Very few movies ever truly catch my eye during awards season. The overwhelming majority of what's nominated for the top categories at the Academy Awards or Golden Globes likely won't appeal to me if I've even heard of them at all. That's not to say they're bad, that's just me saying I'm uninterested. But there was one that stood out among all the rest last year: The Substance.
I first saw The Substance just after the announcement of the Golden Globe nominees last year, and I knew precious little about it going in. I'd seen the trailer, knew it was a "body horror" movie, and that was it. The fact that it's a body horror movie caught me off guard, because I've been a horror fan for much of my life and am in no way used to seeing horror movies receive the overwhelming amount of love and praise The Substance got coming out of the Cannes Film Festival. Not to disparage the efforts of Jordan Peele's cast and crew, but Get Out won and was nominated for tons of awards and I still don't remember it having nearly the same amount of praise heaped upon it in 2017 as The Substance did in 2024.
I was afraid to watch it, honestly. I was afraid it would be insanely overrated, more hype than anything else. But I worked up the courage and loved it, and a year later, I am still upset that it didn't run the table at the the Oscars. And now that I might be here a little bit more often, let's do what I should've done here a year ago and talk about how freaking great The Substance is.
The movie quickly introduces us to Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), a once-acclaimed actress whose career has hit the skids. She was an Oscar winner at her peak, but a lack of meaningful work has left her stuck hosting a cheesy aerobics TV show. Or to be more accurate, she was hosting an aerobics TV show. I say that because Elizabeth is fired by her sleazeball producer Harvey (Dennis Quaid) on her fiftieth birthday because he wants the host to be someone younger and sexier. And just to make sure her birthday is even worse, a distraught Elizabeth finds herself in a nasty car wreck almost immediately after leaving the show's studio and ends up in the hospital.
It is at the hospital where Elizabeth's life will begin heading in a direction she couldn't have possibly foreseen. A young nurse slips her a thumb drive containing an advertisement for "The Substance," a black market drug promising to unlock a "younger, more beautiful, more perfect" version of those who use it. Though initially hesitant, Elizabeth ultimately decides the Substance is for her.
The Substance does indeed awaken a idealized version of Elizabeth, a young woman who literally tears her way out of Elizabeth's spinal column while leaving the 50-year-old woman we knew comatose on her bathroom floor. Adopting the name "Sue" (Margaret Qualley), this new self immediately charms Harvey and is hired to be the aerobics show's new host. Sue becomes an overnight sensation and begins living the life Elizabeth had wished for.
But use of the Substance comes with very strict instructions. Elizabeth and Sue are still technically the same person, and they must transfer their consciousness back and forth every seven days. Doses of the Substance must be closely regulated, and even the slightest abuse of or deviation from these rules can have disastrous consequences. And it wouldn't be a proper horror movie if those rules went unbroken.
Sue enjoys the limelight and her hedonistic lifestyle a bit too much, staying active longer than recommended. It starts as just a few short hours past the time limit. Hours become days, days become weeks, with Sue's excesses doing increasingly terrible damage to Elizabeth's body. This is exacerbated by their opposing views on how the Substance should be used and their increasingly different personalities, the whole thing ultimately leading Elizabeth and Sue to a war over what's supposed to be their shared consciousness.
When one sees the "body horror" label, one might think of John Carpenter's The Thing or most of David Cronenberg's movies. The Substance goes in its own direction. It is a gore-soaked indictment of this mistreatment of women by Hollywood's producers and casting directors (for example, Dennis Quaid's character sharing a name with Harvey Weinstein can't possibly be a coincidence), and an utterly unsubtle tale about ageism and someone who wants to change the flaws they perceive they have. That makes The Substance not quite feel like a horror movie in a traditional sense. It's not a ghost story, a zombie movie, a home invasion thriller, or a slasher movie. Instead, it's a horror movie about someone who simply hates where their life has taken them.
At the helm is writer/director Coralie Fargeat, who had only made one other feature film before this, that being the 2017 thriller Revenge. I watched Revenge while I was going through the notes I took for this review, and I can confidently say that Fargeat is a filmmaker who knows exactly what she wants to say and how she wants her films to say it for her. She has a bold voice and style, which she puts to fantastic use in The Substance.
Fargeat had some amazing tools at her disposal while making the movie too. There's the intense, thumping electronic score composed by Raffertie, great editing, and fantastic cinematography. There are lots of uncomfortable closeups (especially when it comes to men eating food, something I noticed Fargeat also did in Revenge), along with disorienting shots of long corridors and camera angles that make smaller rooms look cavernous. Fargeat does not want to give you a moment to rest or to feel at ease, she wants to make sure you are not comfortable at all while watching this movie.
Another thing Fargeat carried over from Revenge was her striking use of colors. Instead of the sandy browns and sky blues of Revenge, we get much more in The Substance. There's the stark white tiling of Elizabeth and Sue's bathroom, the yellow of Elizabeth's coat, the greys and navy blues of their apartment's living room, the fluorescent green of the Substance itself. Fargeat's use of colors is almost more and more unsettling as the movie goes on, because you don't expect a movie like this to be this colorful. It's like Dorothy landed in the messed up part of Oz.
