of the plot. It was creative and yet very cohesive at the same time. I hate it when movies establish their fantasy own rules, but then fail to abide by those rules. But The Substance does a good job of setting up these elements of the narrative, and then sticking with them, and even going beyond them to logical and extreme ends. It all made sense, in a horrific and bizarre way.
Just as a quick note, I have to mention one thing that I didn’t buy, but I get it. The persona of Sue was supposed to be more beautiful than Elizabeth, but it didn’t really work for me. I thought Demi Moore was prettier. I think maybe they should have either found an actress who resembled Moore, or used de-aging technology on her to allow her to play the other part herself. But I get why they couldn’t do that. Nobody could recognize her as the same woman, or the plot wouldn’t work.
Moore’s performance was brilliant. She was amazing both before and after her body started to disfigure. In the first half of the film, her desperation to regain her youth was strong, making it believable that she would inject herself with a mysterious and dangerous substance. And as she began to age, a process that started with her finger, and eventually spread to cover her entire body, her shock and disgust with her own reflection was perfectly portrayed. Moore really pulled it off and I think her Best Actress nomination was well-deserved.
One scene in particular stood out to me as particularly powerful. She is trying to remind herself that she is still alive, and schedules a date with a man in whom she really has no interest. Her face is still normal, but she sees already herself as disgusting when she looks in the mirror. Her extreme frustration causes her to make several attempts to making herself up. Each time she becomes more and more violent as she wipes the makeup from her face to begin again, until she is simply smearing lipstick all over her cheeks and messing up her hair, making herself look more and more disfigured.
As I watched the movie, I remember asking myself, more than once, how much further the outrageousness of the plot would go. How much more over-the-top would the narrative get? But the story just kept going, kept progressing, and getting weirder and more grotesque. In the end, Sue murders Elizabeth and tries to use the leftover activation drug to give herself one final night of beauty. Instead, she transforms into a monster who, in her final disintegration, ends up spraying an audience with an impossible amount of blood. In fact, during filming, they used an actual fire hose to cover the actors, the extras, and the set with enough blood to drown n army.
But it was the movie’s social commentary on ideas of youth and beauty in our modern society that stood out to me as somewhat dramatic, or at the very least poignant. Do we, as a culture, constantly cast aside people once they are no longer young and attractive? Do we fear aging so much that we would do almost anything to regain the health and vitality that we once possessed? Or is it simply that our focus on youth and beauty is so strong and unhealthy that it ultimately turns us into monsters. I think maybe the answer is yes to all of the above.