There is an annoying habit of film critics losing their minds over weird movies because they are so numbed by the usual mindless dreck Hollyweird pumps out that anything that's remotely unique triggers a herdthink stampede of fawning slobbering about how "important", "thought provoking", "blah-blah-woof-woof" a film is. Toss in some elite festival prizes, like winning Best Screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival and the synchronized baaing intensifies. Thus it is with 2024's cause célèbre, the dark satire/body horror freakout The Substance.
Demi Moore stars as Elisabeth Sparkle, an aging ("OMG, she's 50! That's like....dead for women!" is the text, not even subtext here) actress who hosts an aerobics fitness show that's a cross between Jane Fonda and the 20 Minute Workout show which ran from 1983-84 featuring hot babes working out while making O-faces for the camera. (IYKYK, Gen Xers) As a birthday present, she is fired from her show by the producer, Harvey (a wildly flamboyant Dennis Quaid), and distracted by her billboard being taken down, she's in a big auto accident which miraculously leaves her uninjured.
While at the hospital, a male nurse slips her a flash drive labeled The Substance on one side with a phone number on the other. At home she watches its promo video promising a "younger, more beautiful, more perfect" version of herself. Initially, she tosses the drive away, but after seeing an ad in the paper for auditions for her old job, she calls the number and is given an address in an alley and sent a keycard to access the dropbox where The Substance and refills will be left.
The setup is simple and clear: After taking the Activator, she must stabilize herself with injections daily, and after seven days she must switch back with The Matrix, the original version of herself. (The emphasis is important.) What's not made clear in the packaging is that the Activator doesn't transform Elisabeth's body, it causes it to divide into a wholly separate person who emerges from a split in her back. (Zoiks!) While Elisabeth lays unconscious for the week, fed intravenously, her new improved version will be on the loose until she returns, cross-transfuses with her, then going dormant for a week.
The new girl is Sue (Margaret Qualley, whose mother is Andie McDowell, who costarred with Moore in St. Elmo's Fire) and she promptly goes and gets the job as the new host of Pump It Up, the updated edition of Elisabeth's workout show. Harvey loves her and is fine with her cover story that she needs alternating weeks off to care for her sick mother.
Of course, where there are rules with severe consequences for breaking them - like getting a Mogwai wet and feeding it after midnight - it doesn't take long for Sue to start bending them. When time runs out just as she's about to hook up with some dude, she rushes to extract more stabilizing spinal fluid from Elisabeth's inert body, switching back the next day. But Elisabeth wakes up to her index finger being withered. She calls the Substance hotline and is told that whatever has been taken cannot be returned - the damage is permanent; follow the rules.
What follows is a game of passive-aggressive warfare between the two. Elisabeth spends her week just eating or watching TV while Sue parties and rapidly advances in her career. Sue begins to stay out longer and longer, wrecking ever more damage on Elisabeth. Eventually it gets VERY out of control leading to an utterly gonzo bonkers finale.
Writer-director Coralie Fargeat (whose last movie was her debut, 1997's Revenge) isn't hiding the ball as to her intentions and inspirations. She's fusing the body horror of David Cronenberg movies like The Fly and Crimes of the Future to a commentary on how society and especially the entertainment industry pressure women to look young and attractive at all costs lest they lose their value and be discarded. However, while you can see the obvious outlines of theses, the irony of The Substance is that its execution lacks much substance.
There was an LOL moment in Barbie when Barbie was crying about not being traditionally Barbie pretty and narrator Helen Mirren snarks, "Note to the filmmakers: Margot Robbie is the wrong person to cast if you want to make this point." This immediately came to mind as we are presented Moore's fully nude 59-year-old body (at time of filming in 2022) which despite some sags & remnants of plastic surgery effects is holding up quite well. When an actress can pass for a decade younger & even pass muster by the supposedly merciless beauty standards the movie contends to rage against, you're starting in verisimilitude hole.
