I’m going to lead with this so no one gets mad at me later: of the few thousand of you that are going to read this article, maybe 20 will like The Substance. This is one of those films that critics fawn all over saying it’s an audacious and strikingly original piece of work — the kind that comes out maybe once or twice a year. But audiences think it’s weird or gross or something in between.
Personally, I emphatically think it’s easily one of the best movies of the year and without question the most fun experience I’ve had with a crowd in a movie theater all year. But don’t let that sway you. It’s so weird and gross.
The Substance stars Demi Moore as Elizabeth Sparkle, a TV aerobics personality who overhears her disgusting boss (played by a mesmerizingly unappealing Dennis Quaid) saying how the network needs to hire someone younger, sexier, and fresher to take over for her since he thinks Sparkle is too old to be attractive to audiences anymore.
In a moment of fortuitous timing, Sparkle is given a flash drive advertising something called “The Substance,” an injection program that will apparently create a younger, more beautiful, exceedingly perfect version of herself. Doesn’t remind me of Ozempic at all.
MINOR SPOILERS: After picking up the injection from a sterile and uncomfortably creepy storage facility, Sparkle gives herself the shot and immediately starts writhing in pain. She falls to the floor, her back splits open, and out crawls Margaret Qualley (giving a sneakily affecting performance, one of the best of her career). Here’s how it works: Qualley (calling herself Sue) lives for seven days at a time, intravenously feeding a comatose Elizabeth Sparkle, who then switches with Sue on the seventh day and lives for a week as Elizabeth.
Every week Sue and Sparkle trade places with Sue becoming rich, famous, and desired by everyone and Sparkle getting to (ostensibly) relive her glory days. They don’t share memories, but they’re basically the same person. END SPOILERS.
Obviously, with a setup like that, it’s a strange and genuinely unpredictable movie, but more than being equal parts dark comedy, body horror thriller, and razor-sharp satire, the film is a primal scream of rage at the unfair and insane beauty standards that the world runs on and the lengths society goes through to pit women against each other. The irony of having Demi Moore, who (while absolutely stunning in her early 60s) has certainly been chewed up multiple times by Hollywood’s sex symbol industry, being replaced by Qualley, who is occupying the dead center of that world right now (in her late 20s), is a flawless meta-textual commentary on art imitating life.
So much of Moore’s career has been built around how staggeringly gorgeous she is, but she has always been so much more than her beauty. She’s layered her performances with so much intelligence and wit that she was never discounted as an actor. With movies like Indecent Proposal, Disclosure, and Striptease, Hollywood very much played to Moore’s sexuality, treating her more as a symbol than a person, but then she would counteract that by always being incredible.
Qualley, while having had a genuinely impressive career so far in projects like Maid, Drive-Away Dolls, and The Leftovers, is still being hugely sexualized in things like Donnybrook, Stars at Noon, and Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood. Just as Moore before her, Qualley brings so much intelligence and grace to her work that it will be impossible for Hollywood to treat her like “just a pretty face.” She’s a movie star and The Substance should be the movie that helps cement that.
The performances of Moore and Qualley, along with Coralie Fargeat’s fearless script and directorial style, cement The Substance as one of the finest movies of the year. But it also has exploding bodies, hundreds of gallons of spraying blood and gore, close-ups of people loudly chewing food with their mouths open, oodles of graphic nudity, bodies shifting and changing into nightmarish visions of monstrousness, and a whole lot of goo. So very much goo. Yet, Fargeat won Best Screenplay at Cannes, so all of the goo, gore, and grossness exists for a purpose: to get people to legitimately look at the way women are treated in society and the unfair weight of those standards. To look and maybe make a change.
But also, even simply as a horror movie, it’s so gross, fun, and exciting. It’s 140 minutes and I could have kept watching it for another hour. If they gave audiences barf bags or something before a screening, it genuinely wouldn’t surprise me (and it would be great marketing). The Substance does it all: it’s subversively feminist, a staggering dissection of vanity, a splatterfest that would play beautifully for a Halloween crowd, and a visionary masterpiece that riveted me to my chair from the very first frame to the last.
Yet, most audiences will probably hate it. So much. Most people don’t like really gooey horror like I do. But if you can look past the violence and gore, The Substance has something important to say and does so in ways I’ve never seen before. There are moments of such staggering originality throughout I was in awe of what I was watching. Over the closing credits I found myself loudly applauding, something I haven’t done outside of a film festival setting since the first time I saw Pulp Fiction. That’s cinema, baby! It’s the best.
