The Substance (2024)

Academy Award winning actress Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) – a character name that does signal this film’s idea of subtlety like the crapping elephant did the quality of Babylon – has aged down in the world. She’s done a TV fitness show for ages now, but exec Harvey (Dennis Quaid) really, really wants to replace her with a younger model of public aerobics instructor. Losing that gig is one of the final nails in the coffin of Elisabeth’s societally deprecated self-respect, so she jumps at the chance offered by a mysterious underground drug.

The substance doesn’t make her any younger, but instead creates a younger, supposedly more perfect version of herself by some sort of cell-replication. The old self and the new are supposed to trade active weeks, the inactive one lying in a coma during the other half’s week. The new version needs to feed on some of the old one’s fluids during its waking week.

Calling herself Sue (Margaret Qualley), Elisabeth’s other self – not a font of creativity – grabs Elisabeth’s old job, becoming an overnight sensation. Self-centred as she is, Sue begins stealing time and overmuch feeding fluid from the original. This isn’t great for Elisabeth’s body, and parts of her start aging and decaying with increasing rapidity. It will take some time until she decides to do something about her new self, though.

I can’t say I love Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance as much as most everyone else seems to do. There’s no discounting Fargeat’s abilities as a visual stylist, and certainly little to critique about Moore’s or Qualley’s performances, but to my eyes, the film has two major drawbacks.

Firstly, for a film that so clearly is about the very clear and specific theme of cultural ageism, it has very little to say about it. That it’s grotesque and wrong should be a given, but that’s where the film stops: there’s no subtlety, no interest in exploring its theme beyond the most obvious elements. Which is a particular problem in a movie that’s nearly two and a half hours long – repetition begins to set in, and the neat little body horror freak-outs are simply not enough to distract from this problem.

Secondly, for a film that’s so focused on two characters, there’s very little substance to Elisabeth or to Sue. This does of course make sense with the latter (and is part of her point), but Elisabeth seems to have led a life without any human connections, any interests, any internal life, really, which does make it difficult to feel any interest in her plight. The film’s entertainment industry setting doesn’t help there: in the end, Elisabeth’s stinking rich and independent even in a world that can’t cope with women aging publically, and her self-pity isn’t terribly interesting in this context.