The Substance - Review Thread

Streaming exclusivity can certainly get in the way of keeping up with certain filmmakers. For example take Coralie Fargeat who received some strong notices for a 2018 film called Revenge which was viewed as a modern feminist update on the rape/revenge thriller, seemingly tying her and Julia Ducournau as leaders of an emerging generation of outlandish female French genre auteurs. I haven’t seen that one. Partly that’s because its rather boring title did not really leap out at me when it was first being released but the bigger factor is that in the United States at least the movie has been exclusive to the horror specialty streaming service Shudder, which I’ve only had intermittent access to over the years. As such I’m not really caught up how that we’ve finally gotten Fargeat’s follow-up The Substance, which has gotten mixed but certainly interested reviews and even went on to win the Best Screenplay award at Cannes. And history may well repeat itself because this was acquired by Mubi and after its theatrical run it will likely be remaining on that similarly niche streaming service going forward (outside of perhaps a physical release). Perhaps this is a state of affairs to get used to and it perhaps makes sense that it’s the fate that befell Fargeat, who seems to be very much a filmmaker who’s interested in being “niche.”

The Substance looks at a woman named Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) a star in her fifties who seems to be working on some kind of exercise program. She looks pretty good for her age and the show seems to be doing alright but one day she overhears her sleazy executive boss Harvey (Dennis Quaid) talking behind her back calling her “old” and “ugly” in extremely crude terms and says he’s looking to replace her as soon as possible. Now unemployed, Sparkle slips into depression but is given what she thinks is an out when someone slips her a tip to obtain a mysterious substance that will potentially return her youth to her. The ways this works is that she injects herself with “starter” which results in a younger “double” merging from her back and then sowing shut the split she came out of. The elder version remains but in a coma like state and from there the younger version has seven days to go about her life before returning and switching places with the elder version who lives for seven days and so on and so forth. While the younger version, who adopts the name Sue (Margaret Qualley), is active she auditions to take Elizabeth’s place on her old show and gets it and from there the two sides of this woman will need to find a way to share a single life which may prove more difficult than you’d think.

So the moral of The Substance is kind of aggressively unsubtle: it’s about how the entertainment industry and culture more generally is wildly superficial and body shaming leading people to go to extreme and ultimately self-destructive measures both to feel good about themselves feel good about themselves and also remain employed and respected. Not exactly an original observation, but probably a perennially relevant one. To make its point the film employes in a sort of hyper-satirical, one that’s not necessarily going for laughs or comedy, but which does seek to exaggerate things to the extremes in order to illustrate the mindset of the central character(s). So, for example, the misogynistic executive making hiring decisions on this TV show at the film’s center consistently speaks in the crudest and most objectifying ways imaginable and is usually shot in nauseous Gilliam-esque close-ups. It’s also probably not a coincidence that his name is “Harvey.” Similarly the TV show that Sparkle and later Sue are hosting doesn’t feel like a real TV show. I guess it’s supposed to be some sort of exercise instructional show or dance show but mostly it just seems like it’s meant to be an excuse to show the female host’s booty shaking at the camera and objectify her. And you do need to kind of go along with the logic of this heightened world to enjoy the movie because there are a lot of things here like the speed at which “Sue” is hired to replace Sparkle and their willingness to go along with her special work schedule that would just seem outlandishly implausible if you were looking at this as being set in a world that was meant to directly resemble our own.

I’ll also say that there are elements of this whole concept that just plain don’t work. For one, the movie establishes that “Elizabeth” and “Sue” are not the same person and have separate personalities and frequently act in opposition to one another rather than being a simple shared consciousness and in a lot of ways the movie makes less sense because of that. Why is Elizabeth even going through all this trouble if only “Sue” gets to have all the fun of youth, what’s in it for Elizabeth? I’ll also say that as the movie goes on these character start making cataclysmically horrible decisions that do start to test plausibility even within the hyper-satirical context of this movie. I get that this is supposed to be mirroring self-destructive habits like anorexic purges and heavy abuse of plastic surgery, and that does make it believable up to a point (we all remember what Michael Jackson looked like toward the end after all), but some of these mistakes feel less driven self-hatred and more driven by, like, simple failures to follow some pretty basic instructions. All of that bugged me, as did the running time, as did the fact that it takes things a little too far at a certain point… but the visual filmmaking here is really damn good. Good enough that I was willing to forgive a lot of the movie’s excesses and indulgences. It is frustrating though because it feels like a handful of tweaks could have made this a genre exercise for the ages but in its current form its rather flawed.