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“Have you ever dreamt of a better version of yourself?” asks The Substance. Repeated like a ritualistic chant, this provocation and promise echoes via the in-universe advertising for a mysterious body-swapping product, which allows people to create a younger version of themselves. The insecurities of a middle-aged actress take center stage in Coralie Fargeat’s sophomore feature, the body horror romp that won her the Best Screenplay award at Cannes. However, despite featuring a few astute ideas about aging, the result feels dramatically scattered, and — ironically, given its attempted takedown of how women are perceived in Hollywood — aesthetically superficial.
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While visceral in spurts, The Substance is never quite in control of its satire on sexualization, an excess in which it revels without always meaningfully subverting. Its lead performances are fine-tuned — especially from Demi Moore, who delivers intrepid, career-best work — but the film is more a collection of mild jabs than a full-throated deconstruction of a cultural gaze.
That said, if gory practical delights are what you seek, then The Substance might thrill you on occasion, especially in its blood-soaked finale. However, its gestures toward empowerment and cinematic reclamation are too often insubstantial.
What is The Substance about?
Credit: Courtesy of MUBI
Fargeat introduces us to ’80s sex symbol Elizabeth Sparkle (Moore), not through her on-screen work but through a static close-up of her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame as the decades go by. Like the actress herself, the plaque is initially fawned over, but eventually forgotten and ignored. This is about as meaningfully symbolic as the movie gets, given how closely entwined Elizabeth’s celebrated sidewalk tile is to her celebrity status, and her worth in the public eye.
When we first meet Elizabeth, she’s the host of an aerobic workout show, an outmoded form of television, for which she wears distinctly 1980s gear. Now in her fifties, she’s a nostalgia act, and she soon learns that her obnoxious network executive boss, Harvey (Dennis Quaid), wants to replace her with someone younger. However, at a routine doctor’s visit, she meets an ethereally dashing young physician who looks practically airbrushed, and tips her off about a life-changing product by slipping her a phone number. After a bit of sleuthing and a minor scavenger hunt, she ends up in possession of a personalized medical kit with strict instructions in large print reminiscent of a beauty start-up, and a creepy but informative video clip filmed like a pristine advertisement. “Have you ever dreamt of a better version of yourself?” the voice in the video asks, before introducing her to “the substance,” a cell-splitting chemical that will allow her to — through disquieting means best left unspoiled — essentially clone a new version of herself.
We often see Elizabeth inspecting her bare body in the mirror, looking for lesions and sagging skin. But when she creates a younger version of herself — an avatar who goes by the mononym Sue (Margaret Qualley) — this new and “improved” doppelgänger features none of those perceived imperfections. It’s also particularly notable that, like the young physician, Sue has blue eyes instead of Elizabeth’s green, an ostensible “improvement” upon whose racial dimensions the film never touches.
It is, perhaps, understandable that the film’s approach to the perception of feminine beauty remains locked into white and Western standards, since this is the lens through which the white Gen X celebrity Elizabeth views herself, though it becomes at least mildly frustrating by the end. Through its plot mechanics, which involve Sue and Elizabeth swapping states of waking and unconsciousness for a week at a time so that their paths never cross, the film goes to great lengths to introduce numerous different dimensions to their dynamic with each other, and with the world around them. However, for each new idea introduced by The Substance, another seems to fall by the wayside, leaving little room to explore the wider implications of the body as part of the body politic.
The film’s premise also grows increasingly bothersome with how little it’s actually geared towards Elizabeth’s psychology and self-reflections.
The horror sci-fi plot of The Substance feels incomplete.
Credit: Courtesy of MUBI
The mysterious nature of “the substance” allows its rules to be written on the fly, but Fargeat seldom seems to take advantage of this. There are distinct limitations placed on how much time Sue can spend living Elizabeth’s life and vice versa, and there are clear consequences for breaking these rules, but the temptation to break them is seldom rooted in strong-enough notions of character.
To start with, the actual psychological relationship between the two actresses remains unclear. Despite the insistence of the company’s spokesperson (over the phone) and its numerous printed reminders that Elizabeth and Sue are one person, they’re made immediately distinct in their wants, and become two separate characters tethered to these rules by happenstance. Furthermore, as Sue scales the ladder of success and all but replaces Elizabeth, the veteran actress has little incentive to keep up this game of weekly body-switching, even though an encounter with another person using the product seems to frame it as a kind of addiction. The film’s dramatic language only ever highlights the contrary. Since at least one of them has to be unconscious at all times, Elizabeth is barely a passive observer to Sue’s life, only witnessing its aftermath when she awakens. Elizabeth neither benefits materially from Sue’s success, nor gains any tactile pleasure from letting Sue out into the world, since the two women share no mental, emotional, or metaphysical connection.
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This does, at times, result in a kind of mother-daughter dynamic, wherein Elizabeth wants to (but cannot) live vicariously through a younger extension of herself, and it’s also at times literally a tale of a younger actress replacing an older one. Moore effectively channels the fears and jealousies therein, but the storytelling remains constantly at odds with each one of these underlying themes. Scenes of each actress inspecting themselves in the mirror are placed in sharp contrast with one another, introducing the sort of dysmorphia brought on by cosmetic surgery. But the premise — of a middle-aged woman and her younger copy never occupying the same physical or psychological space — prevents any one of these ideas from taking hold emotionally.
