The Substance (Coralie Fargeat, 2024)
Margaret Qualley is the new Demi Moore
Winner of the Best Screenplay award at Cannes and an Academy Award for Best Makeup and Hairstyling, The Substance is a horror movie about Hollywood’s narcissistic obsession with beauty.
Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) was in a movie or two once upon a time and was significant enough to have earned a star on the Walk of Fame, but most people now know her from her long-running fitness TV show. The problem is, she just turned 50. And that means game over in Hollywood.
Unceremoniously fired on her birthday, she suffers a car crash on her way home and winds up in the ER. Fortunately, she’s unscathed — but this hospital visit is really just a means for a nurse to slip a note in her pocket, alerting her to something called The Substance.
“Have you ever dreamt of a better version of yourself? Younger, more beautiful, more perfect... One single injection unlocks your DNA, starting a new cellular division, that will release another version of yourself.”
Intrigued as a result of her new irrelevance, Elisabeth goes down the offered rabbit hole. She’s led to a squalid industrial area of the city, only to find a futuristic Apple Store-esque interior, where her initial dose of The Substance awaits in a drop box.
She goes home and injects it in her veins, at which point a violent mutation occurs and she births a new version of herself (Margaret Qualley) who assumes the name Sue — and Elisabeth’s old gig as the face of network TV’s favorite exercise show. It’s easy dream fulfilment made flesh.
Part of this Faustian deal, however, is that Elisabeth and Sue must trade off their time in the world. For seven days at a time, Elisabeth lies unconscious on the bathroom floor while Sue lives her life out in the world. And then they switch for the next seven days.
But younger, more attractive women inevitably have more fun, and so it doesn’t take long for Sue to exceed her allowance of their corporeal timeshare. And with that balance out of whack, things start to go wrong very quickly…
The Substance is a sexy, gory, incredibly bloody body horror movie that most blatantly evokes Cronenberg, but Lynch and Kubrick are other obvious influences. The movie also feels very complementary to the recent wave of unabashedly feminist films such as Barbie or Love Lies Bleeding.
It is a satire dealing with important themes to be sure, but The Substance never lets any of that overshadow its core reason for being. It is a horror movie through and through.
It’s a highly-entertaining and accessible film and a lot of fun to watch — both as Elisabeth/Sue navigate the ecstatic highs and cutthroat lows of the fantasy biz, but also as the body horror gets increasingly more extreme.
The excessive finale in particular is gonzo blood-soaked brilliance that elevates everything that has come before it.
The Substance was one of 2024’s most zeitgeisty films and a great horror movie that is sure to linger on the public’s consciousness long after award season is over.
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