Film Review: The Substance (2024)

One of the greatest predicaments facing any contemporary filmmaker who aspires to become a household name is the necessity of being simultaneously hailed as a fresh and original voice by the snobbish, arthouse-oriented critical establishment while also demonstrating the ability to operate within commercial parameters. The horror genre has emerged as the most promising avenue for squaring this particular circle, offering a popular and relatively budget-friendly framework within which directors can indulge in baroque stylistic experiments while still winning over mainstream audiences. The result has been a proliferation of strange hybrids that blend horror with arthouse drama, and arguably the most successful and most notable of these efforts is The Substance, written and directed by French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat. Since its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival and the subsequent aggressive social media campaign, the film has become one of the more iconic cinematic artefacts of 2024.

Set in Los Angeles, the film follows Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), a once-popular Oscar-winning actress now reduced to hosting a daytime television fitness programme to make ends meet. She constantly assures herself and anyone within earshot that "she's got it", but time has caught up with her. On her fiftieth birthday, she cannot help but overhear the sleazy producer Harvey (Dennis Quaid) discarding her and expressing the need for a younger replacement. Devastated, Elisabeth's day takes a turn for the worse when she becomes involved in a spectacular car crash on her way home. Treated in hospital, she miraculously escapes physical injury, but a youthful-looking male nurse (Robin Greer) recognises that her problem is psychological and offers a solution in the form of a black-market drug simply called "the Substance". Elisabeth receives a set of cryptic instructions: the Substance will extract her DNA to create another, better version of herself, and she can take the identity of that improved doppelgänger. There is, however, a major caveat – both versions, original and copy, must be kept alive, and they must switch bodies in precise seven-day intervals.

Elisabeth decides to obtain the drug and follow the instructions. The result is the grotesque birth of an adult but much younger and more attractive woman (Margaret Qualley), who takes the name "Sue" and promptly answers a casting call at Harvey's studio to become Elisabeth's replacement. Sue is immensely beautiful and instantly popular, and she proceeds to enjoy sex, drugs, parties and all the other pleasures that had become inaccessible to Elisabeth. Yet this comes at a price: any delay in feeding or switching causes damage to Elisabeth's body, and subsequently makes Sue sicker as well. Elisabeth attempts to sabotage Sue by deliberately gorging on junk food, making her younger self ill, while Sue retaliates by accelerating Elisabeth's transformation into a monstrosity. The conflict between the two reaches its culmination during a New Year's Eve show in which Sue, beginning to feel the effects of Substance abuse, is the main star.

The Substance is easiest to describe as a combination of body horror and black comedy satirising Hollywood's obsession with looks and eternal youth. This is Fargeat's second feature film, and because her debut, the 2017 action thriller Revenge, had strong feminist overtones, The Substance was widely interpreted as a feminist film – a reading that certainly helped endear it to the generally left-leaning critical establishment. The character of Harvey, an obvious reference to Harvey Weinstein, was another nod in that direction.

For most viewers, however, the first thing to notice about The Substance is its tremendous sense of style. The film was made entirely in France, and Fargeat plays with elaborate sets, meticulous static-shot composition and, most importantly, bright, saturated colours that make the film stand apart from the typically desaturated palette of Hollywood blockbusters.

Another important asset is the cast. Fargeat had to be careful with casting because the film deals with a subject most actresses find disturbing – ageing and the transient nature of fame. Thankfully, both Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley rose to the challenge. The film not only required immense effort to portray two versions of the same character but also demanded nudity. Moore, who famously posed naked while pregnant earlier in her career, was apparently comfortable performing those scenes at the age of sixty, just as Qualley was at half that age.

The film also required extensive makeup and prosthetic effects, and Fargeat uses them effectively to portray the grotesque transformations that Elisabeth and Sue undergo. There are also plenty of cinematic references to film classics, both in terms of visuals and, at times, soundtrack – most notably the use of Bernard Herrmann's score from Vertigo.

Yet Fargeat, for all her talents, apparently cannot resist the temptation to overindulge in style. The result is a film in which many scenes are overlong and repetitive, contributing to a running time of nearly two and a half hours. This is unusual for a horror film, but these days such length confers "arthouse" credentials upon stories that would be much more effective in a shortened form.

Another issue is the lack of originality. The main premise is based on something Fargeat used in her acclaimed 2014 short science-fiction film Reality+, which was later expanded into an episode of the Black Mirror anthology series and in many ways inspired the premise of The Substance. Hardcore cinephiles will easily recognise the premise or various visual cues being used before, sometimes in much better films. The most obvious influence is John Frankenheimer's 1966 body-switch science-fiction classic Seconds – a film that explores the fantasy of reinvention as a desperate, ultimately futile escape from stagnation. There are also echoes of the much inferior 1992 fantasy black comedy Death Becomes Her, which similarly satirises Hollywood's obsession with eternal youth through a magical elixir. The body-horror elements are borrowed from 1980s classics such as David Lynch's The Elephant Man, which explores aesthetic qualities of ugliness, and David Cronenberg's The Fly, which established a new subgenre of body horror through its depiction of a scientist's gruesome transformation into an insect-human hybrid.

The plot, in truth, is very thin. Fargeat's script never bothers to explain who, why or how the Substance is distributed, and the resolution is quite predictable, opting for a blend of melodrama, irony and spectacle that combines the blod-splattering finale of Brian De Palma's Carrie with the tragic grandeur of Sunset Boulevard. The character of Dennis Quaid is poorly written, and the otherwise capable actor can do little but ham it up as a caricature, with Fargeat directing his scenes in a surreal, off-putting manner that feels out of sync with the rest of the film.

The Substance is an interesting but imperfect film that represents – pun intended – a triumph of style over substance. It dazzles the eye, provokes thought about uncomfortable subjects, and showcases committed performances from its leads, but it is ultimately too long, too derivative, and too enamoured of its own stylistic flourishes to achieve the greatness to which it so clearly aspires. For those willing to overlook its flaws, it offers a memorable, if exhausting, cinematic experience. For everyone else, it shows dangers of mistaking visual panache for genuine artistic depth.

RATING: 6/10 (++)

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