At one point, Elizabeth wakes up to find that Sue, while heavily intoxicated, has made rash decisions that affect both their careers. The older actress insists that these weren’t her choices but those of someone else, thus invoking the language of substance abuse — another crutch an aging actress might turn to in order to cope with being discarded — only this doesn’t work as intended. While it echoes the denial and self-delusion that can accompany addiction, Elizabeth is also simply correct about Sue being her own distinct person. The Substance demands to be read through an abstract lens, but it remains too tethered to the literal, through crossed wires and half-baked themes, for the kind of poetic readings that might make it feel harmonious.
The filmmaking in The Substance feels confused.
Credit: Courtesy of MUBI
Elizabeth’s story often works in isolation, especially when her fears of aging — and of losing her professional and personal value in the process — take disquieting physical form. The film is at its most unnerving through subdued changes, from small injuries akin to paper cuts and tiny spores of infection, to the vile and uncouth presence of Quaid’s Harvey (you’ve never seen a man eat shrimp cocktail in such a disgusting manner). However, while its more overt transformations are impressive feats of practical filmmaking, they’re seldom viscerally effective, playing like lesser versions of scenes and images from other, better movies.
Numerous elements reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining appear on-screen, from patterned carpets and red bathroom walls, all the way to specific shots, but these obvious callbacks serve little thematic purpose beyond recognition. While some films are invoked for more specific reasons, like the body horror of Brian Yuzna’s cult horror-comedy Society and Ridley Scott’s sci-fi slasher Alien, others like Hitchcock’s Psycho become reference points without clear purpose, as though Fargeat were attempting to simultaneously pay homage to Hollywood’s male-centric, female-focused horror canon while defying and deconstructing it. Unfortunately, she seldom succeeds, and her comparisons end up setting a high bar that the movie cannot clear.
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A major, self-aware element of The Substance is its presentation of Sue, seen as a virginal temptress by the appropriately named Harvey and other male executives. She’s often shot like the female subject of a beer commercial: glossy, needlessly hyper-sexualized, and simultaneously central to the allure while being disposable to the product. And while this aesthetic takes hold when she’s on set, in front of studio cameras, it’s Fargeat’s camera that films her this way, a perspective that isn’t tethered to that of the media or male onlookers within the film. This approach isn’t inherently problematic, but there’s no evolution to it.
Beyond a point, gratuitous shots of Margaret Qualley’s crotch and buttocks are just that: gratuitous. The message of “this is how the world sees women” is clear the first, second, and third time this framing appears, but at 140 minutes in length, the movie’s lack of any real aesthetic exploration or refutation becomes numbing and boring. The scenes that exist outside of this setting don’t meaningfully diverge from it either. (Benjamin Kracun’s lighting is often too flat and over-lit for Fargeat’s visual composition to introduce dramatic dimensions).
Unfortunately, The Substance lacks meaningful psychological exploration too. Its inability to sink its teeth into any one idea stems from a surface-level approach to nearly all of them. Like with her debut feature, Revenge, Fargeat’s subversion of the “male gaze” is limited to most peripheral reading of what is, at least in academia, a vital analytical concept. Spend enough time in online film circles, and you might see the “male gaze” reduced merely to an objectifying lens with men behind the camera, or worse, to the blanket aestheticization of the female form, which entirely ignores the origins of the term (popularized by feminist theorist Laura Mulvey) as a foundational psychological framework rooted in the works of Freud and Lacan.
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The concept of “gaze,” in its original meaning, certainly involves the pleasures of looking, but it also goes far beyond this act. At the cost of being reductive — though you can read Mulvey’s essay for yourself — it also wrestles with an audience’s projection and identification, and though it uses visual fetishization as its fulcrum, isn’t necessarily limited by who is behind or in front of the camera. If anything, The Substance often fails to confront or even account for these notions of cinematic “gaze” in their totality, because it isn’t interested in the dynamic between Elizabeth and Sue, whether they’re meant to be distinct beings or parts of a single whole.
Sue, although she has corporeal form, is entirely a spectral projection. She’s a fantasy of both men’s desires and Elizabeth’s desires. But in crafting this specific sci-fi premise, Fargeat too often separates them, nullifying her own drama in the process. She allows for little (if any) actual confrontation of Sue’s creation as an act of embodying the idea of gaze, or cinematic fetish, let alone aesthetically refuting it. Elizabeth may be afforded the chance to reckon with the deterioration of her own physical form, but her fantasies and eventual contempt for Sue are never fully allowed manifest as self-contempt — a key element in any story about the psychology of beauty standards, and the ways in which male-dominated society forces women to see themselves.
The camera, though it reflects the way some phantom third party might capture Sue, seldom affords Elizabeth a personal gaze, an inward gaze, in a way that at least depicts her potential for autonomy, even if The Substance is reticent to grant her any in order to make its malformed point. Some have compared the film to past Cannes Palme d’Or winner Titane by Julia Ducournau, which is a far superior film, but the gulf between the two is illustrative. Where Ducournau’s biomechanical transformations both reflect and deepen its characters, Fargeat simply uses metamorphosis as an extension of that which is already self-evident through plot and performance, resulting in an operatic climax that, while innovative in its practical execution, lacks truly transgressive flair.
Fargeat’s midnight body horror stylings may have struck a chord with the Cannes jury — perhaps as a novelty in a competition lineup filled with straightforward dramas — but its style has no real substance.
The Substance opens in theaters Sept. 20.
UPDATE: Sep. 18, 2024, 4:58 p.m. EDT The Substance was reviewed out of Cannes. This review was first published on June 3, 2024, and has been updated to reflect theatrical availability.
