The Substance (2024)
A hypodermic needle enters the screen from the left. The hand of an unseen person injects a green liquid into the unbroken yellow yolk of an egg seen from above. The yolk then replicates itself, splitting into two perfectly formed spheres. So, begins the genre-bending film The Substance (2024). Part drama, part dark comedy, part horror, the much-anticipated film written and directed by Coralie Fargeat, stars the still strikingly beautiful Demi Moore as the lead character Elisabeth Sparkle and Margaret Qualley as Sue; not Elisabeth’s younger self in a traditional sense of “before,” but her younger self in the freakish experimental drug sense of + Elisabeth. What do we mean?
Well, that egg and the hypodermic needle were a symbolic key to Elisabeth’s quest for a younger, firmer, more “beautiful” self, the self that she tragically believes she has lost through the natural process of aging. You see, although a Hollywood super star of fitness television (think Jane Fonda’s 80s vibes) Elisabeth believes that it is all about to disappear. She has built a storied career, symbolized in her glittering pink star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and a Hollywood studio corridor lined with large, glossy portraits of her slender body glistening in form fitting Lycra. The crisis point for Elisabeth is a lunch date with her studio exec boss Harvey (played with obnoxious and repulsive gusto by Dennis Quaid). Why has he summoned her? Well, to inform her that her career is done as a 50-year-old woman who is no longer attractive enough to hold an audience and provide the necessary ratings. She’s out and the quest for a younger version of Elisabeth, 18 to 30 to be exact, has begun!
Harvey is smarmy, slimy, uncouth, obviously wealthy and powerful, and disastrously, in a position to dictate what huge swaths of people believe is beautiful. Unsurprisingly, as the film progresses, we see that most of his minions (whether executives or board members) are also white men who gleefully assess, measure, and package (white) female beauty.
To say that Elisabeth is devastated by the news is an understated. Her life as she sees it is solely about her body and her beauty, and the career it has made possible. Her modern yet clinical condo provides clues to her lifestyle and inner world. It is bereft of signs of loved ones and companionship, be it a significant other, children or even close friendships. Instead, a massive glossy photographic portrait of her in Lycra – much like those that adorn the walls of the Hollywood studio – dominates one wall of her living room. Indeed, Elisabeth is so distraught after her lunch with Harvey that her distracted driving leads to a car accident. Although bruised, she emerges relatively unscathed, and it is at the hospital after the doctor assures her that her injuries are not severe, that a medical assistant performs a further assessment telling her she’s a good candidate. But for what? Outside of the hospital she is stopped by a starstruck fan who knew her when; a former high school classmate who clumsily bestows his phone number. Crucially, he tells her that she hasn’t changed a bit (meaning that in his eyes, she has not aged and is still as beautiful as ever).
But a pivotal moment happens on the way home from the hospital when Elisabeth discovers a thumb drive in the pocket of her warm, amber-yellow coat. Intrigued, Elisabeth plays the contents, which explain the life-changing potential of “the substance” for recapturing one’s youthful beauty. The voice on the phone provides no information but a street address. That there is no medical consultation, FDA approval, clinical trials or patient testimonies should be triggering Elisabeth’s internal warning system to scream abort! That it doesn’t lets the audience know how much her self-worth is tragically connected to her physical appearance and the stardom she has achieved from being considered beautiful.
The Substance is also a morality tale about listening to one’s gut, especially for women. When Elisabeth is directed to a grimy, garbage-filled alley that looks like a place where vermin go to die and drug dealers go to kill their rivals, although she pauses, she still activates the metal gate with the substance symbol and crouches like a pretzel to squeeze under the malfunctioning door. Once down another dark and filthy corridor, patients’ mailboxes are arranged by number and Elisabeth grabs the substance and returns home.
While Elisabeth’s palpable self-loathing is painful to watch, the most disturbing parts of the film begin after she administers the substance. The box includes various hypodermic needs, medicines, and “food” in fluid form, packaged for self and other. Once the new self is “born,” they must split their consciousness, each being awake only seven days in a row. While one part of the self is awake, the other part is in a catatonic state, immobile, and perilously helpless. But critically, it is the responsibility of the conscious self to ensure the feeding and care of the unconscious self during those 7 days.
One of the most gruesome scenes is the “birth” of Sue who literally emerges from Elisabeth’s back after the initial injection. While Elisabeth wreaths in pain, naked on the bathroom floor we are witness to the birth of this younger, supposedly more beautiful part of her that emerges to study her pale white body in the mirror. Sue touches her naked body and glories at the firmness of her white flesh and rosy, pink nipples. Although the film clearly condemns the agism and sexism of society at large and the misogyny of Hollywood that imagines that women are disposable at a certain age, where it falls short is in its simultaneous glorification of white female beauty. The camera lingers on Sue’s back, breasts, and buttocks lovingly as if asking us to acknowledge her pale whiteness as ideal beauty. Indeed, Sue is so besotted with herself that it is a while before she turns her attention back to stitching up the back of the unconscious Elisabeth (literally the other part of herself) and act that will ensure her own survival since she must draw her nutrition from Elisabeth’s spinal fluid. But the “birth” of Sue does not heal their self-loathing since, tellingly, when either is conscious, they leave the other initially naked on the white tiled bathroom floor, or later, locked in a specially designed hidden room, on the floor, without the basic comforts of natural light, a bed, a pillow, or even a blanket.
