Substance, The
Entry updated 20 June 2025. Tagged: Film.
Film (2024). Working Title Films, Blacksmith, A Good Story. Written and directed by Coralie Fargeat. Cast includes Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley and Dennis Quaid. 141 minutes. Colour.
On her fiftieth birthday, former film star Elisabeth Sparkle (Moore) is unceremoniously dismissed from her job as a fitness guru on a morning television show by sleazy boss Harvey (Quaid), who is looking for someone "young and hot". On her way home she crashes her car, and in hospital is given by a nurse a flash drive advertising a product called "The Substance", which promises a "younger, more beautiful, more perfect" version of oneself (see Rejuvenation). Elisabeth is intrigued and collects the serum from an out-of-the-way, unmanned warehouse. Injecting herself, she goes into convulsions and her back splits: there emerges an idealized version of her younger self (Qualley). Obviously there are rules, mainly that the two incarnations must switch every week without fail.
The younger version of Elisabeth, calling herself Sue, passes an audition to get the tv fitness job back. She has immediate success, and inevitably begins to enjoy her life, and resents having to switch back to Elisabeth. As she tries to find ways to stay in her younger body, ignoring the schedule for the injections, the older Elisabeth begins to age at an alarming rate when she does emerge. Sue lands the plum job of hosting the New Year's Eve broadcast, but on the day before runs out of serum and starts losing teeth and nails. The supplier informs her she must switch bodies to replenish the fluid, but Elisabeth is now so devolved she is almost unrecognizably deformed. She attempts to terminate the programme, but believing that she still has a chance being a star, stops part way through. Her two bodies are now conscious, and a furious Sue kills Elisabeth. Sue then begins deteriorating rapidly, and becomes an unrecognizable Monster, with Sue's face emerging from its side. She makes her way to the tv studio and attempts to make her stage appearance, causing panic in the audience. One audience member decapitates her, but she begins to revive, while drenching the audience in blood. Trying to make her way home, she eventually collapses into a mass of gore, on Elisabeth's Hollywood Walk of Fame star.
The Substance is a gleefully gruesome, thoroughly unsubtle, example of Horror in SF, and as such is very entertaining, though the effects and frequent movie homages swiftly overtake the somewhat cartoonish feminist Satire. The clear if overemphatic assault on the film and television industries' treatment of women, particularly once they reach middle age, gets somewhat lost in the gore and a perhaps paradoxical, presumably unintentional, equation of older women with monstrousness. The sleazy tv exec, whose name is probably intended to evoke associations with Hollywood producer and accused sex predator Harvey Weinstein, is particularly broadly drawn. The explicit evocations of other films include the expected references to David Cronenberg, Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick, and a blood-drenched finale that must be a deliberate homage to Carrie (1976). The Substance itself is something of a McGuffin, as there is no indication of what the company which produces it has to gain from it, given there is no mention of payment and the only other customer we see is by no means a glamorous Hollywood star. However, the mix of elegant visuals with dramatic close-ups, the ironic inversion of the male gaze in the lingering over Sue's body, and the finely maintained pacing over a long running time, make the film compelling despite its flaws. Fargeat won an award for best screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival, and a Bram Stoker Award in the same category. [CWa]
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