Despite Rave Reviews ‘The Substance’ Is Actually A Pretty Bad Movie

“Internalized misogyny” is not a phrase you’ll hear me say very often, but I think it’s weirdly appropriate when it comes to Coralie Fargeat’s critically acclaimed body horror film, The Substance, which has become—rather bizarrely—a massive hit since its release last year. Demi Moore won a Golden Globe for her performance as washed-out celebrity, Elizabeth Sparkle, a name that’s about as subtle as the rest of the film.

The Substance is an on-the-nose parody of celebrity beauty standards especially as they apply to aging female stars. The entire movie—which is a grueling 142 minutes long, about half an hour longer than it needed to be, yet so poorly paced that the slog felt paradoxically rushed—reminded me of the 1992 Robert Zemeckis film Death Becomes Her, and it suffers from many of the same problems. Chief among these is the very peculiar tendency toward punishing the film’s female protagonists as frequently and horrifically as possible.

Both films are about the preposterous beauty standards foisted upon women in our modern culture, yet both films seem determined to make these same women suffer, while portraying men as mostly bumbling buffoons whose chief infractions are wandering eyes. The men in The Substance objectify women to a cartoonish degree, but it’s the women who fall apart, who turn violently on one another, who pay the highest price, all for our entertainment.

The Substance wants to have its cake and eat it, too, at least when it comes to objectification. It’s been a long time since I’ve watched a film that lingered so long on the alluring bodies of beautiful naked women. Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley are both on full display here, and sure you can say it’s all part of the satire, but it’s also very clearly meant to be titillating (before things go bad). Moore and Qualley’s beauty is dangled in front of us and then chipped away at relentlessly, grotesquely, in a series of mean-spirited vignettes that do nothing to engender sympathy for these women, who are also the ones most responsible for the abuse. By the time the movie ends, I mostly just despised everyone, male or female. That’s a feeling I had watching Death Becomes Her as well, though perhaps to a lesser degree. Both films tell us “These beauty standards are absurd!” and then gleefully destroy the women who are victimized by said standards. Is it parody or torture porn?

I was scrolling through reviews of Death Becomes Her last night, and stumbled on this critique from David Denby of New York Magazine. “The target of the movie's jokes is female vanity,” Denby writes, “but since Zemeckis exhibits not a trace of affection for the actresses (or for any of the men, either), one feels humiliated merely watching his crude-spirited wit.” This could be applied, after a fashion, to Fargeat’s film as well. There’s not a trace of affection for the female protagonists in The Substance, and the men are merely caricatures. We are here to watch the former suffer and to blame the latter. None of it feels particularly authentic.

The Premise Is Really Stupid When You Stop And Think About It

Let me be blunt: The film’s premise is absurd. It doesn’t make sense. Basically, Moore’s Elisabeth Sparkle is a washed out celebrity still doing, of all things, workout videos a la “Buns of Steel” which, I guess, is still a thing that famous people do? She overhears her gross, sexist boss, Harvey (Dennis Quaid) in the gender-free bathroom talking about how he wants to get rid of her and find someone younger. This is meant to inspire sympathy for Sparkle’s plight, but I have to ask: Aside from Harvey’s icky verbiage and lack of empathy, is he wrong? Is it reasonable to employ a 62-year-old hosting an aerobics morning show? This would have worked better if the role was in some kind of drama or even a soap opera where ageism might be a little less, well, practical.

In any case, Sparkle gets in a car accident and when she’s at the doctor, someone slips a thumb-drive and a note into her pocket. “It changed my life” the note reads, and on the drive is a brief video about a mysterious Substance that allows you to essentially clone yourself, only your clone will be a younger, better, more beautiful version of you. There’s a number to call and Sparkle calls it. The catch? You have to switch back and forth every week with your double. One week in your own old, sad body and the next as the better you. This involves a ridiculously grotesque cloning process where the new you is “birthed” out of a split down your back, followed by a regimen that really ought to require medical assistance to properly carry out.

