The Sub­stance – first-look review

It’s no secret that women are held to a high­er stan­dard than men in every aspect of life, but per­haps nowhere is this more evi­dent than in Hol­ly­wood, where to vis­i­bly age, gain weight or not fit the very nar­row pre­vail­ing beau­ty stan­dard is to be deemed worth­less. There are plen­ty of films that wres­tle with this issue – Sun­set Boule­vard, All About Eve, Black Swan, Inland Empire and The Neon Demon are just a hand­ful – which means it’s becom­ing an increas­ing­ly sat­u­rat­ed mar­ket, and film­mak­ers need a nov­el idea if they’re going to stand out from the crowd.

To her cred­it, writer/​director Coralie Fargeat has one of those. Elis­a­beth Sparkle (Demi Moore) is an age­ing star who decides to take a chance on a mys­te­ri­ous med­ical pro­ce­dure after she’s uncer­e­mo­ni­ous­ly fired from her job as a tele­vi­sion fit­ness instruc­tor due to her age. ​‘The Sub­stance’ promis­es to cre­ate ​“a bet­ter ver­sion of your­self” – and so, after col­lect­ing her mail-order pack­age from a lock­er, Elis­a­beth injects her­self with a sus­pect yel­low flu­id and ​‘Sue’ (Mar­garet Qual­ley) slith­ers forth from a large inci­sion on her spine.

The pair are instruct­ed by the oth­er­wise anony­mous com­pa­ny to fol­low a cer­tain set of rules. Only one of them can be con­scious at a time (while the oth­er lies on the bath­room floor with a feed­ing tube plugged in) and they have to switch every week to avoid irre­versible side effects. To ​‘sta­bilise’ the process, Sue must inject her­self with Elisabeth’s spinal flu­id every day dur­ing her con­scious week. The two are sup­pos­ed­ly one, but they’re also com­plete­ly sep­a­rate, not shar­ing each oth­ers’ thoughts, emo­tions or mem­o­ries – the week one is in con­trol is lost time for the oth­er, and they have to piece togeth­er what’s going on in the other’s life from con­text clues. It’s not clear what Elis­a­beth is get­ting out of the arrange­ment, since she ben­e­fits in no way from Sue’s instant success.

Sue imme­di­ate­ly takes over Elisabeth’s old TV job, work­ing with her skeezy boss Har­vey (Den­nis Quaid play­ing a Wein­stein type, because sub­text is for cow­ards) and buys her­self a new wardrobe. Slow­ly but sure­ly she begins to want more time in her body, which starts caus­ing issues for Elis­a­beth. Fargeat shoots Qual­ley in the same man­ner she shot Matil­da Lutz in Revenge, with slow pan­ning close-ups over her body, often naked or scant­i­ly clad. There’s noth­ing inher­ent­ly wrong with such, but the cam­era is leery, obses­sive, hyper­sex­u­al – ​“Younger, more beau­ti­ful, more per­fect” than the body that birthed her, it makes sense that Sue would be keen to flaunt her assets. But it’s less clear why Fargeat her­self is so intent on high­light­ing Qualley’s unde­ni­able beau­ty in a film sup­pos­ed­ly cri­tiquing the film industry’s obses­sion with it. If Fargeat’s inten­tion is to make the audi­ence com­plic­it, she repli­cates an exist­ing his­to­ry of horror’s exploita­tion of women’s bod­ies rather than turn­ing it on its head.

Moore goes for Most Act­ing rather than Best Act­ing as Elis­a­beth, at one point just lift­ing from Glenn Close as Alex For­rest, while Qual­ley has some­thing of Patrick Bate­man in her dead-eyed, nar­cis­sis­tic gym bun­ny who starts to push her luck. We don’t learn any­thing about either char­ac­ter beyond the most cur­so­ry details, and Fargeat keeps the world around them gener­ic (it’s set in the present day or near future, where pre­sum­ably tele­vised work­out shows have become pop­u­lar again). This isn’t in itself a prob­lem, as it’s very clear­ly meant to be Los Ange­les, but in strip­ping all per­son­al­i­ty and speci­fici­ty from the world and char­ac­ters, it’s hard to have any sub­stan­tial invest­ment in what’s happening.

Elis­a­beth starts binge eat­ing, real­is­ing that if she does, it will impact Sue’s body. This con­tin­ues a few times, and it doesn’t get any fun­nier, with grotesque scenes of food debris shown around the apart­ment, and Sue refer­ring to Elis­a­beth as ​“gross, old, fat, dis­gust­ing”. Giv­en the whole ongo­ing Ozem­pic hul­la­baloo and rum­blings of a return to hero­in chic, the food scenes don’t play as fun­ny. They just read as sad – as though the idea of being fat tru­ly is the worst thing that Fargeat can imag­ine. Sim­i­lar­ly, Fargeat sug­gests a cliched link between inter­nal ugli­ness and exter­nal ugli­ness, rather than inter­ro­gat­ing (or tak­ing to task) the sys­tems that make phys­i­cal per­fec­tion so desir­able to begin with. There’s one inter­est­ing moment, when Elis­a­beth con­tem­plates killing Sue to escape her, and tells her uncon­scious body ​“You’re the only lov­able thing about me” but it’s dif­fi­cult to feel that there’s a true con­nec­tion between Elis­a­beth and Sue giv­en that they are nev­er shown to have one previously.

Even­tu­al­ly the whole film spins out into pure body hor­ror, com­plete with a hulk­ing crea­ture who resem­bles Abzor­baloff from Doc­tor Who. This got big laughs from the Cannes crowd, but its appear­ance read as deeply trag­ic to me, the sad con­clu­sion to a woman who doesn’t know how to be any­thing but a celebri­ty, and giv­en Hollywood’s long, hor­rif­ic his­to­ry of mis­treat­ing peo­ple with phys­i­cal dis­abil­i­ties, it’s a strange choice to play the char­ac­ter for laughs. The film bor­rows from The Pic­ture of Dori­an Gray, Car­rie, Death Becomes Her and Scan­ners with­out ever com­ing close to hav­ing an orig­i­nal thought, even with enough fake blood to put Kubrick’s Shin­ing ele­va­tors to shame.

Instead, The Sub­stance regur­gi­tates old talk­ing points about Hollywood’s obses­sion with beau­ty and fear of age­ing in a ster­ile fac­sim­i­le of Hol­ly­wood with­out adding any­thing new or inter­est­ing to the con­ver­sa­tion, and then goes for broke in a third act it hasn’t come close to earn­ing. It’s cer­tain­ly a showy movie, and the props team have worked their socks off to bring to life some grim cre­ations, but more than any­thing the film felt deeply depress­ing – a reminder of how Hol­ly­wood den­i­grates any­one who looks a lit­tle dif­fer­ent from the stan­dard pushed by social media and pop­u­lar cul­ture. But repli­cat­ing images doesn’t auto­mat­i­cal­ly make them sub­ver­sive, and The Substance’s exe­cu­tion of its sup­posed themes is as shal­low as the very thing it’s cri­tiquing, a stab at fem­i­nism with­out actu­al­ly say­ing any­thing oth­er than ​“women are held to excru­ci­at­ing beau­ty stan­dards”. There’s no com­pas­sion here, and cer­tain­ly no cathar­sis – just more hagspoil­ta­tion and a sense we’ve done this all before.