The Substance (2024)

3 1/2 Stars (out of 4)

Long in the Youth

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

A brilliantly savage satire on the male gaze and women's self-image, Coralie Fargeat's body-horror movie The Substance goes all the way up to the edge and past it, and even the most jaded viewers may want to cover their eyes.

Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) is the legendary star of an exercise show. Still in shape but past fifty, she's unceremoniously let go by her sleazy boss Harvey (Dennis Quaid) in favor of someone younger. She learns of a process called "The Substance," which can restore her youth, but it comes with many rules. She begins the procedure, and a young pretty new woman is made from Elizabeth's body. She's called "Sue" (Margaret Qualley).

Sue quickly lands Elizabeth's old job, and begins a meteoric rise to fame. But the rules of the procedure require that the awake version "feeds" the sleeping version, and that they must switch places every other week. The increasingly busy, popular Sue begins to feel cheated about her lack of time, while Elizabeth feels utterly useless, a former shell of herself. Even though they are the same person, the two women slowly develop a bitterness toward one another, which escalates dangerously.

Written and directed by the French-born Fargeat, whose 2017 debut movie Revenge was an amazing, unrelenting feminist thriller, The Substance is a bigger, bolder follow-up, although, like its predecessor, it rages. Viewers should be aware of just how far the movie goes into its squelching, mutated, infected, spewing, hideous body-horror. It's bonkers and over-the-top to be sure, but it's also deeply effective. It's an intelligent and direct exposure of the double-standard of men's and women's body types.

Dennis Quaid plays a man of some power, icky in every way, shelling and slurping shrimps at lunch, smiling with disgusting teeth, and ogling and pawing at beautiful young women. Demi Moore, on the other hand, has spent her life staying in shape, looking her best, and is the one that pays the price. (Moore gives perhaps her first truly great, outside-the-box performance.) In one deeply ironic — but key — sequence, during a taping of Sue's erotic exercise routines, the director orders a cut (he saw something weird), after which all the male crew members move forward to scrutinize the monitor and every millimeter of her close-up, semi-naked flesh, frame by frame.

It's too bad the movie didn't further explore the rules of this peculiar split-person situation (why aren't the women more connected intellectually and emotionally?). But, as bodies divide and merge and turn into indescribable monsters, The Substance asks the question: why are women subject to such scrutiny, and not men? That question is not addressed with the mind, but rather with the gooey stuff that makes us up — the stuff that makes us human, but eventually — after a time, returns to goop.