Basically, “new” you has to stitch up “old” you’s back. Then there is a daily booster that has to be injected and the comatose body that just lies there in your totally not-sterile bathroom for a week, as well as a food pack that you have to set up, all intravenously, in order for the other version to survive. What an ordeal! Sparkle and her new self, Sue, have to do all of this without any instructions or assistance, which is the first time I really rolled my eyes during the movie. This is not exactly DIY stuff. If you haven’t set up an IV before, it’s not a sure thing. If you haven’t stitched a massive wound, you’re probably not going to get it on your first try. And what about antibiotics and disinfecting the wound and blood loss? Even a stitched wound of this size laid out in a bathroom for a week would almost certainly become horribly infected.

I know, this is a science-fiction horror film, and I suppose if I can accept the premise of this magical Substance I should be able to look past all these details, but that’s not how it works. I need the details to make sense so that I don’t have to think about them. When stuff like this doesn’t click for me, I just find myself annoyed and distracted.

It gets worse. Once Sue has been “born” and does all the medical stuff she needs to do to keep her old self alive, she heads to the studio where Sparkle used to work in order to audition for—you guessed it!—another aerobic workout show, which in this universe is apparently the big thing that gets you famous. Go figure! Of course, she gets the job because she’s gorgeous (we know this because we just spent five minutes watching her pose naked in the mirror above the inert form of a naked Demi Moore) and Harvey is vapid and shallow and only wants hot young women to star in his aerobic dance class shows. What a monster.

She gets the job and things are going well until she decides that instead of switching back after seven days, she’d rather extend that by a few hours so she can booze it up and get laid. She doesn’t know this will have terrible consequences because there are no detailed instructions included with The Substance. She sucks a little bit of extra fluid out of Elisabeth’s back and gets busy with a handsome lad and then switches back (at this point she’s also built a secret door in the bathroom which leads to a secret closet because I guess she has pretty amazing construction skills somehow, and just using a spare bedroom or something wouldn’t be as cool or use up a bunch of superfluous runtime).

When Elisabeth wakes up, her pointer finger has gone necrotic. It’s now the wrinkled talon of an old crone. She’s pissed. Her other self isn’t following the rules!

From here, it’s a back-and-forth between the two selves as the youthful Sue robs her older self of life-force, and the older Elisabeth Sparkle rages, falling into a sort of slovenly madness until Sue decides she just won’t ever switch back again. And I’m sorry but none of this makes even the tiniest bit of sense.

Look, if I have a miracle drug that allows me to be 20 again, awesome. I can spend a week as a 20-year-old version of myself and then switch back and be 43 for a week. Having the brain of a 43-year-old and the body of a 20-year-old would be like having the best superpowers of all time. If I can experience both weeks, why not? And if I know that I have to switch back every week or face terrible consequences to both my younger and older self, I’m going to do that without question.

But this movie makes it pretty clear that Elisabeth and Sue are experiencing totally different lives. Elisabeth has no memories of what Sue does while she’s in her young, hot body. Sue has no memories of Elisabeth cooking up a storm and leaving the house trashed, the windows stuck all over with newspaper, food everywhere. Both are shocked and dismayed when they “wake up” at the start of their week.

They’re aware of one another, obviously, but they don’t experience one another’s day-to-day lives so they have no hesitation about screwing the other one over and resentment quickly blossoms. They don’t think to even try and communicate with one another. Maybe leave a note, make a truce, figure out how all this works so they don’t die. No, you see the point of this movie is that women don’t get along, even with themselves. They just try to destroy one another. What a fun and inspiring message!

So Why Even Take The Substance?

Okay, so I have to ask: What on earth is the point of taking this drug? Let’s say you’re Elisabeth Sparkle and taking this drug just makes you pass out for a week and then wake up with various deformities thanks to your alter-ego, Sue, whose time you don’t even get to experience. Why take the Substance to begin with? Elisabeth isn’t getting showered with affection and adoration as Sue, or getting to sleep with hot young men, she’s just waking up when that’s all over, grey-haired and sickly. At least in Death Becomes Her, the miracle drug worked for them in real time. In The Substance, there’s literally no point in doing any of this. Why would I take a drug that gives me a younger, more beautiful and fit body for a week if I didn’t get to experience the benefits myself, and only the bad side-effects after? It’s a genuinely stupid concept and yet this movie is winning Best Screenplay awards.

