In the Demi Moore/Margaret Qualley led The Substance from writer/director Coralie Fargeat, former It-girl Elisabeth Sparkle searches for a way to revitalize her career in an industry (and a world) that sees little value in women of a certain age. Consequently, she opts into a mysterious medical treatment which promises the possibility of living part-time as a “better” version of yourself. The issues that the film grapples with have less to do with the desire for beauty and youth than they do with the desire for a purpose and for a place within any given community. If our society defines the value of beauty or fame in a particular way, it also defines the way we value individuals in a vast number of other ways—including the ways in which we see ourselves as worthy or unworthy of other peoples’ time, or of their love.
The Substance sets out to create its critique within the context of a highly stylized futuristic/vaguely 1980s world in which television ratings have the power to make or break stardom, and where the men are smart enough to rule the world yet too dumb to do any real harm. This is the kind of reality that comes to revolve around a provocatively-shot daytime workout program featuring Margaret Qualley and a squad of backup dancers in shimmery leotards. It’s a reality that only works through an enormous collective suspension of disbelief on the part of the audience.
Perhaps the greater mistake than underestimating a character’s intelligence is that of underestimating the audience’s intelligence. After accidentally overhearing a crude remark about her age while hiding in the stall of a men’s bathroom, Moore’s Elisabeth proceeds to stare at herself in the mirror, the pain she feels evident on her face—not anger, but a kind of hurt that suggests these words have truly wounded her, or that she’s somehow shocked to have heard them expel from the lips of the creepy network executive played by Dennis Quaid. As if she isn’t already profoundly aware—as if we as an audience aren’t already profoundly aware—of the ways in which age defines her value. As if this man’s words are somehow a shock to the system rather than the straw that broke the camel’s back. Proceeding in this manner makes us inclined to see Moore’s character as too shallow and dimwitted, and leads us to believe that the film thinks the same of us as an audience.
A generous take suggests that the film is at its most profound when it centers this plight of self-hatred, and the highs and lows of living with a self one recognizes as both precious and monstrous. We cannot maintain the things we love most about ourselves without also contending with the things we hate—the parts we would kill if we could. And though we understand the problematic nature of wanting to achieve any kind of perfection, we cannot seem to separate these intellectual thoughts from the desires so thoroughly ingrained within our hearts and minds that they can never seem altogether wrong.
At its most trite, Fargeat uses food as a blatant tool through which Elisabeth punishes Qualley’s Sue alter-ego. The film steers even further off the rails of any possible nuanced satire, and we as an audience have no choice but to laugh at the characters rather than with them. Here, The Substance commits its most damaging unkindness; the characters no longer feel like people, only stereotypes, and the humanity that might have existed untapped beneath their surface seems to have dried up completely. The film fails to take into account that we understand ourselves and our contradictions more than we let on—even if we’re incapable of externalizing or putting into words these complex emotions and desires, we do, on some level, comprehend that the things we want and the things we need are often at odds with each other. The use of food as a weapon functions as a grave miscalculation on the part of the filmmakers; it reduces Elisabeth’s wants and needs to something so shallow and unoriginal that it leaves us feeling very little true remorse for either of the characters.
Complaints aside, the elaborate and labor-intensive process of implementing the substance treatment makes the whole experience feel all the more emotionally draining because the effort and sacrifice required to live in this way is so intentionally significant and time-consuming. The act of heaving your own limp, lifeless body around, sewing up the flesh of your own back, or extracting and injecting various fluids in order to properly complete the transition from one body to another is no small matter—you have to really want it. You have to believe that the only thing worse than going through this kind of horrific transformation every seven days is the unimaginable alternative: aging slowly into obscurity.
The theater fills with laughter as the film takes that final step off the diving board and straight into the deep end of self-deprecation. (Musical themes pulled from Vertigo as well as 2001: A Space Odyssey make more explicit the vague cinematic references woven throughout in a seeming act of self-parody.) And though the film’s concluding sequence does a disservice to any of the more nuanced ideas at work under the film’s surface, it will certainly deliver an entertaining and perhaps unforgettable time at the cinema (or the living room—whichever comes first).
The movie opens with Elisabeth Sparkle’s name being carved into stone—or, rather, installed as a star onto the Walk of Fame—her immortality seemingly cemented into the Hollywood history books. But ultimately, even this glamorous act of self-preservation proves futile. Time weathers this slab of concrete until it slowly loses its shine; to passersby it begins as a monument to talent and beauty and winds up the equivalent of a desecrated tombstone. As The Substance fails to recognize, simply pointing a finger at the generations’ worth of misguided ideals and values perpetuated by Hollywood, or society at large, is not enough—we see the damage caused by these entities plain as day. Reducing the complex and ever-shifting dialogue on the ways in which women are and are not allowed to remain relevant to society as they age into a vehicle for mass entertainment isn’t inherently bad, but praising any piece of art as profound and revolutionary when it so blatantly refuses to endeavor a nuanced discussion about these issues is dangerous. At the end of the day, if The Substance has anything profound or meaningful to say, the weight rests upon its audience’s shoulders to do the work of unpacking, arranging, and aligning the dots that the film ultimately fails to connect.