“Has she started yet? Eating away at you?”
[There shall be spoilers right from the get-go. Ye have been warned.]
What rough beast slouches toward Hollywood Babylon? In the case of The Substance (2024), it’s a grotesquely deformed creature, shambling its way down an empty Los Angeles street, a photo of a once-celebrated star superglued to its face (or what by default would be considered its face; it’s got at least two of them). The thing may have been human once, but the features we use to identify our own kind have been overwhelmed by a roiling, revolting mass of distorted flesh. Eyes are in the wrong place, limbs are akilter, breasts make a mockery of the term pendulous. It doesn’t so much walk as lurch; when it speaks, its voice is a distorted moan. It probably smells, too.
The abomination is on its way to an assignation with nationwide fame, in the form of a hosting gig on a New Year’s Eve broadcast. Or at least its previous incarnation—a rising young media personality named Sue—was on the way there, before she made the fatal mistake of ignoring the very strict instructions of the miracle product that literally spawned her. Now the thing she has become stumbles down an empty studio hallway, its warped imagination conjuring the vision of a crowd of adoring fans. The worshippers smile. They applaud. They inundate the creature with praise: “So beautiful!” “We love you!” “This is where you belong!” They will vanish before the thing manages to reach the end of the hall, before its delusions will be permanently shattered before the merciless gaze of the cameras.
One thing in the finale of The Substance (2024) that grabbed my attention: As the creature—dubbed, a title card helpfully informs us, “Monstro Elisasue”—approaches the TV studio, she’s greeted at the door by a stagehand, who doesn’t blink twice as he says, “Hurry up, you’re up in five.” It parallels an earlier moment in the film—before Sue’s complete metamorphosis—where the woman’s loathsome boss, Harvey (Dennis Quaid) fails to notice that her tight smile might be concealing the fact that her teeth are falling out; and a subsequent encounter in an elevator, where a fellow passenger tries to conduct a conversation, oblivious to the fact that Sue’s holding a ragged hunk of ear in one hand.
Confirmation bias is all over The Substance. It goes beyond Sue’s entourage failing to notice that the face grinning back at them is a pasted-on photo (with, as a coup de grâce, a grotesque splash of lipstick smeared across the two-dimensional lips), or that their Bright Young Thing is decaying right before their eyes. Everybody’s too dug-in to their own thing to be swayed by reality. That’s a fitting mindset in Hollywood, a town built on artifice and exploitation, where one’s career advancement is frequently facilitated by the ease which one can forget how many souls one has sacrificed along the way, including one’s own. It’s an ecology that ultimately spells doom for The Substance’s main protagonist, Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore)—and one that she’s ultimately complicit in.
Adored by millions, Elisabeth was once one of Hollywood’s most beloved stars—although possibly it was that brand of love that only lasts over the release of a few, trendy pictures. That window of time closed years ago, and the Industry has treated Elisabeth with the same level of care and respect it does any woman approaching middle age—in other words, none at all. In the ensuing decades, Elisabeth has been forced to follow the Jane Fonda workout route, fronting a group of lithe young bodies on her own exercise show. Even there, the star’s expiration date is running out—as The Substance begins, Harvey is berating his flunkies for their failure in finding a replacement for her, and not long after, ol’ Harv’s unceremoniously showing Elisabeth the door.
Salvation of a sort comes in the form of a mysterious commodity—known only as The Substance—offered by equally mysterious vendors. The promotional video promises, “A better version of yourself, younger, more beautiful, more perfect.” With that kind of pitch, how can an over-the-hill celebrity, whose sense of worth only thrives under the warming glow of the spotlight, refuse?
What Elisabeth receives in her first shipment is queasy array of syringes, nutrient drips, and intravenous catheters, and a set of disquieting instructions: Use the Substance only once; “stabilize” every day; and, perplexingly, switch off every seven days(?). No exceptions. There’s also one stern reminder: “You are one.”
That last point is important, because what the Substance does is literally (and agonizingly) spawn a younger, more beautiful, more perfect version of Elisabeth out of a slit in her back. As the husk of Elisabeth lays dormant on the bathroom floor—sustained by that nutrient drip—the newly created doppelganger, who names herself Sue (Margaret Qualley), goes out, replaces Elisabeth on the exercise show, and rediscovers the joys of being a pretty young thing on the Hollywood scene. After a week of basking in the glow of her revivified stardom, “Sue” does an intravenous blood swap with Elisabeth, and the older incarnation resumes her life, free to bask in the glow of her self-imposed irrelevance.
It doesn’t take long for things to go pear-shaped. The first week goes well—Sue staves off decomposition with daily doses of Elisabeth’s spinal fluid (Fargeat does not deny us the cringy sight and sound of the tap entering Elisabeth’s back), and relinquishes her place at the end of seven days. After that, though, Sue begins to press her advantage—first taking a few extra hours, then extra days, and possibly extra weeks.
