The Sub­stance review – as shal­low as the very thing it’s critiquing

It’s no secret that women are held to a high­er stan­dard than men – 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 – so it’s a sat­u­rat­ed field, 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 celebri­ty fit­ness instruc­tor who decides to take a chance on a mys­te­ri­ous med­ical pro­ce­dure after she’s uncer­e­mo­ni­ous­ly fired due to her age. The Sub­stance promis­es to cre­ate ​“a bet­ter ver­sion of your­self” – and so, after col­lect­ing her mail-order pack­age, Elis­a­beth injects her­self with a sus­pect yel­low flu­id and ​“Sue” (Mar­garet Qual­ley) slith­ers forth from a large inci­sion on her back.

The pair are instruct­ed by the oth­er­wise-anony­mous com­pa­ny to fol­low a cer­tain set of rules. Only one of the pair 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. The two are sup­pos­ed­ly one, but they’re also com­plete­ly sep­a­rate, not shar­ing each other’s thoughts, emo­tions or memories.

Fargeat shoots Qual­ley in the same man­ner she shot Matil­da Lutz in Revenge, with slow pan­ning close-ups over her scant­i­ly clad body. 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 the his­to­ry of horror’s exploita­tion of women’s bod­ies rather than sub­verts it.

Moore goes for Most Act­ing rather than Best Act­ing as Elis­a­beth, while Qual­ley has some­thing of Patrick Bate­man in her dead-eyed, nar­cis­sis­tic gym bun­ny. We don’t learn any­thing about either char­ac­ter beyond the most cur­so­ry details, and Fargeat keeps the world around them gener­ic. In strip­ping all per­son­al­i­ty and speci­fici­ty from the world and char­ac­ters, it’s hard to have any sub­stan­tial invest­ment in what’s hap­pen­ing.
In regur­gi­tat­ing old talk­ing points about Hollywood’s obses­sion with beau­ty and its fear of age­ing, The Sub­stance becomes a ster­ile fac­sim­i­le of Hol­ly­wood itself, refus­ing to add any­thing new to the con­ver­sa­tion before going for broke in a third act it hasn’t come close to earning.

Yet more than any­thing it feels deeply depress­ing – a reminder of how soci­ety den­i­grates any­one who chal­lenges the stan­dards pushed by pop cul­ture. But repli­cat­ing images doesn’t make them implic­it­ly sub­ver­sive, and The Substance’s pre­sen­ta­tion is as shal­low as the very thing it’s cri­tiquing. There’s no com­pas­sion, and cer­tain­ly no cathar­sis – just more hagsploita­tion and a sense of déjà vu.