Funereal Plots
Horror Cinema reviews

Matthew M. Bartlett

The Substance

Writer/Director:  Coralie Fargeat

Our living room television happens to face a window that looks out on our side yard, and is probably easy to see from the house next door. The reason I bring this up is because I watch a lot of horror movies, and I watch them before the sun comes up, and it’s very likely my neighbors might glance out the window and see someone being pulled apart by zombies or hacked to component parts by an ax-wielding lunatic.

And if they were looking when I watched The Substance, they would have seen a lot of jiggling, supple female flesh along with some truly grotesque creature effects. Sorry, neighbors! Or…you’re welcome!

The Substance features Demi Moore as Elizabeth Sparkle, a fading starlet whose current gig is hosting one of those exercise shows whose audience is, on paper, other women who want to get fit, but is more likely composed of teenage boys before they discover pornography. After Sparkle is cruelly and cynically dismissed due to her age, she crashes her car, and a young nurse slips her a flash drive: on the drive is an ad for the titular substance.

The substance promises a kind of fountain-of-youth. Humiliated, crestfallen, Sparkle gets hold of the substance. There are rules which I’m fairly certain the audience is supposed to remember, but it’s fairly easy to see that whatever rules there are for the safe use of the substance, they’ll be broken.

Sparkle ends up on the bathroom floor, her body bursting open and birthing a younger version of herself, who ends up going by Sue (Margaret Qualley). Sue and Elizabeth must switch places every week, and whichever one is active must provide a stabilizing fluid to the other.

When Sue (inevitably) neglects her duties, Elizabeth begins to warp and deteriorate.

There’s a lot of Kubrick in the spacious interiors of The Substance, and a sort of futuristic look to the proceedings. Everything is glittery and shiny and colorful. The leads are believable in their roles; every last one of the men (including Dennis Quaid as the executive who fires Elizabeth) are overacted, portrayed as open-mouth-chewing, bellowing blowhards or outlandish buffoons. This is likely by design, but it does distract from the story.

Also distracting is the message of the movie—it’s right out front: the old adage about shallow society discarding people (especially women, especially in entertainment) when they age. But it also portrays aging as disgusting grotesquery. Beyond that, there’s not much to this movie: the message, and the unintentional betrayal of the message.

That having been said, there is also a large quantity of blood and some truly twisted body horror—all of it ratcheted up to 11 in the finale, where Sue, in the process of a monstrous transformation, hosts the New Year’s Eve show. If you’re into blood and gore and body horror (and I am), The Substance is, at the very least, an entertaining watch. I’ll bet my next-door neighbors agree.