The sterile art-directed world & calculated cinematography adds to the unreality. After taping her show, Elisabeth walks down a long hallway festooned with huge posters cataloging her career only to find the women's restroom out of service, forcing her into the men's room where she conveniently overhears Harvey's plans to replace her. She doesn't have her own dressing room with private bathroom?!?
The rules of the Substance also seem situationally random. We're told there is only one person and the switching process involves hooking up a two-line transfusion device, implying that memories would be downloaded into the other body, but neither is aware of what the other does except environmentally as Sue is disgusted by Elisabeth's binges and Elisabeth resents Sue's rapid fame as shown on the billboard outside her window. But Elisabeth's binges don't harm Sue; she eats her way through a French cuisine cookbook and Sue remains a hardbody; but Sue's cheating wrecks Elisabeth.
It also suffers from what I call "no one in the world but the people in the movie." Elisabeth has no family, no friends, no ex-husbands or children, not even a therapist. She is utterly alone. The one outside man she encounters who knew her from school, she makes a date with out of desperation, but ends up standing him up because she didn't think she looked good enough when she looked fine.
Which leads to the ending, which I shant spoil here, but for all its Grand Guignol excess, it's just too much in a movie where excess was the medium. There is a shot where Sue appears on stage at the climatic New Year's Eve show which should've been the end of the movie. But Fargeat didn't end it there.
I have a suspicion that much of the fawning adulation for The Substance & uniform commentary echoed by critics comes from reading the press notes about what the movie is about more than what the movie actually has to say in its telling. Too arch & sterile in its milieu, too sparse in its actual storytelling - surprisingly it's 2-1/4 hour runtime didn't drag - its commentary is inferred rather than explicit and the choices made in telling the story ends up leaving things to interpretation - "Like, wow, man, what did it mean when Bowman saw himself as a dying old man reaching for the Monolith at the end of 2001 and did he turn into the Space Baby, man?" - which you'd think were explicit according to those who got the explainer notes in their press packets.
It's not that the subject doesn't merit discussion. Hollyweird has always liked its starlets young and tales of ridiculous ageism are legion like how then-28 year-old Olivia Wilde was considered too old to play 37-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio's wife in The Wolf of Wall Street so the role went to 22-year-old Margot Robbie, her career-making big break.
But wouldn't it have made more sense to cast an actress who was once a sexy star, but clearly lost the genetic lottery for aging? Elizabeth Hurley, Salma Hayek, Nicole Kidman, and Ming-Na Wen range from 57-60 years old and would have little trouble attracting the so-called male gaze. Kelly McGillis was blunt when asked why she wasn't asked to return for Top Gun: Maverick - then 48-year-old Jennifer Connolly was cast as then 57-year-old Tom Cruise's love interest - stating, “I’m old, and I’m fat, and I look age-appropriate for what my age is." (She's also five years older than Cruise.) People age, some better than others, so how stunning and brave is it really to cast one of the lottery winners in a story of unrealistic beauty standards when she's already waaaaay ahead of the game compared to mere mortal women?
Moore is being talked up for Oscar attention and I can see the case for it, but let's be honest, most of that is because she was willing to play "old" & get naked in the process. Someone snarked that Patricia Arquette won her Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Boyhood (which I call Twelve Years A Movie) for "being willing to age 12 years on screen." Considering how shrill and one-note her character was, that's likely. Moore is good and she needs to work more - perhaps some of the roles Jennifer Connolly is too busy to take - but again the overpraise.
Qualley has the different task of being both a naif and a malevolent actor in the story. Decked out with impressive prosthetic breasts - makeup has become so advanced that actresses who used to have to get implants (e.g. Mariel Hemingway's modest upsizing to play doomed Playmate Dorothy Stratten in Star 80) now can play boob queens like Pamela Anderson (Lily James in the Pam & Tommy miniseries) or Angelyne (Emmy Rossum) - she almost fares as badly as Moore as The Substance wreaks its havoc on rulebreakers, but as with everyone else, the script infers more than explicates.
Quaid is clearly having a blast filling in for originally-cast Ray Liotta, who passed away before filming started, but he's playing a cartoon.
Score: 5/10. Catch it on cable.
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