As you may have guessed, it is Sue who auditions for and wins the new role of the fitness guru who will replace Elisabeth on the TV show. Harvey is smitten and sees the dollar signs behind Sue’s youthful beauty. Bizarrely, in the sequences where the camera crew is filming Sue’s new show, the movie centers dramatically and repeatedly on Sue’s buttocks in terms of the shots, angles and exercise moves. Now listen, as black people we understand ass-culture as a central part of what drives black male heterosexual attraction to black women. Black women don’t ask their black men the question that terrifies most white woman, “does my ass look fat in this”? That is, they don’t ask that question unless they expect and desire the answer to be a resounding “yes”! It was odd to see a “white” film about beauty focussed not on the female breasts, but on the buttocks as the primary site of sexuality, health, and vigour. That said, the film again assumes or tries to convince us that the round backside of Sue is the universal ideal physique although it is clearly distinct from the more muscular, toned, full and preferable (to us) buttocks of one of her black female fitness companions who was not the star (nor the beauty ideal) of the movie.
But Sue’s growing fame and immersion within the Hollywood lifestyle soon fuels her selfishness as she is loath to return to the necessary unconscious state after seven days. Instead, she drains more and more spinal fluid from Elisabeth to sustain her wild partying and lavish lifestyle, although the growing blue, infected injection site on Elisabeth’s back speaks of the havoc she is causing on her other self. That havoc is physically visible when Elisabeth awakes to find that a finger on her left hand has aged with the curvature, skin, and nail appearing more like that of a ninety-year-old woman. Furious she understands what Sue has been doing and the operator on the substance hotline confirms that because they are one, anything that one of them does, impacts the other. You can see where this is going, can’t you?
In a particularly gripping scene, Elisabeth conscious and desperate for external affirmation, reaches out to her high school classmate and sets up a dinner date. Dressed in a stunning red dress and elbow-length black gloves (to hide her decaying finger), she completes her flawless makeup and heads to the living room to exit the apartment. But stopped in her tracks by a gigantic poster of Sue (pouty and sexy in Lycra) that looms outside of the window, she returns again and again to the bathroom to fix her makeup, adjust her dress, and cover her chest and neck with a scarf before a meltdown causes her to smudge her red lipstick violently across her entire face in disgust. (This is a heart-breaking scene in Moore’s Oscar-worthy performance.) While Elisabeth sits in her darkened bedroom, her phone blows up with texts from the former classmate anxiously asking if she is ok and on her way. She is, of course, neither.
The rest of the film charts how she/they systematically betray(s) her other self through disastrously selfish behaviours. While Sue parties and uses Elisabeth’s body as a feedbag, Elisabeth forsakes her liquid food and indulges mercilessly in French cuisine. Finally at her wits end, with her body now fully degraded into that of an unhealthy geriatric woman, bald, and suffering from drooping and wrinkled skin, varicose veins, arthritic limbs, and curvature of the spine, Elisabeth orders a termination kit which is exactly what is sounds like. But after injecting Sue’s unconscious body with the “medicine” she has second thoughts and hastily revives her. This poignant moment is the first time that the two are awake at the same time. But if you were expecting an exchange of love and compassion, think again. When Sue awakens and sees the label on the needle, her wild rage drives her to beat the elderly and near defenseless Elisabeth to death.
But the movie is not done yet. You see, Sue must prepare for a spectacular night which will catapult her career to new heights; her gig to host the network’s New Year’s Eve celebration. But once at the studio and dressed in a ruffled blue gown that would make a Disney princes proud, she is horrified when her teeth start falling out. Her desperate solution is to return home and use yet another substance kit, but not the ones she has been using for maintenance with the now-deceased Elisabeth, the injection that started it all. But hold onto your seats because what crawls out of Sue’s back this time is not another Sue-like woman, but a disastrously deformed combination of the two women, complete with Elisabeth’s face and a protruding arm in the back of their new shared body.
We won’t reveal what happens after the new Sue-Elisabeth makes her way back to the studio and onto the stage, but it ain’t pretty and if you aren’t a fan of gore or horror films, you probably can’t deal with the final sequences.
The Substance is a beautifully stylized film that is rich in symbolic significance. It is also a well-timed commentary on the lengths that people will go to and the things we will put in our bodies (think GLP-1 drugs for instance) to achieve near impossible standards of beauty. Although it relies on colonial ideals of female beauty as white female beauty it is also a shockingly inventive and bold, film that provides a thoughtful and incisive critique of white, male dominated media and the widespread societal misogyny which judges women’s value solely based upon how they measure up to a very narrow ideal of beauty as youth. However, it also interrogates how much women participate in the construction and maintenance of these violent and denigrating systems and imagery through a deadly self-loathing which manifests in Elisabeth’s mindless, self-destructive quest for youth and beauty at all costs. Watch if you dare!