Which is absolutely fine… for Sue. For Elisabeth, she wakes to discover that, Picture of Dorian Gray-style, her body is dramatically aging as Sue takes more time away: A withered hand here; then one whole side; then a progressive slide into full-on decrepitude. Reluctant to step outside her apartment, she inflicts passive-aggressive revenge for her younger counterpart’s excesses by becoming a creature of rabid consumption: Lounging in front of the TV, preparing meals culled from a book of “French” recipes that all seem to incorporate organ meats, and leaving Sue to clean up the disaster area she leaves behind. In a delicious bit of irony, both incarnations call the Substance vendors to complain that their worse half is making a mess of their lives, only to have the dispassionate voice remind them, “You are one.”
“The balance needs to be respected,” Elisabeth declares to the voice. “So respect it,” the voice responds.
The film was written and directed by Coralie Fargeat, and it’s heartening to see a woman director unafraid of going to extremes that would make David Cronenberg blanch—I estimate I cringed approximately every five minutes, and things didn’t improve upon a second screening. Yet for all that The Substance embraces the hyperbolic—and Dennis Quaid deserves some kind of award for hitting the stratosphere in his performance and refusing to come back down—perhaps the most devastating thing about the film is the conceptual twist contained in that oft-repeated phrase, “You are one.”
We as genre lovers are well-schooled in the two-sides-of-the-same-coin scenario, tales that explore the duality of our natures by splitting our psyches into two distinct entities. Yet The Substance is no Frankenstein and his monster/Jekyll and Hyde/Good Kirk-Bad Kirk retread. Right from the start, it tells us that whether we are looking at Elisabeth or Sue, we are always looking at the whole coin. There are no sides to pick, no “better half” to root for. When Elisabeth eventually gets the best of Sue and begins to administer the syringe that will, as the lovely folks behind the Substance so delicately put it, “End the experience,” it’s not empathy that stays her hand. It’s the realization that she needs Sue out there to soak up the love she can no longer receive. Sue isn’t separate from Elisabeth, isn’t stealing anything from her. She’s merely a conduit through which Elisabeth can still feed upon the adulation of the masses. For that, Elisabeth is willing to surrender everything, up to and including her own deterioration. (Unfortunately, Elisabeth comes to this realization a bit too late. Once roused from her coma, Sue promptly beats Elisabeth to death.)
The film industry has long taken a piquantly masochistic pleasure in presenting tales that explore the greed, shallowness, and baser instincts concealed behind the Tinseltown veneer—I suspect that’s what merited The Substance’s nod as nominee for this year’s Best Picture Oscar (I also wonder whether any Academy members merely heard that it was a kind-of modern-day Sunset Boulevard and didn’t bother to see for themselves how deliriously vicious it was). But for all that The Substance offers up the expected parade of self-serving egotism and cruelty—and there’s tons of that, to the point where I wished the film had provided at least one redeemable character—what makes The Substance especially damning is its exposure of how willing one is to betray oneself for the most trivial of rewards. Elisabeth is no admirable heroine, much as Moore’s performance stirs our empathy (I’d call it courageous, but too often that term is used as a synonym for “looking her age,” and Moore is doing way more than that); and Sue is no despicable villain. They are the same person, desperate for the acclaim of the crowd, and willing to do anything to themselves in order to retain it.
I have to admit, I’m a little uncomfortable with my love for The Substance. It’s too much, way too much. It’s gruesome and nauseating and violent and garish. There isn’t a sincere emotion expressed by any of the characters, and the best that could be said about any of them is that they’re fools, if not out-and-out shits (watch Quaid down a plateful of shrimp in horrendous close-up, and see if you don’t retch just a little bit).
None of that is by accident—it is, I believe, all in service of ripping away the bandage on a most unpleasant aspect of the human soul: Our capacity to sell ourselves out for whatever we regard as valuable. I marvel at Coralie Fargeat’s willingness to take something so dark and electrify it with such stunningly intense vision and brutal wit. The Substance is a fable you can’t tell your children, but it merits attention from us adults.
I’m not good at predictions, but I’ll make one anyway: The Substance is not going to win the Oscar. It’s great that it was nominated, but I think it’s too much of an acid bath for the Academy’s general population. I could be wrong—don’t place bets based on my analysis. But what do you think? Does The Substance deserve to be hailed as one of the best films of 2024? Was there something else from last year that deserved its slot? And how many times did you go, “Oh… ew,” while watching it? The comments section below is open for your input. Just keep things civil and be mindful of others when you contribute. Remember, in terms of feelings, we are one…
Well damn, but haven’t you put a film I hadn’t even heard of ’til now at the top of my to-watch pile!