Elizabeth Brady ’25 is a public policy major and an English minor, and she is a member of Alpha Chi Omega. She loves art, music and movies. Email her at eabrady@wm.edu.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own.
In 1972, Susan Sontag published “The Double Standard of Aging,” an essay that wrenched to the foreground the unspoken but ubiquitous beliefs we have about aging. She describes the anxiety women bring to the project of self-maintenance and self-preservation in the face of visible aging, and she clarifies for us the patriarchal underpinnings that create this anxiety. Right now, 24-year-olds are tweeting about “girlhood,” 13-year-olds are buying anti-aging retinol cream and we are still doing the thing where we point at a picture of someone like Jennifer Anniston and say, “can you BELIEVE that SHE’S 55!!!!”
Coraline Fargeat’s “The Substance” lives squarely in this world, where women grip white-knuckled to their youth, where we are forever bracing for and running from the fate of being old. Our main character, Elisabeth Sparkle, is played by the lovely Demi Moore. She takes a black-market drug (the titular “substance”) and splits herself in two, creating a younger (assumably hotter) alter-self, Sue, played by the also lovely Margaret Qualley. The two trade off each week, leaving the “inactive” body to lay on the cold tile floor of Sparkle’s stark-white bathroom until their turn with sentience. From the get-go, you feel the precarity of their arrangement. The body horror, needles and scary buying-of-black-market-drugs all give the feeling that this could come apart at the seams at any second.
There is a physical, grotesque, body-horror tension as Sue starts stealing time, leaving Elisabeth more and more disfigured, which feels really similar to the present, comprehensive anxiety I see a lot of women experiencing as a reaction to our own aging. In the same way that Elisabeth and Sue precariously balance their time, women must find a way to delicately navigate the tension between their imagined, projected, ideal self and the self they feel and fear just around the corner.
This kind of analysis makes “The Substance” sound really serious and grim. It’s not. It’s brightly colored, highly stylized, goofy and outlandish. It’s weird and satirical and fun to look at (except when you’re watching Qualley extract herself from a bleeding gash down the middle of Moore’s back and then sew it back up). Scenes of candy-colored leotards, art-deco color-blocked hallways and Elisabeth’s insane bachelorette-pad apartment zip by, coupled with intense and all-consuming sound design that sometimes feels like evil ASMR.
A lot of the one-star Google reviews for this movie talk about the “excessive nudity” in it. Granted, we do see a lot of Qualley and Moore, and there may be a 1:1 ratio between their clothed versus not-so-clothed screen time. However, the nudity feels clinical, entirely unsexy. Even in shots where Sue is dancing and gyrating in tiny leotards, it feels cold and dispassionate, unsexed through the calculating and capitalist channel-executive eye.
I saw this movie with my roommate, and at the about two-thirds mark, we simultaneously turned to one another and agreed that we kind of loved this movie. It’s weird and loud and stupid in a smart way. It’s really cool to look at, it has a great sense of itself and it’s easy to get lost in. Or it was all of these things. Almost exactly after we had our mind-meld, everything kind of fell apart. The last 20-30 minutes of “The Substance” do not entirely undo the first two acts, but they do weaken them. It really does feel like Fargeat had money to burn and wanted to spend it all on some narratively empty gore.
Some movies go off the rails at the end after the steady and artful building of tension. You can feel the movie pulling at the leash, and the snap is a catharsis. This film’s descent into madness feels half-baked and hammy, unearned after the snappy, sterile pacing that proceeds it. It feels like the wrong kind of relief, discordant and mismatched from the rest of the film. It also goes on for way, way too long and burns itself out, pressing you with beat after beat after beat.
“The Substance” is also an incredibly gooey, squelchy, fleshy, viscous movie. I ate most of a big bag of Twizzlers during this movie, the Pull’n’Peel kind. By the end of the movie my stomach hurt really bad, only partially the fault of the Twizzlers.