Week #5: The Substance delivers a gut punch, though it’s not entirely novel
To say The Substance is subtle would be an understatement. Its in-your-face messaging is far from novel and hits like a ton of bricks. While I’d usually mind the lack of subtlety, here, the execution, which is crafted to make audiences cringe and feel uneasy, makes the movie impactful.
After watching this, I was reminded of Poor Things (2023), a film also set in an unusual world. What makes both of these interesting isn’t so much what they say, but how they say it. Although Poor Things certainly had more ideas in it.
In Poor Things, we follow Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), a woman implanted with an infant’s brain, as she engages with the world around her. Bella is an unhinged adult woman who finds herself in the unique position of not feeling limited by society’s ideas of right or wrong.
Meanwhile, in The Substance, Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) is dealing with quite the opposite. She is the star of an aerobics TV show and is suddenly let go on her 50th birthday as she is considered too old to attract viewers.
Unlike Bella, Elisabeth is painfully aware of her environment and how she is perceived in it.
Her answer to this crisis comes in the form of a mysterious serum—the substance—that promises to turn people into better versions of themselves. Quite literally, after injecting it, a younger version of the user emerges from their own body.
This is where the film fully leans into its potential for gore. Elisabeth’s younger self, Sue (Margaret Qualley), takes her place on the TV show and it is her recklessness in not switching back—the user must switch between the old and young versions every seven days—that causes Elisabeth to age rapidly in strange ways, while Sue gets more youthful.
At its core, The Substance critiques beauty standards for women and the systemic pressures of the entertainment industry, where profit drives the relentless pursuit of youth.
While this message isn’t particularly groundbreaking, it’s Elisabeth’s loneliness and self-destructive tendencies that give context to her behaviour, helping the audience understand her more fully.
Elisabeth, sensitive, vulnerable and dangerously isolated, is driven by the same kind of obsession we see in Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) in Black Swan (2010). Where Nina’s pursuit was perfection, Elisabeth’s is validation, and both could do anything to achieve this, even at the cost of their own well-being.
Elisabeth’s only potential ally is a former classmate from school she nearly meets for dinner—an encounter that could have perhaps altered her path, but that never ends up happening.
I thought the execution of the film’s idea was both brilliant and revolting as it’s impossible to watch this movie and forget it. In that sense, it is a thought-provoking film. Even so, it was Elisabeth’s loneliness that lingers more than the beauty-standards commentary.
The film’s use of sometimes jarring camera angles was reminiscent of Requiem for a Dream (2000), another film about deeply troubled people trapped in cycles of self-sabotage, with no one to save them.
The Whale is another example that comes to mind. Incidentally, all films except Poor Things are directed by Darren Aronofsky, whose films mostly centre around people devoid of hope.
The Substance too, is in essence a pessimistic film that is asking society to re-examine the discourse on age and beauty.
It also makes me wonder if the film’s body horror is a desperate cry for help on this issue—one that no one will pay attention to unless it’s packaged in the extreme way it is in this case.
Coming up
In Week #6 of What I Saw Last Week: Wolfs directed by Jon Watts arriving October 20th.