Writer-director Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance is devastatingly funny—or comically devastating, take your pick. Like the two entities who compete for control over their shared life, the satire seesaws between black humor about Hollywood’s unattainable standards for youth and cutting commentary on how aging transforms women into something beastly to be hidden away or obliterated entirely. Thanks to a career-best performance from Demi Moore, there are countless shriek-out-loud moments at how unflinchingly far the film pushes the thought experiment of, what if you could reinvent yourself and how much would you hurt yourself to hold on to that youth?
After decades in the business, former starlet Elisabeth Sparkle (Moore) has plateaued as the face and body of a retro aerobics morning show. Despite appearing far more taut than any other sixtysomething, not to mention clearly having a warm rapport with both her backup dancers and her viewers, Elisabeth is deemed passé by network head Harvey—who, the film makes sure to express through Dennis Quaid’s revolting performance, is a slurping, smacking soup of machismo sloshing around in lurid suits. While he won’t say what “it” is that she’s lost after 50, it’s clear that he thinks Elisabeth has long passed her last fuckable day. And so, her incredibly successful, long-running series is canceled.
That it happens to be her birthday is the rotten cherry on top of a shit sundae that would send anyone spiraling. Throw in a nearly-fatal car crash from which Elisabeth miraculously emerges without a scratch, and she is perfectly primed to receive a sales pitch from a beautiful stranger about The Substance, a black-market drug that promises to transform Elisabeth into her more perfect (read: younger) self.
What follows is a grotesque fable that both builds upon and then outrageously deconstructs its body-horror premise, as the revitalizing Substance pits Elisabeth against a gorgeous, lithe, dewy creature who christens herself Sue (Margaret Qualley)—a Frankenstein’s monster, but also Frankenstein herself, as The Substance constantly reminds its users to REMEMBER YOU ARE ONE.
The Substance at first sounds like a cult; Elisabeth keeps pinned to her fridge the stranger’s message proclaiming that IT CHANGED MY LIFE. (As she will learn too late, this statement is more bleakly matter-of-fact than ringing endorsement.) The kit is delivered to a remote storage locker in the frictionless manner of online shopping; each box contains hilariously minimalistic packaging, as if to say, You have to figure it out yourself. What is actually supertext are the all-caps instructions, to be strictly followed: You must trade off one week at a time, with whoever is out in the world making sure that the other inert body is fed via IV. You must switch off at the one-week mark. The comparisons to Ozempic and other radical weight-loss drugs cannot be ignored, especially when Sue must stabilize her freshly hatched body by withdrawing spinal fluid from Elisabeth’s unconscious form every day.
Moore’s casting is pitch-perfect, considering that nearly any viewer older than Qualley will remember how the iconic actress embodied key body-positive moments in the 1990s, from posing naked and pregnant for Vanity Fair to bulking up and shaving her head for GI Jane. It also makes it all the more difficult to watch along with Elisabeth as she scrutinizes her reflections for flaws, both before and especially after she starts using The Substance. The camera trains us early on to call out any ugliness in her, long before the film’s brilliant prosthetics actually drag said monstrosity to the surface.
It makes you wonder if any of Moore’s daughters were ever up for consideration for the part of Sue, or if that would have been far too surreal. Regardless, Qualley (herself a Hollywood baby, the daughter of Andie MacDowell) gamely takes to the role, proudly flaunting her cellulite-free form in body-hugging unitards and playing up the doe eyes and lip bites for the lecherous Harvey, who adores his new toy. As the subtly cruel opening sequence swiftly informs us, Elisabeth Sparkle got her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame early on in her career, even garnering some Oscar love, but became embedded in the collective consciousness as an aerobics superstar—like Jane Fonda’s Workout, except that Elisabeth never returned to acting afterwards. It’s telling that Sue doesn’t try to restart her career on the silver screen, that she seeks only to replace herself in her current persona. Elisabeth has been humiliated, which makes her need painfully myopic: to claw back her one bit of relevance, even if it means erasing her own legacy that much more quickly. But being the flavor of the week brings exclusive party invites and hot dates, and Sue can’t resist siphoning off a few more hours. When the careful balance is thrown off, it’s Elisabeth who wakes up late with a withered finger, the years literally sucked out of her. Suddenly the aging isn’t just in her head; it’s on her body, for everyone else to see.
The sequences in which the two trade off consciousness is a perfect encapsulation of the film’s deft juggling of humor and darkness. Watching Elisabeth sequester herself in her apartment all week binge-watching TV and binge-eating food is so difficult, yet there’s a sly satisfaction in her sabotaging Sue’s waking hours with all the cleanup she’s left her like a bad roommate. Despite The Substance’s constant refrains to REMEMBER YOU ARE ONE, it is far too easy to regard Elisabeth and Sue as two separate people. It becomes increasingly difficult to reconcile these two into one identity, in the way that we might not recognize our younger or older selves. It doesn’t take long for Sue’s early tenderness for her older self to slide into revulsion, which then morphs into self-righteous greed borne out of its own gnawing insecurity.
Elisabeth’s is the decaying body hidden away à la Dorian Gray’s portrait, but her lavish Hollywood home also features a massive photograph of Elisabeth in her prime—which is to say, probably her 30s, so younger than Elisabeth but older than Sue—that taunts both women with her taut pose and steely stare. Far too late does either persona realize that their shared accusations of what have you done? actually means what have I done to myself? but by then they are on a collision course as these new and old stars go supernova.
One of the biggest criticisms of the film is that despite the specificity of Elisabeth and Sue’s nightmarish forays into self-perfection, the actual arc of their shared career is Ozempic-level thin. All of the Hollywood scaffolding is as flimsy as backlot facades: despite the (single) TV network’s rebranding, it’s the same aerobics program; Sue’s big late-night debut is on The Show; the coveted New Year’s Eve spot is just her leading some showgirls on a soundstage. The movie favors repetition of singular images, like Sue’s gyrating posterior, over what could have been screen time devoted to other details of Elisabeth’s lifetime, like whether she had frequent collaborators other than Harvey, or if she had a “brand” before fitness instructor, or if she had any friends (or rivals) or lovers in the limelight.
Instead, these broad archetypes hold up well enough to the scathing commentary, with Fargeat electing to add texture by paying homage to famous Hollywood scores. I didn’t catch all of the references (like Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo score), but the usage of Richard Strauss’ “Thus Spake Zarathustra” took me out of the action in a distracting way—though the subsequent sequence that one-upped Carrie was a bloody delight.
Like its titular drug, The Substance is not for the faint of heart. It takes audacious swings, and while its effect may not stick with you once you leave the theater, every single artist involved fully commits in a manner that deserves your attention, even if only for a few hours.
