The Substance

Watching The Substance, I was reminded of four other films. The first three are 2012's Helter Skelter, 1997's Perfect Blue, and 2014's Starry Eyes. All three are horror or horror-adjacent movies that look at self-esteem, body issues, the uncaring omnivorous maw of the entertainment industry, and the pressures and price of fame for women, all from different perspectives. Starry Eyes is about an aspiring young actress trying to break into the industry, Perfect Blue is about a pop star transitioning to more serious fare, and Helter Skelter is the modeling industry. They are excellent movies all, two of them (Starry Eyes and Perfect Blue) being my pick for best horror movies of their respective years. But aside from sharing themes, they also share a perspective, that of their protagonists being young. All three are built around women that haven't even hit 30 yet. As much as Hollywood is known for being a meat grinder and a soul-crusher, its approach towards the not-young is even more callous, especially for women. As men get older, they get to be elder statesmen, distinguished, and still referred to as sex symbols. Women hit a certain age and they're grandmas. The goal of The Substance is to examine just that: what happens when the famous woman is of the dreaded middle age, when a whole generation knows them as someone their mom watched a long time ago, when they're no longer getting offers to be a guest on talk shows or do magazine covers. What does this ageism do to a woman's sense of self-worth, when she's told you're not young enough or hot enough to be marketable? What happens when your career has been built around being validated for your beauty, and the validation stops? The concept of the movie is that there is a drug that can create a younger clone of oneself that can go out and live that younger life for the older half. There are, of course, rules to the drug; one becomes comatose for seven days while the other lives, and they must switch every seven days like clockwork. The clone has to stabilize every day using spinal fluid extracted from the original party or they'll decompose. The two are supposed to be the same person, sharing thoughts and experiences. "You are one", the literature that accompanies the drug says. I mentioned in the intro that The Substance reminded me of four movies. That fourth is Gremlins. I love Gremlins. It's a holiday staple in my house. I am not the first person to say, though, that the rules and the logic of Gremlins make no sense whatsoever. If getting wet makes them multiply, why don't they start spawning when they walk through the snow, or when liquor gets spilled on them at the bar? When, exactly, is it no longer "after midnight"? Why does the light of a desk lamp bother them but not the light emanating from a TV? Director Joe Dante was so aware of how preposterous the ruleset was, he openly called it out in Gremlins 2. As fragile as Gremlins' logic is, though, the movie powers through these issues on sheer charm and the movie's dark comedy. How can I be bothered to ask questions about how a Gremlin knows what time zone they're in to calibrate midnight accordingly when they're launching Mrs. Deagle like a model rocket, or Kate stopping the movie cold to give totally unnecessary backstory about her dad that's both tragic and hilarious? The first of my major problems with The Substance is that, unlike Gremlins, it does not have the charm or the chaotic whimsy to power through the tangled nonsense of contradictions that are its rules. Why does the wound from the spinal tap not heal while the person is out cold? How does the 7-day span seem so perfectly timed between the intravenous food supply running out and the beginning of the clone deteriorating? Considering the instructions to this concoction are written on index cards in 72-point font in less than ten words apiece (seriously, IKEA relays instructions on how to build a cabinet better), how does anybody know exactly how to administer any of this? Since we never hear about any kind of financial transaction going on, how does this Substance company make money? These are just a smattering of the questions my wife and I asked as we were watching. And if those seem ticky-tack for you, sure, they are. But they pile up and point to logic gaps the writers apparently never considered, or just hoped the grotesque (but admittedly excellently executed) body horror and artsy cinematography would mask. It never did. There wasn't enough meat on this bone to chew on to distract from the glaring holes in the script. And that's before we get to the biggest hole: that the two are supposedly one. They seem to have continuity of thought when the script needs it, and discard it when it's an inconvenience. The movie never even tries to make so much as a passing reference to how or why they'd have one mind as two people -- I assume it's during the two-way intravenous hook-up they do at the end of the 7-day cycle, but there's no hint in the movie that that's what it is -- so it becomes this malleable plot device for whatever the moment needs. I know what the movie is trying to do, in that the younger version of Demi Moore's character Elisabeth is so drunk with the freedom of youth and the adulation she's getting that she doesn't want to go back to being older and unappreciated. But