The Substance (2024)

Rated R for being the most R-rated movie ever.  It has nudity, sex, language, and just all of the body horror and gore imaginable.  If you are wondering if this movie has it, just take that thought and exploit it to its inevitable zenith.  It's so much.  There's hardly a moment where the movie doesn't show you something that is going to try and make you retch.  R.

DIRECTOR: Coralie Fargeat

I hate body horror.  I don't care for it.  Never have.  Never will.  There are movies that have body horror in them that are so good that I tend to allow the body horror to happen.  The Substance is not that movie.  Yeah, I get what Fargeat is doing with the body horror.  Yeah, I applaud the message that she is getting across.  I don't care.  The movie isn't very good and the body horror makes me absolutely loathe it.  Sometimes I look forward to writing blogs on movies I don't like because I tend to have a lot to say about them.  Not true with The Substance.  I just want to put this movie so far in my past that I never have to come back to it.

A lot of it comes from the direction and just the indulgence of it all. Now, I am probably in the minority of people who seems to dislike the trend of being as over-the-top as possible with our messaging.  Okay, I'm going to already dial it back.  I have to give the movie credit for having a heck of an idea.  Like with Fahrenheit 451, I like the idea...not the execution.  (See, if you disagree with me, you can now cite that I am one of the few people who doesn't like Fahrenheit 451.)  With Fahrenheit 451 and The Substance, if you told me the summary of both stories, I would lose my mind with how good of an idea that is.  I like that The Substance brutally talks about aging in Hollywood, especially when it comes to being a woman in a chauvinist industry.  And if Fargeat was pitching the movie to me, I'd also be in the camp of "hold nothing back."  It's just that I hate the way that this movie is filmed and it completely overstays its welcome.

Also --and I can't stress this enough --I don't like like body horror.

I'm one of the five people who hated Poor Things.  The Substance is this year's Poor Things.  But at least with Yorgos Lanthimos, I get that the aesthetic, while often not for me, was specifically controlled to give film the look that it has.  But with The Substance, a lot of it just looks...bad?  Honestly, it has a lot of music video vibes.  Maybe some of it comes from the fact that the movie knows that it is a horror movie.  A24 has held genre pictures up to a standard that The Substance doesn't really want to embrace.  I'm going to talk about Dennis Quaid's character a lot in this as my example because his character is a great representation of what is frustrating with the movie.  Quaid is meant to represent a lot of male Hollywood.  He lacks any depth.  He's meant to be disgusting.  We're meant to hate every second we're with him.  Fine.  But my hate is almost a Clockwork Orange conditioning hate for this character.  There are these cuts to him eating shrimp that are revolting.  The foley on it is disgusting.  So my association with him is one of physical revulsion.  Fine.  But it makes this villain so comical that he isn't actually real to me.  Do we not trust Dennis Quaid to be gross by himself?  I mean, he played a loving portrayal of Reagan.  I'm most of the way there.  But it's almost a distrust of its audience.  And, as such, the movie almost stays in this Adam West Batman place of camp.  The monsters of the world are physically disgusting, not real people.  The hard, but effective, route would be to build that character into ways where the villain thinks that he's the hero while we're all painfully aware that he's the bad guy.

Also, like Poor Things, there's that hypocrisy that the movie indulges in.  With both Poor Things and The Substance, there is this thread about how women are oversexualized and exploited for men's benefits.  To show this off, there are sexual scenes.  Okay.  But man, at one point, the commentary about exploitation becomes exploitation in itself.  Like, there's so much nudity in a sexual context, it kind of misses the point of what it is trying to condemn. 

There's also some really muddy messaging in the movie.  So one of the central conceits of the film is that Elizabeth Sparkle, played by Demi Moore, yearns for the spotlight again.  She is tempted by this product called "The Substance" that will give her a younger duplicate of herself.  In the case of Elizabeth, her duplicate is named "Sue."  Okay.  But the repeated message by this mysterious corporation is that Elizabeth and Sue are not two separate people.  Elizabeth is Sue and Sue is Elizabeth.  Too bad none of the movie reinforces this.  If anything, Sue and Elizabeth are mortal enemies (which is kind of cool when it comes to messaging.  Your older self hates your younger self and vice versa? Cool.) But Elizabeth seems to have no memories as Sue and Sue seems to have no memories as Elizabeth.  The closest metaphor that actually works --which seems to be completely ignored by the filmmakers --is one of parent and child.  Elizabeth births Sue and is angry at Sue for her success.  Do you understand how much more I would like the movie if that was the direction that the movie took?  But the stupid voice on the phone kept stressing, "You are one.  You need to get it together." 

See?  That's where things get really muddy.  But then we could just say that we're at war with the way that we view ourselves, coupled with the expectations of society.  So when Elizabeth, who is a gnarled old troll by the end, tries to kill Sue only to have Sue kill her, there's a natural resolution.  I could also live with the idea that Sue can't live without Elizabeth.  Okay.  That works with the whole metaphor of plastic surgery and being obsessed with image.  Maybe the younger, hotter version that you've come back to is empty without the older version.  Cool.  I like that.  But then the movie reminds itself that it's a horror movie and needs to be excessive.  It's in this moment that the whole allegory falls apart and goes into this monster machine that bleeds over everything.  See?  Genre doesn't have to be that.  Jordan Peele kind of proved that you can make a horror movie that has (heh) substance without being a bad Dead Alive knock off.  Like, I kept on looking at the runtime and I wondered how the movie was going to maintain its narrative considering that it told its story pretty early on.  That last act is a complete detraction from what little goodwill the first two acts had earned.  The last part is just meant to be fun.  But if you don't find that kind of stuff all that fun, what happens?  

I do have to point the finger at myself a bit though.  I do like Evil Dead 2.  I don't deny that.  A lot of the visuals in this movie probably owe a lot to Evil Dead 2.  Why am I cooler with Evil Dead 2 than The Substance?  Maybe because there's a core of a movie here that means something.  This is a movie that overstays its welcome and then some.  It's afraid of being vulnerable.  It takes the easy route when the more subtle route would have had a greater impact.  Like Emilia Perez, it's screaming at its audience when talking to them would have had a greater impact.  I really didn't like this movie.  Part of it was that I was looking forward to it and it didn't deliver.  That's a bummer.  But at least this is one of those years where I got The Brutalist, so I can at least say that was good.