The Substance (2024)

An egg, a syringe, a doubling of the yolk. A walk of fame star, carefully laid, admired, then walked over, cracked, forgotten, bloodied with ketchup. The Substance shows its hand immediately, urgently. That’s part of the fun. 

The shine on Elisabeth Sparkle has worn off, Dennis Quaid insists. He fires her from a wet, sloppy pile of peel-and-eat head-on shrimp, in what was, for me, the most harrowing scene of the film.

In case that blow wasn’t heavy enough, Elisabeth gets into a car accident upon leaving her business lunch. At the hospital, the doctor wishes her a sad little “happy birthday,” before leaving the handsome young nurse to finish up. He tells her she’s a good candidate, which she receives with the same amount of tensely held confusion as she did her firing and accident. 

We learn very little about Sparkle as a person. Throughout the film she is an object. This isn’t a knock on Demi Moore’s performance, which is stellar. She exudes the regret and terror of a life as a commodity, embodying again what Roger Ebert once described as “the tension between a woman’s body and a woman’s ambition and will.” This is casting over character development at its finest, a person as a symbol as a character as a body. 

When she fishes the usb drive the hot nurse slipped her  out of the trash, we are given the thesis of the film as hands holding yellow clay roll a perfect sphere for one hand and a blob for the other.

“Have you ever dreamt of a better version of yourself? Younger? More beautiful? More perfect? One single injection unlocks your dna, starting a new cellular division that will release another version of yourself. This is the substance. You are the matrix. Everything comes from you and everything is you. This is simply a better version of yourself. You just have to share. One week for one and one week for another. A perfect balance of seven days each. The one and only thing not to forget: you are one. You can’t escape from yourself.”

Then, we watch her try anyway. 

Margaret Qualley’s Sue has a freshly-hatched naivety that makes it hard to determine if her actions are fueled by recklessness or revenge. She has nothing but contempt for Elisabeth from the beginning, either forgetting or ignoring the credo of The Substance. This conflict plays out slowly at first, often in ways that could have been resolved if we hadn’t lost track of the housekeeper who was vacuuming early in the film. As it builds, Elisabeth’s jealousy gnaws away at her as gourmet chicken carcasses and garbage pile up in her cavernous apartment, and Sue’s willful ignorance festers into a time bomb pustule. 

To writer/director Coralie Fargeat, vanity is an act of selfishness as much as self-loathing, a sleight of hand whose secrets, if revealed as they are in the film’s final act, are horrifying to behold. 

I was left feeling “satisfied by slightness.” (I think is a paraphrase of a Richard Hell poem I read in high school.) Fargeat has served us a resplendent feast of snacks. It’s better to lick the sugar and salt coating your fingers than to sit with the vast ocean of questions you’re left with. It’s a film that doesn’t plumb the depths because it’s only concerned with the surface. 

Halfway through watching The Substance (on my couch, lest you think I’m a monster), I got a FaceTime from my brother and my 18-month-old niece. When he pointed at the phone and asked, “who’s that?” she said, “a ghost.” An enthusiastic 3.5 out of 5 sacs of blood.

—Jaime Fountaine