The Substance

The Substance, an outrageous and over-the-top body horror film from writer-director Coralie Fargeat, has had people talking since it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.

The film’s premise is quite simple and straightforward. Longtime aerobics show star Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) is aging out of the business. At the doctor’s office after a severe car accident that leaves her surprisingly unscathed, a male nurse slips her an oversized USB flash drive and a handwritten note. It’s an understated pitch for a dramatic treatment that promises to create a newer, better, younger version of yourself. Having nothing to lose with her career prospects faded, Elisabeth orders the treatment, becoming number 503 to the mysterious medical company and getting a keycard to retrieve her first kit in a sketchy alley storage locker.

Following the clear yet considerable directions to a T, Elisabeth gives herself the activation injection, causing her to fall to the floor. Her back cracks open and from this emerges the young, perky, and equally nude version of herself (Margaret Qualley) that comes to be called Sue. Housing Elisabeth’s talents in a flawless, young body, Sue finds instant stardom at the audition to find Elisabeth’s replacement. Within days, she is the central personality of her own new fitness series. The production even agrees to work around her schedule, which is essential because part of the substance’s protocol is for the two versions of the person to share existence, trading off weeks while the inactive version lies lifelessly on the floor receiving intravenous nutrition and a daily stabilization procedure.

Adorning a giant billboard outside their apartment, Sue rises suddenly and absolutely, but her ascent does little to fulfill Elisabeth during her on weeks. What’s worse is every time Sue opts to extend her time about, Elisabeth suffers for it, beginning with a decrepit and atrophied finger.

Aging is a sore subject that comes to mind frequently once you’ve left the coveted 18-34 demographic. For women in the entertainment industry, it is largely a death sentence. You can count on maybe two hands the number of actresses above the age of 40 who habitually land leading roles in film. Demi Moore is not one of those actresses, which makes her casting and performance here all the more interesting. Moore was one of the biggest female movie stars in Hollywood in the early 1990s, with lead roles in blockbusters like Ghost, A Few Good Men, and Indecent Proposal.

At 33, Moore cashed in on her status and sex appeal, getting paid a then-unprecedented $12.5 million to star in 1996’s Striptease, an upper mid-budget summer film that was widely panned by critics but probably still came out ahead financially. While her follow-up vehicle G.I. Jane improbably was at the center of the most remarkable and rewatched moment in modern Academy Awards history (Chris Rock’s sequel joke prompted Will Smith’s infamous slap), Moore’s career never seemed to recover, even when she was married to a then-thriving Ashton Kutcher.

The not-forgotten success (Ghost and A Few Good Men are still among the most well-known and loved of ’90s films) and subsequent lull give Moore personal investment in a film that’s all about aging out of a business that, especially for women, is perpetually tied to beauty and glamour.

Now it’s worth noting the obvious, that Fargeat does not have any personal insights into the machinations of show business. The French filmmaker is reportedly in her late 40s and this is just her second feature film, following 2018’s Revenge. Fargeat’s portrayal of the industry is based on realities, but ones that are exaggerated to dark comic effect. That much is apparent in simply the names of her protagonists, the porn-sounding Sparkle and the improbably mononymous Sue. It’s impossible to find a real career arc that parallels Sparkle’s; her shtick seems comparable to a 1980s Jane Fonda or a 1990s Denise Austin, but fitness routines alone don’t often land you a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, an achievement Fargeat compellingly captures in a film-opening, narrative-laying overhead time-lapse shots.

For that matter, what are we to make of Dennis Quaid’s character, an unholy head honcho who is introduced devouring prawns in off-putting close-ups? Is he a producer? A network executive? For Fargeat, all that seems to matter is that he and his band of merry old white men are the enemy, the ones with the power and proclivity to cancel any woman who fails to arouse them. The sleazy, showy performance of Quaid is both colorful and welcome; he inherited the part after the originally cast Ray Liotta sadly passed away in 2022.

Qualley, who can surely relate to the material as the daughter of Andie MacDowell, Moore’s St. Elmo’s Fire co-star and a fellow sexagenarian decades removed from leading lady parts, adds another strong performance to what has now been five productive years of those. She is emerging as one of the standouts of young Millennial actors, although it’s tough to believe she’ll soon turn 30, the upper limit of the age range the film’s newspaper ad for “the next Elisabeth Sparkle” seeks.

While much of The Substance holds you captive, from its believable product packaging and marketing to the relatable desire to reclaim the power of one’s youth, the film wears out its welcome with a disappointing final act. If the film reasonably reminds you of an imaginative episode of “Black Mirror”, it outgrows that design, running too long and going too far with its absurdly bloody and prolonged climax. You can tell that Fargeat has written herself into a corner. The dramatic allure of having a younger and older version of one’s self take turns existing renders conflict inevitable and these later scenes fail to live up to the compelling early ones. While Fargeat’s most obvious influences throughout are Davids Lynch and Cronenberg, the finale seems to take a page from Quentin Tarantino’s playbook and leave no blood unsprayed. It’s unfortunate for a movie with the word “Substance” in its title to ultimately let style reign in the end. The grotesque New Year’s Eve finale is hard to defend on any level in a film which takes delight throughout in causing winces and averted eyes in audience with its bodily horrors.

Despite the critical raves, the genre leanings of The Substance seem to prohibit it from serious awards consideration. Moore has a most compelling career narrative and does a solid job of steering the film for much of its superior first half. But although it’d be satisfying, her landing her overdue first Academy Award nomination for this seems implausible. At the same time, is there any way the Academy can legitimately ignore the film in its Best Makeup & Hairstyling category? It has some competition in the thematically kindred and possibly less off-putting A Different Man, Tim Burton’s whimsical and commercially successful Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, Joker: Folie à Deux, and the yet-to-be seen Nosferatu. But I’d be surprised if any of those works relied so extensively on jaw-dropping, organic-looking prosthetics.

The Substance represents an apparent first in the 17-year history of the streaming service MUBI, who will give this a wide theatrical release in North America this week after a worried Universal Pictures backed out. It will be interesting to see if the festival-fueled Internet buzz contributes to some box office business. The film would have felt quite at home had either A24 or NEON picked it up for distribution.