I also liked Fargeat approached the way the story was told. For example, the movie begins with a a two-minute montage at the beginning of the movie that centers solely around Elizabeth's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. We see the creation of her star, we see the fanfare she enjoyed so much at the peak of her career. But the passage of time and exposure to the elements create cracks in the star, tourists notice it and can't remember where they know Elizabeth from, people drop garbage on it. The transition from that montage to the taping of her aerobics show is all the backstory we need. We're told everything need to know in a way that I thought made for a creative way to begin the movie.
Even the set designers contributed to telling the story, with an oversized picture of Elizabeth that faces the windows in her apartment's living room, perpetually staring out at a billboard with Sue's face on it. It works as a very unique to approach Elizabeth and Sue's war. They're constantly face to face, staring at one another even while one is unconscious and the other is active.
But now that I think about it, it may not be as much a war between an aging woman and her younger doppelganger as it is one between an aging woman and her own fears and insecurities. Trying to hold herself to the standards of others has made Elizabeth her own worst enemy. As the Substance's advertisement itself says, "You can't escape from yourself."
I say this because by using Elizabeth and Sue are two sides of the same coin. It's who Elizabeth is versus who she wishes she could be. Sue abuses her time being active, while Elizabeth abuses herself by binging on every edible thing she can find in her kitchen while hiding from the outside world. Sue is young, gorgeous, and popular. She relishes all the attention she gets and has absolutely no problem with using her sex appeal to her advantage. She's also impulsive and prone to making rash decisions that will hurt her in the long run. Elizabeth, on the other hand, is very self-conscious about her age and brought down by men that view her as past her prime and treat her like a commodity that has lost its value. Elizabeth is also very jealous of Sue's fame and resents her for having what she desperately wanted to regain, while Sue intentionally ignores the rule about switching places because dealing with Elizabeth is getting in her way.
I mentioned earlier that Fargeat had some great tools at her disposal, and I would be foolish if I did not mention that one of them is the cast. There's not a lot of actors in the main cast, but it's not meant to be a huge ensemble anyway. Let's start with Dennis Quaid, whose character is the slimiest asshole you'll ever see. Quaid's performance is completely over the top, which is perfect for the character and the movie as a whole. Margaret Qualley is also great as Sue. Sue is a vain, self-centered bitch, and Qualley does a great job putting that forward.
The movie, however, is completely owned by Demi Moore. There were so many award ceremonies that saw Moore nominated in the Best Actress category, and for good reason. It had been said by pretty much everyone that about The Substance immediately after its release that she hasn't had any really notable roles in the last twenty-five years, spending being more known as tabloid fodder since the turn of the millennium. I think I know more about her marriage to and divorce from Ashton Kutcher than I do any movies she's been in since the year 2000. But The Substance, however, shows just how good an actress Moore is.
It's a brave turn for her, as the concept requires not only for her character to start vulnerable and become more and more bitter and angry as we build towards the movie's utterly unhinged final twenty minutes, but also requires Moore (who was 61 when the movie was released, a full decade older than her character) to wear an increasing amount of hideous monster makeup as the movie progresses. If the people that thought her shaving her head for G.I. Jane was a big deal back in 1997 knew this would be in her future, they'd have lost their minds.
But her performance is more than just wearing heavy prosthetic effects and being upset with men treating her like she's unattractive because she's middle-aged. There is a scene roughly halfway through the movie where Elizabeth is preparing to go out on a date with a high school classmate who believes she's still as beautiful as she were when they were teenagers. But one look at Sue's unconscious body and the billboard I mentioned earlier makes her hate her own reflection in the mirror. She can't possibly see herself as being as beautiful as Sue, even after spending another ten minutes trying to doll herself up, so she just angrily wipes her makeup off before ghosting her date. It's a powerful scene, one of the best in the whole movie. It goes a long way in showing just how low Elizabeth's view of herself is, and how strong Moore's performance is. Moore will absolutely convince you of Elizabeth's refusal to believe in herself and that she's been led astray by the superficiality of Hollywood.
If you haven't seen The Substance, you are missing out on what I would call one of the best movies of this decade. I do not believe this to be hyperbole. It's an utterly fantastic movie that is absolutely worth seeing. Will it appeal to everyone? Absolutely not, and I would be foolish to believe that it would. But The Substance is a movie that will stay with you. It's driven heavily by its visuals and Demi Moore's performance, but there's so much more going for it than that. All the gore and shocking body horror might be gross on the surface, but it's also a surprisingly deep story about how gross the treatment of women in Hollywood (and really, the entertainment industry as a whole) can be. If there's one thing for absolutely certain, The Substance is more than just a movie. It is an experience.
Final Rating: *****
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