The Substance Review: A Haunting yet Disjointed Exploration of Aging and Identity Demi Moore stars in Coralie Fargeat's sophomore feature, The Substance, a film that delves into the insecurities of a middle-aged actress and explores the themes of aging and identity. The movie follows Elizabeth Sparkle, a faded '80s sex symbol, as she discovers a mysterious body-swapping product that allows her to create a younger, more radiant version of herself. [Image: Demi Moore in "The Substance." Credit: Courtesy of MUBI](https://carsnewstoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/the-substance-review_img_0.jpeg) The film raises haunting questions about the human desire for a superior version of oneself, and the lengths to which people will go to achieve it. However, despite featuring some astute observations about the perils of growing old, the result feels disjointed and aesthetically shallow. A Collection of Gentle Jabs Rather than a Scathing Deconstruction While The Substance is visceral in moments, it struggles to maintain control over its satire on sexualization, often reveling in excess without meaningfully subverting it. The lead performances, particularly Demi Moore's intrepid and career-defining work, are finely tuned, but the film feels more like a collection of gentle jabs rather than a scathing deconstruction of the cultural gaze. [Image: Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley in "The Substance." Credit: Courtesy of MUBI](https://carsnewstoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/the-substance-review_img_1.jpeg) A Fleeting and Insubstantial Exploration of Empowerment That being said, if you're seeking gory practical thrills, The Substance might occasionally deliver, especially in its blood-drenched climax. However, its gestures toward empowerment and cinematic reclamation are often fleeting and insubstantial. What is The Substance About? The Substance introduces us to Elizabeth Sparkle, a faded '80s sex symbol, through a static close-up of her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame as the decades pass. Like the actress herself, the plaque is initially revered, but eventually forgotten and ignored. This poignant symbolism is as profound as the movie gets, given the inextricable link between Elizabeth's celebrated sidewalk tile and her celebrity status, as well as her worth in the public eye. When we first meet Elizabeth, she's the host of an outdated aerobic workout show, clad in distinctly 1980s attire. Now in her fifties, she's a nostalgia act, and she soon discovers that her obnoxious network executive boss, Harvey (Dennis Quaid), wants to replace her with someone younger. However, during a routine doctor's visit, she meets an otherworldly young physician who looks practically airbrushed, and he discreetly tips her off about a life-changing product by slipping her a phone number. After some sleuthing and a minor scavenger hunt, she ends up in possession of a personalized medical kit with strict instructions in large print reminiscent of a beauty start-up, and a creepy but informative video clip filmed like a pristine advertisement. "Do you ever fantasize about a superior version of yourself?" the voice in the video asks, before introducing her to "the substance," a cell-splitting chemical that will allow her to — through disquieting means best left unspoiled — essentially clone a new version of herself. Read more about the latest entertainment news at carsnewstoday.com
We often glimpse Elizabeth scrutinizing her reflection, seeking imperfections and signs of aging. Yet, when she crafts a younger, idealized version of herself – an avatar known simply as Sue (Margaret Qualley) – this new, "refined" doppelganger is remarkably free from these perceived flaws. Notably, Sue also boasts blue eyes, unlike Elizabeth's green, an apparent "enhancement" whose racial connotations the film overlooks.
It's perhaps understandable that the film's perspective on feminine beauty remains entrenched in white and Western standards, given that this is the lens through which the white Gen X celebrity Elizabeth views herself. However, this limited scope becomes increasingly frustrating by the film's conclusion. Through its narrative mechanics, which involve Sue and Elizabeth alternating between states of consciousness and unconsciousness for a week at a time, the film goes to great lengths to introduce multiple dimensions to their dynamic with each other and the world around them. Nevertheless, for each new idea introduced by The Substance, another seems to fall by the wayside, leaving little room to explore the broader implications of the body as part of the body politic.
The film's premise also grows increasingly bothersome in its lack of focus on Elizabeth's psychology and self-reflections.
The Substance Falls Short of a Satisfying Sci-Fi Horror Experience
The enigmatic nature of "the substance" allows its rules to be written on the fly, but Fargeat seldom seems to capitalize on this. There are distinct limitations placed on how much time Sue can spend living Elizabeth's life and vice versa, and there are clear consequences for breaking these rules, but the temptation to break them is seldom rooted in strong notions of character.
To begin with, the actual psychological bond between the two actresses remains unclear. Despite the company's spokesperson's insistence (over the phone) and its numerous printed reminders that Elizabeth and Sue are one person, they're made immediately distinct in their desires, and become two separate characters tethered to these rules by circumstance. Furthermore, as Sue scales the ladder of success and all but replaces Elizabeth, the veteran actress has little incentive to maintain this game of weekly body-switching, even though an encounter with another person using the product seems to frame it as a kind of addiction. The film's dramatic language only ever highlights the contrary. Since at least one of them has to be unconscious at all times, Elizabeth is barely a passive observer to Sue's life, only witnessing its aftermath when she awakens. Elizabeth neither benefits materially from Sue's success, nor gains any tactile pleasure from letting Sue out into the world, since the two women share no mental, emotional, or metaphysical connection.
This occasionally sparks a maternal affinity between Elizabeth and her youthful doppelganger, where the former longs to (but cannot) relive her youth through a younger incarnation of herself. At times, it’s a literal tale of a younger actress supplanting an older one. Moore masterfully conveys the underlying fears and insecurities, but the narrative consistently struggles to reconcile these themes. Scenes of each actress scrutinizing themselves in the mirror are juxtaposed, highlighting the dysmorphic effects of cosmetic surgery. However, the premise – of a middle-aged woman and her younger duplicate never coexisting in the same physical or psychological space – prevents any of these ideas from resonating emotionally.
