The Substance
The titular substance itself, artificially concocted in all its neon green glory, to the backdrop of a clinical setting. What is isolated in agar jelly and petri dish will eventually cross the permeable membrane of human skin. Still from The Substance (2024), courtesy of MUBI. Picture access via ScreenRant.
Conspicuously advertised across billboards and socials, a formula in algorithmic facility, French director Coralie Fargeat’s fervently fiendish body modification parable The Substance has finally hit the market—an outlandish pharmaceutical romp that takes much traversed themes of ageism, celebrity, and self-resentment to twisted satirical extremes between its two tethered leads, the illustrious Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) and rival Sue (Margaret Qualley).
The pulse-pounding fare, however, kicks off starkly cold open and sterile, not by homing in on its centremost starlets in the painstakingly oversexualized rhythms of their exercise regimen—of which we later learn they earn repute—but rather the principal reasoning for their eventual entanglement: a wordless demonstration of the elusive serum in action, labelled only as the ‘Activator’. Sanitized, the MUBI-financed film’s foremost incubative truth is laid out for us right away, as bare as the sexless nude expressions of our co-stars in the LED-lit lab-like bathroom they otherwise come to haunt, ultimately forged on an enfleshed lie.
Yet, across its entirety, The Substance’s exhilarating 2-hour 20-minute runtime is really prompting its audience to question whether the ontological substance of the syringe is a mistruth, and thus the bane of our leads’ provocation, or if the act of marketing a medical misnomer by any other definition is the actual evil at play, deliberately withholding information in service of selling a false promise. For, obviously, the elixir itself is a fictional element rendered fact for the most cantankerous elite in this world of corporate smiles and stooges, technological advancement, and male-gaze heavy centrism—a world, as it becomes indomitably clear, that is pretty much our own, albeit for the preternatural deus ex machina of the rejuvenating fluid itself (a “miracle combatant against ageing”) and the insane hilarity that ensues. One cannot deny its illicit backdoor footing, nor its restorative raison d’être in the SNL sketch-like parodied edge of the branding Fargeat wryly instantiates; first depicted in an avian ovule, the substance performs its function with finesse, decorated only with the minimal script of modal verbs that delineate how to administer the medium. A hollow how-to guide at best, really only mimicking support and credibility, it is almost as if the elusive parent conglomerate might not exactly have its consumers’ best interests at heart…
That is, conversely, substitute The Substance’s hoax of a self-revitalizing cosmetic enhancement with something more along the lines of fundamental regenerative replacement, and you arrive closer to the solution’s true spinal-tapping, self-splintering nature. Exposed in simpler, circular yolk form, the ease of seeing such a fractured process unfold ironically adds a sense of foreboding to the film by implication; audible squelches and minor motions make for a clever contrast, serving as a stand-in for the back-rupturing bone-cracks that will berth a beautified offshoot when skeletal musculature inevitably complicates the fray, translated to the human form. Less the ozempic craze that has stolen the buccal fat of a now gaunt Hollywood elite, and more the fearful symmetry of Dead Ringers and Infinity Pool, The Substance lands itself as an honorary member of the Cronenberg clan in spirit, embossed with the editorial audiovisual style of The Neon Demon.
For an undertaking in camp that is so tightly beat-matched, snappy, and surprisingly dialogue-light (cut like a music video of sorts, with an emphasis on the soars of its Raffertie-produced score, itself reminiscent of the club-ready Reznor and Ross spearheaded Challengers soundtrack), The Substance delivers a cuttingly dark comedic update on the classic Monkey’s Paw cautionary tale. It depicts a fatal readiness to sign away the human identity to the unknowns of fine print in fulfillment of desire and the overreaches of excess. Fargeat ingeniously adds in a clause of worth to those terms and conditions, blending insecurity and fame, in the extreme lengths that wealthy personalities can—and will—go to to increase their perceived market value and assure their beautified seal of approval from the public.
A masterclass in exposition, the film’s secondary overture sets this up as an evocatively wordless tell-all, clueing the audience in on the status of Elisabeth Sparkle’s star in a less explicit fashion than the tabloid media that sensationalizes her future circumstances. Here, we first learn of Sparkle’s incongruously aptronymic name where it is solidified on the Hollywood Walk of Fame via a time-lapse through scenes that suggest the fading of her starlet over time, most literally lost to persistent shuffle, wear, and tear. Taken as a metaphor, the film positively sizzles with this kind of symbolism throughout, and Fargeat’s presentations of food are especially exacting in envisioning the grotesqueries of man (with Dennis Quaid’s businessman’s insipid chewing most vile to behold, taken as predatorily as the action was in her debut feature, 2017’s Revenge—thematic linkage if you will).
Like an image cut straight from a morgue, a figure in dragon-stitched velvet looms over a naked female body. The place is actually one of prior procreation, to which the two are anchored. The question is: which is Elisabeth and which is Sue? Shot from The Substance (2024), courtesy of MUBI. Image via MIFF.
It is as if the film assumes their point of view, as we witness the jaded Rosemary Connelly/Jane Fonda type outdated model in Sparkle go head to head—tooth and nail—against the ultra-new Sue. By pitting it like so, Fargeat cariacatures the sorts of misogynistic standards and stereotypes placed on women by gleefully reveling in them; if made Drop-Dead Gorgeous, then it is taken to the upper limits in full-figured curvature, and, when age tolls, it is next level, as a wretch near the place where Death Becomes Her. This accelerator logic also applies to the outlandish body horror that Fargeat conjures, historically relegated to the male form in classic films of old (e.g., The Fly, The Thing, and Society), the auteur unafraid to embrace monstrosity in the feminine expression. Multiple polarities are skirted, but it is the film’s stock background characters who set the barometer for their reception—to Moore’s Sparkle and Qualley’s Sue, their beauty remains constant in each phase of their chrysalis as it unravels, spiraling beyond control.
However, the symbiotic pair don’t quite work it out on the genetic re-re-remix they endure, the backstabbery twofold (in more ways than one; see Sparkle’s spine), as their primary source of connection becomes an actual festering pustule, weeping with each extraction. From a literary standpoint, the back-and-forth switch between either double is a smart device to portray the intense toxicity of their push-and-pull dynamic, one sapping the other in physical stamina as the other leeches mental resolve, making the upset of their equilibrium more pronounced as it veers into take-heavy territory, irrevocably sealing their tragic fate.
At a certain point, The Substance feels never-ending as it hurls to a hulking finale of ‘monstro’ proportions. With a last 20 minutes that will surely go down in third-act history, currently driving the masses to see it (think the crimson coat of Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria), it's like the letting of a blood-bag, expelling the spurts of every sexist expectation. A laborious product of many enterprises, The Substance admittedly doesn’t entirely reinvent the wheel, but I don’t think it’s trying. To the age-old question “Have you ever dreamt of a better version of yourself? Younger, more beautiful, more perfect”, it goes about saying “don’t submit” in a fresh decompressed narrative that leaves you questioning what’s next. Haggard, in a hybrid of physical comedy-horror, its final shot leaves more of a lasting impression than the fleeting pulp it portrays: have some self-respect.
