Botox is everywhere, and Ozempic will follow. To voluntarily place a needle in one’s skin is no longer an image of deviancy, but one of routine self-improvement. And while pharmaceutical companies have been known to sell their fountains of youth with refillable snake oil, the products on the market today are actually pretty good. So, we’ve all become William Gibson’s amateur biohackers: some casually use fitness apps on their phones, others meticulously measure out supplement “stacks” to completely re-engineer their insides. But a few, those whose entire sense of self is latched onto the signifiers of youth, die a social death as they age — who would blame them for taking advantage of these new substances?
One of these few is The Substance’s Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), a once successful actress whose mere age (50-something) has relegated her to leading a wooden televised workout program beamed in presumably from the 1980s. Meanwhile, her boss, Harvey (Dennis Quaid, whose cartoon laugh and penchant for vitriol sets the tone for much of the film), unwittingly confirms all of Elisabeth’s worst fears about her career thanks to loudly complaining about her on the phone. By chance, a physician notices her panic and depression and surreptitiously offers her an invitation to a treatment called the Substance. The method to acquire the Substance — call this number, get this address, get a number — contains both the red flags of a bad drug deal and the exciting and mysterious exclusivity of an underground club or secret society. It’s packaged with the sort of minimalistic logo and design associated with pharmaceutical startups and contains plenty of instructions and very stringent rules. After dosing herself with what looks like flat Mountain Dew, she falls to the floor, her back slowly opening like a chrysalis to reveal the 20-something Sue (Margaret Qualley) inside her. Every other week, Elisabeth is and must be Sue — a good enough deal until Sue’s meteoric rise in popularity tempts Elisabeth into staying in the young body for longer than she’s welcome. It turns out to be a bad idea.
The film’s setup is itself a bevy of references — All About Eve, Sunset Boulevard, Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde — but none are touched upon as much as The Picture of Dorian Gray. Just as Dorian’s portrait becomes more sinister in relation to the young man’s nasty sins, Elisabeth’s body suffers from stealing time for Sue. A mild necrosis becomes severe necrosis, half of her face withers into old age, and, with enough time stolen, all of her features become comically monstrous, like the ass-creature from Society (1989) complete with the gross-out humor of a Garbage Pail Kid. And in case the Wilde reference isn’t literal enough, an actual gigantic portrait of Elisabeth that is visible in nearly every shot of her gaudy LA apartment is replaced with a portrait of Sue during the Sue weeks. And, by God, if that portrait isn’t in frame, a gigantic billboard that changes with Sue’s rise will hover outside her window. Given the over-the-top line readings from every ancillary character, this reference is knowingly, cheekily obvious, which has about as much charm as the purposeful camp, which this movie also is.
Among the other assertive references are two distinct visual styles with little-to-no middle ground. The first frames a single character at the dead center, usually in a hallway, usually from a distance, and usually with a wide-angle lens; which, combined with the bathroom set lifted from The Shining and 2001’s omnipresent white tile, as well as the use of “Also Sprach Zarathustra” and a literal Stargate Sequence, could make The Substance the first instance of Kubricksploitation. The second style is a jarring opposite: extreme close-ups are cut rhythmically to inserts of disgusting food, disgusting chewing, disgusting injections, and all the great and disgusting work of the props and effects teams. When the sound design here is unsettling, these scenes are dead ringers for outtakes of Requiem for a Dream, but an occasional noise might resemble something from the foley department of comedy radio and throw off any established tone. Both horror and comedy are serviced by the element of surprise, but for most of The Substance the setups often overshadow the punchlines.
Thankfully, sometimes the whiplash works. Moore’s naturalistic acting, driven by a constant mix of visible fear and anxiety, is made more disturbing when she’s pitted against the manic cartoon chauvinism of Quaid. While this juxtaposition is meant to play with dramatic irony and humor, Elisabeth cannot see this interaction from an audience’s perspective; that every minor character also hams up their lines hints that Elisabeth is trapped in a happy little prison called L.A.
Ultimately, the use of irony and camp aesthetics belie the tragic heart of the film. Unlike Dorian Gray, Elisabeth has committed no evil acts; instead, her deterioration came from breaking the rules in moments of desperation, much like a drug addict avoiding a doctor’s warning. There’s a brilliant nebulosity in the appropriately-named Substance itself. It could be read as “drugs,” those bad things you get addicted to and die — here, Sue is a safe week’s worth of high and anything more constitutes abuse, which further breaks the body, which calls for a more intense and longer-lasting high. While the repeated usage at the end makes that reading plausible, surely it must relate to Elisabeth’s anxiety over aging. To stress this, director Coralie Fargeat goes to great lengths to visually emphasize the difference between Elisabeth and Sue’s asses; there’s even a full sequence that plays like a commercial for Sue’s ass. As Sue, she wins an audition to be crowned the new Elisabeth Sparkle and immediately incorporates a level of twerking that Elisabeth would shy away from. Here, the Substance can be the motley of products — Botox, Ozempic, supplements, some sort of medicinal BBL — that keeps one feeling not just young but confident. But this reduces Elisabeth’s punishment to a mere fable about getting bad work done.
Perhaps the Substance touches upon what Mark Grief identified in his “Against Exercise.” It’s a culture of constant regulation led by a bureaucracy of biometrics; it’s the dream of Elizabeth Holmes’ blood tests; it’s the project of Bryan Johnson, who went viral from claims to have made his body younger through the low price of removing everything one might call “life” from his schedule in favor of constant health assessments. It will turn you into a monster. And then, that the ambiguous Substance is placed at the center of a movie that deliberately avoids subtext offers a final case of whiplash. It’s as frustrating as it is interesting, as fun as it is trite, and it’s ultimately not that gross. But perhaps it’s best we all learn to accept some blemishes in life.
DIRECTOR: Coralie Fargeat; CAST: Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, Dennis Quad, Hugo Diego Garcia; DISTRIBUTOR: MUBI; IN THEATERS: September 20; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 20 min.
Originally published as part of TIFF 2024 — Dispatch 1.
