Body horror has always given us repellent answers to pertinent questions, and The Substance (2024) is a great entrant to the genre, even if it’s quite busy paying its dues to a whole host of past directors and titles. The key question under consideration here is a very familiar one: what happens to women in the public eye when they dare to grow older? But it’s not just about stardom: this is a hideous microcosm of the horrors of ageing in a patriarchal society. It’s focused on celebrity, but it runs deeper than that, so as grim as it gets, it’s coming from a recognisable place.
Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) is the star of a long-running TV fitness show, and she’s a big success until – bam – she has the temerity to turn fifty. On her birthday, she overhears head honcho Harvey (a brilliantly repugnant Dennis Quaid) pondering aloud how the old bitch has even lasted this long. She’s being replaced: the channel needs someone ‘young’ and ‘hot’ instead.
Elisabeth’s day from hell continues when she leaves the studio and, momentarily distracted by a vast billboard bearing her image (the film goes a bundle on distracting, unsettling posters) she’s involved in a car accident, at which point the film rolls out the first of its waves of noise trauma, as the sounds of the impact cut through the air like shards of metal. At the hospital, Lizzy is told she’s had a lucky escape, with no major injuries. But as she prepares to leave, a handsome young doctor – who seems enamoured of her spinal column for some reason – tells her she would be a “good candidate” for…something. She finds a card and a memory stick in her coat pocket after she leaves, mentioning something simply called The Substance.
When you base your entire existence on the kind of shiftless popularity upon which LA is built, then a day like this is completely untenable. Faced with a bunch of roses with a cutting past tense message: ‘you were great!’, Lizzy plugs in the memory stick and swayed by the information she discovers, tracks down this Substance to a grotty PO box. Soon afterwards, she’s ready to create the ‘best version of herself’ using an appropriately vivid green concoction, a syringe and an array of drips. The instructions are sparse – surely we could get a few good short films out of people misinterpreting what they have to do here – but Lizzy gets through it, and…
You’ll have to see the process for yourselves. No descriptions here. My word.
Her ’best self’ turns out to be a twentysomething girl (Margaret Qualley) with little about her beyond prettiness and that kind of saccharine, unspoiled tabula rasa quality which people in the industry love: not for nothing, we can guess, does she choose the name ‘Sue’ (‘Use’). She is excited by the possibilities this creates and decides to gyrate her way back to her old job under her new guise, heading down to the studio to audition as Elisabeth Sparkle’s replacement. Sue dispenses with even notional fitness value for the new act, instead dropping a bubblegum-coloured, softcore dance act instead – which, obviously, the dunderheads in charge absolutely love (women’s bodies may shift and twist and change in this film, but all the men here are born grotesques). Whilst it’s initially quite difficult to see Lizzy and Sue as essentially one person, it beds in, clearly following in the footsteps of the likes of Dorian Gray and Dead Ringers (1998). Each incarnation begins to detest the other self, each of whom seems to deliberately goad the other, eventually attempting to break the rules of conduct expressly given by the makers of the Substance by hanging onto more time as the favoured self – which can only go one way: disaster.
While we’re on the subject of influences, this is a film which very clearly signposts a number of films and filmmakers, though The Shining (1980) is probably highest in the mix, alongside a fair few other, often very open nods (bows?) to Kubrick – this makes for a rich, interesting aesthetic mix, particularly around the use of interiors, with some direct references to killer Kubrick scenes. But there’s more: as the film progresses from a more sober, clinical body horror (the likes of Brandon Cronenberg) to a much more OTT, late 80s-style body horror (David Cronenberg; Brian Yuzna) the film manages to balance being its own beast against a clear, if occasionally hectic homage to the greats.
It does work, though. At its heart, the messaging behind The Substance is sincere, clear and devastating. We can all think of anecdotes – with different outcomes, admittedly, or hopefully – where stars, usually women, reach a certain age and are immediately sidelined. Moore, who is fantastic in this film, has probably been far closer to this cruel system during her own career, and her performance is sympathetic, even whilst showing us a woman whose entire sense of self-worth is built on sand. She’ll do anything to get the applause back, and look what happens as a result. We get Sue, a girl so hooked on that applause that she will do anything, even playing fast and loose with the rules of the substance (see also: Death Becomes Her) that she messes everything up in grand, irrevocable style. But then we only get Sue because she is, incredibly, the best version of Lizzy, a woman who, for all the money and the billboards and the designer clothes, is lonely. It’s a brittle, aimless life. Whilst The Substance is a hammer blow to the brutal vicissitudes of celebrity, it is also a distillation of wider attitudes to women. Moore – who looks great, but that’s to evaluate her against exactly the same bullshit scale as the one used in the film – really gets put through the wringer here, and so does Sue. It’s quite something to behold.
As an addendum, it was a pleasure to watch this with a non-horror crowd who’d come to see it entirely based on its lead actresses; these were people who have lived pleasant lives, with no knowledge of Society (1989) or anything like it, and then they were faced with…this. Hope they’re okay today. I hope, too, that they are with me in appreciating this well-crafted, vivid, bold piece of body horror with clever ideas, references and developments. There’s no let-up, all whilst retaining an artful, consistent visual style, a hellish soundtrack and killer performances. If Demi Moore doesn’t win an Oscar for this, then the Harveys are still, sadly, in charge.
The Substance (2024) is on general release now.