Oh, but you see it’s an allegory! It’s about younger generations taking the spotlight from older generations, about the inordinate value we place on youth and beauty, about mothers and daughters, about fame and fortune. Blah blah blah. I don’t care. Allegory only works if the story makes sense. This story does not make sense. And the message is trite, shallow. It’s been done before and better. I’ve read The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein. And honestly, who among us isn’t aware that beauty and youth are overrated, especially in Hollywood, but that no matter how much we say that we still pine for the bodies we used to have? Tell me something I don’t know. Yes, some of the gross body-horror stuff is very unsettling, but that’s not enough to make this a good movie.

The Gross Body Horror Stuff

In the final act, Sue has drained Elisabeth for months but now she’s run out of the magic fluid—sucked the husk of Elisabeth dry—and is forced to switch back or die. Elisabeth is now a hunchbacked old crone, utterly robbed of her beauty and whatever youth remained, and she’s given the option to stop, to terminate the whole thing.

But as she’s about to do just that, she has second thoughts. “I hate myself,” she says. “You’re the only lovable thing about me.” This is a silly thing to say given the circumstances, because Elisabeth doesn’t actually experience Sue’s life, despite the man on the phone telling them over and over again that “you are one.” Clearly, they are not one. Elisabeth has been utterly destroyed by Sue and the Substance, but she still decides to let Sue live, halting the termination midway. Also, that line is so on-the-nose I laughed when she said it.

Sue wakes up and . . . I guess she’s very angry that Elisabeth was going to terminate her, though really this is just an excuse for a big fight scene where Sue savagely beats her elderly counterpart to death, smashing her face into the mirror, kicking her across the room, kicking her over and over until only a bloody, broken heap remains. You see, this movie is a satire of unreasonable beauty standards, so we must punish and destroy the women who participate in this culture as horrifically as possible.

It’s gross and excessive even for a horror movie, though I think what bothered me most is just how illogical the whole thing was. Sue knows she needs her counterpart to survive. Killing Elisabeth means she won’t be able to rejuvenate. And sure enough, she starts to lose teeth at the big New Year’s Eve show she’s starring in. It’s a cabaret show being broadcast to 50 million households on network TV . . . and I guess in this universe, that involves a couple dozen topless cabaret dancers. (This movie pretends to be a critique of the male gaze but takes every opportunity to throw hot naked women in front of the screen, and then use them either sexually or in the most violent and bloody manner possible, or both).

Sue runs back to her penthouse and uses the rest of the Substance Activation vile, despite the “one use only” warning, and out of her back a monster is birthed, a grotesque, waddling pile of flesh with body parts stitched hideously together like some aberration from Elden Ring. The monster tapes a picture of Sparkle to its face and somehow waddles its way back to the show, where it gets past security (you’d think that might be tricky, but it’s barely an inconvenience!) and disrupts the NYE show in spectacular and bloody fashion.

Are we meant to sympathize with this creature as people scream in terror and call it a monster and attack it and scream for it to be shot? Has this film done anything to make us sympathize with any of these characters, let alone this hideous thing that quite literally coughs up (from one of its mouth-like orifices) a disembodied breast onto the stage? Are we meant to feel bad when we realize that we, too, would likely be shocked and terrified by this monster’s appearance?

Because I don’t feel bad. The film’s creators have gone to great lengths to make the creature as monstrous and disgusting as possible. “I’m still me!” it cries, forlorn, “I’m Elisabeth, I’m Sue!” but no, not really. Sue wasn’t even Elisabeth, and Elisabeth wasn’t even Sue, so why should we think this Frankenstein’s monster that just emerged moments ago has any of their memories or awareness? If it did, it never would have left the condo (Elisabeth couldn’t even leave the condo to meet an old classmate, in one of the movie’s more thought-provoking and evocative scenes).

At one point the monster sprays a fire hydrant worth of blood on the entire studio audience. But the satire has run dry by now. The creature is too far removed from anything even remotely human to be real. This is not an Elephant Man scenario, or poor hunchbacked Quasimodo. The movie takes things so far that any message about “inner beauty” is lost in the stampede.

Ultimately, while The Substance got off to an intriguing start, the majority of the film and especially its goofy ending was mostly cheap shock value and amateurish satire built on the flimsiest premise imaginable. Even the camera work felt cheap. Lots of zoomed in shots and a wide-angle lens to make us feel dizzy. Very bold colors—a long, bright orange hallway—and wacky costumes like Harvey’s floral suits, to give the film a strident, distinct look and feel.

Lots of style, sure, but ultimately, and perhaps ironically, very little substance.

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