THE SUBSTANCE (AND THE LACK OF IT)
Thoughts on the new body horror movie which wrestles with anti-Hollywood satire and more serious concerns around ageing, self-image and chauvinism
The Substance is a movie about a faded (and fading) female star who wants to recapture former glory through a new, younger surrogate. So far, so familiar.
The film begins with chic, clear design and strong colour cinematography and soon veers off into a gory meditation on the value of beauty and ego and the desire to turn back the clock, quite literally against the body. Managing to combine images of disgust and resentment with sexy adoration and beauty as virtue soon spiral into an elegant but sometimes overblown state of chaos as wishes are fulfilled but in doing so becomes a curse.
I enjoyed the film overall: it had great performances and excellent staging and framing and the prosthetics and effects are very well done. The problem is, The Substance tries to do too much and falls down in the final act which feels tacked-on and too big a departure from the overall ‘point’ of the movie. The main thrust is delivered via the eponymous wonder-drug which allows Elizabeth Sparkle to quite literally be reborn through a renewed self – YOU, but better! The creeping sense of horror and unease arrives from an abusive relationship which means the new Elizabeth, ‘Sue’ saps more and more life force from her parent/older double, causing Elizabeth’s body to collapse into premature old age, she becomes a shadowy former self, a mature woman trapped in the body of a 100 year-old woman.
This is the great dramatic crux of The Substance, the push and pull of respect in the symbiotic relationship, an odd-couple who are kind of the same person, wrestling over power, vitality and time, trading seven day stints for week long comas. Sue is corrupted by her own vanity, while Elizabeth’s last grasp/gasp at fame and beauty causes her to be shockingly and grotesquely short-changed.
I do think there could be an unsubtle nod towards the ongoing back and forth debate around Ozempic as the weight loss wonder drug that also seems to carry its own price of skinniness as body ‘perfection’ that also causes people’s faces to look gaunt to the point of skin stretched over bone. In this the constant run of injections and extractions show bodies to be ephemeral and shifting, adding and subtracting, as one gets sucked away to nothing the other runs its shallow course of beauty for its own sake, concealing an inner shallowness.
There are two great moral senses to the film: the satire of being loved/liked by sleazy studio executives and faceless audiences, an attention energy that is somehow meant to sustain you, but will inevitably fall short when the attention stops. And what I read as a divining message to be happy with what you have; to find contenment or lasting satisfaction is far more worthy than to want what you cannot have, or regain. Easier said than done, but if not for her own jealousy and hunger for perfection, Elizabeth might have entertained ageing as a continual progression of living, not a slow exit out of real life, instead the film becomes a revenge tale, against herself.
In the first, the film establishes a brilliantly shallow world populated by feckless and facile men as the main supporting cast. Everywhere men are grading Elizabeth and Sue, categorising them in the realm of wanted/unwanted. They are each dissected by lingering glances, uncomfortable small talk, empty promises; where Elizabeth an attractive older woman, is supressed by negative voyeurism, fired form her TV keep-fit show, Sue is elevated for her raw physicality and beauty, ogled-at and lusted after, both women are trapped in the same prison of their bodies, their inner character(s) are of no interest.
On this point, people have spoken with great acclaim of Demi Moore’s performance and throwing around Oscar Talk. She is a great sport, throwing herself into the anger and bitterness and raging jealousy the character demands, but so much of her part is played by heavy prosthetics, I don’t love the emphasis on a female actor’s willingness to ‘ugly'-up’ to be seen as unlikeable in every way, contrasted with the inevitable strolling on red carpets, seen to be ‘looking amazing for her age’ etc. etc. in this sense the heavy aesthetics of film versus life perhaps takes away form her performance?
By contrast, Dennis Quaid is amazing, and perhaps deserves a Best supporting Actor award, as the nihilistically gauche and garish studio executive who ejects Elizabeth and replaces her with Sue. He is a gaping mouth with a duck-billed quiff and a range of horrifically loud suits and catchphrases, filmed in close profile the gaping orifice of his mouth is pure personality, consuming a bowl of prawns without losing a word, blowing smoke rings, declaring how much he loves his wife (as an afterthought) and ticker-trailing his eyes after chorus girls in high silver thongs and pink feathers, he chews up the scenery as a martyr to TV ratings and irrepressible ego for all of his 20 minutes of screen time.
On my second (more important?) point, Elizabeth end up worse-off than when she started, and ultimately commits herself to self-sacrifice, in that Sue (She) to experience a taste of that first whirlwind of excitement that comes from being famous and beloved, and in spite of this Sue’s continued greed and reckless selfishness, typical of being young and learning things the hard way, causes her life to fall apart, as she realises her existence depends upon her symbiotic twin.
This was powerful to me. The haunting sense of terrible mistakes made which cannot be undone; hurting and exploiting others is also hurting yourself, the glossy veneer of shiny sexiness wears thin very quickly. I struggled with the concept of the twin/individual women as separate entities, Sue is Elizabeth reimagined (but Better!) and they experience nightmarish visions of their decadent crimes against each other; the abject outcry of bodies splitting open from over-eating or carrying yet another form inside of them, but they never seem to fully step in and out of each other’s thoughts; the line is vaguely drawn and makes it confusing how distinct and separate each character really is in the vicarious trade-off between death and new life. Perhaps that is the point, but it seemed a bit wishy-washy, to me.
Other writers and critics have observed the near slapstick levels of violence and gore, which in the last twenty minutes veered off at such a kilter it lost me, an seemed to devalue any notions of deeper meaning behind the film, a late punchline. Many people have noted the borrows/steals from several signature Kubrick shots, the corridor filled with a wave of blood, a close-up face collapsing onto the floor, and the expanding iris bursting into multiple colours. None of these moments really expand on what Kubrick was doing, in that sense they repeat what have already become cinematic tropes without adding a unique twist of its own. A lot of the hyperbole surrounding The Substance is a highly visual movie lacking much meat behind the surface, until trying to be something it is not, and perhaps, that is the real problem after all.
p.s.
Well worth watching also, is Coralie Fargeat’s 2017 film, Revenge, which as the title suggests is a lusty and gratutious revenge movie of a woman abused by her lover and raped by his friends then left for dead. Like The Substance it lingers long on shots of star Matilda Lutz’s perfect rear end, and also incorporates lots of gory physical effects which again unites the core themes of sex and violence.