Demi Moore plays Elisabeth Sparkle (no relation to the Japanese detergent magnate, I assume), a Jane Fondaesque actress who’s made her living in middle age by hosting a daytime women’s fitness show. When the network executive (a snarlingly disgusting Dennis Quaid, having a blast) fires her on her birthday, she coincidentally receives an invitation to partake in a treatment to make her younger again. I won’t reveal how it works (that’s part of the fun), but it involves injecting herself with the title and titular Substance, a vial of neon green liquid that looks like Ecto Cooler™️. This creates a young doppelganger (Margaret Qualley) with whom Elisabeth is allowed to trade places for a week at a time. The kit comes with an ominous message: “Remember, you are one.”
The shadowy corporate bioengineering surrounding the Substance is one of the movie’s more satisfying creations. Elisabeth is led through cryptic phone calls and professional but foreboding mailers to a property deep in the slums of Hollywood, through a rollup door that only opens halfway (forcing her to supplicate herself), to a sanitized white locker room where she picks up her equipment without any contact. The room mirrors the sanitized white bathroom at her apartment where most of the movie’s more gruesome action takes place.
Like Coralie Fargeat’s previous film Revenge, The Substance is a gradually spiraling horror drama about a woman trying to claw her way back after being destroyed by men. But Revenge began with a truly terrifying situation (a young woman trapped in a remote location with a group of violent rapists) and gradually built to an oddly logical level of absurdity (if I recall correctly, a climactic scene featured the heroine attempting to evade her attacker while he slowly bled to death, all the while trying not to slip and fall in the blood). The Substance, unfortunately, is wafting through crazytown all the way through, with too little of the real horror it hints at.
The male villains representing the sexist system that envelops Elisabeth and then rejects her are sometimes funny, but are generally too goofy to be as insidious as they ought to be. Buffoonish and threatening certainly aren’t mutually exclusive—just look at Christoph Waltz in Inglourious Basterds, or Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet, or anyone in the Trump Administration. But Fargeat can’t find the right balance and the men end up as caricatures rather than as logical exaggerations of their real-world parallels. Harvey Weinstein, the namesake of the Quaid character, didn’t merely reject older actresses in favor of nubile youngsters; he used his position to take advantage of them physically and held their careers hostage for it.
The movie’s version of that systemic assault is absolutely chaste by comparison. The symbol of the lowest level of cultural degradation is… a fitness show that allows people to stare at boobs and butts? Give me a break. All this cartoonishness does is allow any of Fargeat’s possible targets to escape unscathed. Would any of the Harvey Weinsteins of the world feel confronted here? Even Quaid himself, a vocal Trump supporter married to a yoga instructor half his age, seems not to have felt his ears burning.
Though Qualley is believable as Elisabeth’s younger self and later nemesis (named Sue), her scenes are not as interesting as Moore’s if only because her dalliances in her younger body are conventional and expected. She sleeps with young hot guys, she drinks and does drugs, she uses her younger body at the older one’s expense. Her inevitable disobedience of the “rules” of the Substance leads to horrific transformations. Don’t google it before you see it, but the creators here seem to have taken a lot of inspiration from Rob Bottin. If that means something to you, you’ll know what to expect.
The movie’s lone oasis of subtlety is Moore herself, whose performance is a deeply felt essay of a fallen idol whose self-loathing has been set in concrete by the men who control her career (much like her Hollywood Walk of Fame Star, the image of which begins the movie). She’s the reason the movie works at all, and imbues all of her physical transformations with a genuine hope and sadness. When the Substance takes its toll on her, her growing sense of being trapped in her aging body, while a younger person reaps the benefits, makes for the movie’s best and most heartbreaking scenes. A sequence in which Elisabeth is preparing for a date is probably the most tense in the movie, and it depends on no body horror or physical deformations or anything that isn’t in Moore’s performance. She’s fantastic, and deserves to win the Oscar for this.
It’s too bad that Fargeat doesn’t follow through on everything Moore brings to it. As she’s in the movie less and less, it loses its uniqueness. The climax follows through on the literal bloodbath it promises, and without giving away too much, I’ll say the makeup artists show quite a bit of respect to Beryl Lerman and Michael Morris’s work on The Elephant Man. But the ridiculousness of Lis/Sue’s surroundings comes too close to meeting the ridiculousness of what happens to her, and the line between them is never clear enough for it to be truly effective. It needs a bigger moment of catharsis. Think the ending of Rose Glass’s Saint Maud, which examines this sort of degradation in a way that The Substance fumbles. Still, I must admit I take some joy in this being the first Oscar-nominated movie in which… well, see for yourself.
** 1/2 out of ****