their survival is at stake, and that never seems to factor in. It would be fine if the Elisabeth and the clone, Sue, had separate minds, because then it could be the young trying to take the place of the old without thinking of the consequences, but we're told over and over and over and over that they don't, which means neither of them are thinking ahead. It makes Elisabeth/Sue come off as an idiot, and therefore unsympathetic. But I was still willing to look past all that. Despite the plot holes big enough to park a fighter jet in, that first hour and a half is still disturbing and tragic and horrific and visually beautiful. It wouldn't have gotten a very high score if it had ended around there, maybe 3 1/2 snowflakes, four if it had stuck a really cool ending, but I was still on board for a flawed but interesting movie. I appreciated that, for once, it was looking at these themes of beauty and fame and the uncaring beast that is Hollywood from a perspective that wasn't the young. I paused it after what I thought was the climactic showdown between young and old to use the bathroom, and I saw there was still 45 minutes left. I was confused. How was this not the climax? What more could it possibly do or say? I've seen The Substance given, among others, the label of satire. Dennis Quaid's repellant network executive is the loudest, most sexist, disgusting pig imaginable, and named Harvey, which I'm sure is a deliberate (and fitting) choice. There's a big talk show named The Show. Hosting a New Year's Eve show on The Network is considered the height of fame. Everything presented in The Substance is a caricature of reality, simplified to its grossest and most ridiculous features. Unlike other movies that want to deliver a message through subtle storytelling, The Substance is intentionally overt. I'm fine with that approach to satire ... in principle. The Substance wants to rub your face in the commentary, to beat you into submission with it like a boxer punching you in the face. But it can be effective. The tone has to be locked in, though, and for that first 90ish minutes, it is. The satire is meant to horrify, to repel, to shock. But then the last 45 minutes happens. The tone doesn't shift, it reverses course. The Substance stops being horrific and becomes a campy B-movie akin to Basket Case or Freaked. Satire becomes silly. Overt becomes on-the-nose. Caricatures become crude sketches. Any semblance of commentary or horror is thrown out the window for a climax so over the top, so divorced from even the movie's warped version of reality, it's impossible to watch without re-enacting the Picard "what the hell is this" meme. I could feel my appreciation for the movie slipping away with every passing moment of the last 45 minutes. At one point, I made a comparison to a running gag on The Simpsons, about how the town is willing to break out into an angry mob. When a movie can be compared to something like that, and it is unfavorable, something has gone terribly, horribly wrong. Shortly before it ended, my wife said if it ended up all a dream, she was going to be upset. When it did end, she said "that movie really left a bad taste in my mouth". I think I somehow would've preferred it do the it-was-all-a-dream ending. I think she would've too. It's a shame, too, because in a vacuum, Demi Moore is doing fantastic work here. There's a scene at the beginning of the movie, after she's been fired, where she stands naked in front of a mirror. She looks at her face, at her body. We, the audience, can see that Demi Moore is still a beautiful, desirable woman ... but her face tells a different story. She's been discarded by Hollywood, and that was how she measured her value. She doesn't say a word in this scene. All she does is look at herself, and the depression and lack of self-esteem and abundance of self-loathing are evident. This is mirrored later on when, after bumping into a high school classmate earlier, she decides to give him a ring and set up a date. She gets into a low-cut dress, puts on some stilettos and make-up, and starts to leave, and then catches sight of the billboard outside her apartment with her younger self. She goes back and tries to replicate the make-up her younger self is wearing. She tries to leave again, ignoring the billboard, but it's in her head now. She goes back in the bathroom and smears the make-up all over her face and ruining her hairdo. Again, all without saying a word, we see her go from appreciative and happy again to crushing self-doubt and self-loathing. She's had to settle for some balding nobody from high school decades ago to get that validation; her double is literally on billboards for how sexy she is. She doesn't go on the date. And Margaret Qualley does great work too, coming off as both a dewy-eyed ingenue when needed, a savvy, experienced celebrity when needed, all the while desperate for her week of life to not come to a stop. But it's all in service of a script that sets rules it disposes of its own rules and logic when convenience strikes, satire that's broad by design but shallow in content, and a tonally dissonant climax that squanders everything the previous 90 minutes has been building. This was one of my most anticipated movies of 2024, and as of this writing, it's turned out to be the worst movie I've seen for the year.