At one point, Elizabeth awakens to find that Sue, in a state of heavy intoxication, has made impulsive decisions that impact both their careers. The older actress insists that these weren’t her choices but those of someone else, invoking the language of substance abuse – another coping mechanism an aging actress might employ to deal with being discarded – but this approach falls flat. While it echoes the denial and self-deception that can accompany addiction, Elizabeth is also correct that Sue is a distinct individual. The Substance demands an abstract interpretation, but it remains too grounded in the literal, with crossed wires and half-baked themes, to facilitate poetic readings that might make it feel cohesive.
The filmmaking in The Substance appears disjointed and fragmented.
Elizabeth’s narrative often functions in isolation, particularly when her fears of aging – and of losing her professional and personal value in the process – take unsettling physical form. The film is at its most unnerving through subtle transformations, from minor injuries akin to paper cuts and tiny spores of infection, to the vile and uncouth presence of Quaid’s Harvey (you’ve never seen a man devour shrimp cocktail in such a disgusting manner). However, while its more overt transformations are impressive feats of practical filmmaking, they’re seldom viscerally effective, playing like lesser versions of scenes and images from other, better movies.
Several elements reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining appear on-screen, from patterned carpets and red bathroom walls, all the way to specific shots, but these obvious callbacks serve little thematic purpose beyond recognition. While some films are invoked for more specific reasons, like the body horror of Brian Yuzna’s cult horror-comedy Society and Ridley Scott’s sci-fi slasher Alien, others like Hitchcock’s Psycho become reference points without clear purpose, as though Fargeat were attempting to simultaneously pay homage to Hollywood’s male-centric, female-focused horror canon while defying and deconstructing it. Unfortunately, she seldom succeeds, and her comparisons end up setting a high bar that the movie cannot clear.
A crucial, self-reflexive aspect of The Substance lies in its depiction of Sue, perceived as an ingenuous temptress by the aptly named Harvey and other male executives. She's frequently framed like the female subject of a beer commercial: glossy, unnecessarily hyper-eroticized, and simultaneously central to the allure while being expendable to the product. And while this aesthetic prevails when she's on set, in front of studio cameras, it's Fargeat's camera that captures her in this way, a perspective that isn't bound to that of the media or male onlookers within the film. This approach isn't inherently problematic, but it lacks evolution.
Beyond a certain point, gratuitous shots of Margaret Qualley's crotch and buttocks are simply gratuitous. The message of "this is how the world perceives women" is clear the first, second, and third time this framing appears, but at 140 minutes in length, the movie's lack of any real aesthetic exploration or refutation becomes numbing and dull. The scenes that exist outside of this setting don't meaningfully diverge from it either. (Benjamin Kracun's lighting is often too flat and over-lit for Fargeat's visual composition to introduce dramatic dimensions).
Regrettably, The Substance also lacks meaningful psychological excavation. Its inability to delve into any one idea stems from a surface-level approach to nearly all of them. Like with her debut feature, Revenge, Fargeat's subversion of the "male gaze" is limited to a most peripheral reading of what is, at least in academia, a vital analytical concept. Spend enough time in online film circles, and you might see the "male gaze" reduced merely to an objectifying lens with men behind the camera, or worse, to the blanket aestheticization of the female form, which entirely ignores the origins of the term (popularized by feminist theorist Laura Mulvey) as a foundational psychological framework rooted in the works of Freud and Lacan.
The concept of "gaze," in its original meaning, certainly involves the pleasures of looking, but it also goes far beyond this act. At the cost of being reductive — though you can read Mulvey's essay for yourself — it also wrestles with an audience's projection and identification, and though it uses visual fetishization as its fulcrum, isn't necessarily limited by who is behind or in front of the camera. If anything, The Substance often fails to confront or even account for these notions of cinematic "gaze" in their totality, because it isn't interested in the dynamic between Elizabeth and Sue, whether they're meant to be distinct beings or parts of a single whole.
Sue, an ethereal being with a tangible presence, personifies the fantasies of both men and Elizabeth's desires. However, in crafting this sci-fi premise, Fargeat often disentangles these desires, thereby diminishing the drama. She neglects to thoroughly explore Sue's creation as an embodiment of the gaze or cinematic fetish, nor does she aesthetically refute it. While Elizabeth is given the opportunity to confront the deterioration of her physical form, her fantasies and eventual disdain for Sue are never fully realized as self-loathing – a crucial element in any narrative about the psychology of beauty standards and the ways in which patriarchal society influences women's self-perception.
The camera, although it mirrors the way an external observer might capture Sue, rarely affords Elizabeth a personal, introspective gaze, which would at least depict her potential for autonomy, even if the film is reluctant to grant her any agency in order to make its misguided point. Some have drawn parallels between this film and Julia Ducournau's Titane, a far superior film, and the disparity between the two is telling. While Ducournau's biomechanical transformations both reflect and deepen her characters, Fargeat merely uses metamorphosis as an extension of what is already evident through plot and performance, resulting in an operatic climax that, although innovative in its practical execution, lacks genuine transgressive flair.
Fargeat's midnight body horror aesthetic may have resonated with the Cannes jury – perhaps as a novelty in a competition lineup dominated by straightforward dramas – but its style lacks real substance.
The Substance opens in theaters Sept. 20.
UPDATE: Sep. 18, 2024, 4:58 p.m. EDT The Substance was reviewed out of Cannes. This review was first published on June 3, 2024, and has been updated to reflect theatrical availability.
