Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance has deservingly taken the world by storm – even if some of its more maximalist tendencies tend to overshadow its more substantial messages. It’s transitional setting makes it the perfect antidote to the annual ‘New Year, New Me’ guff the world is churning out this January 1st, too.
A few months ago, I criticised Longlegs (a film I actually loved) for being “so obsessed with subtext that it often loses sight of delivering satisfying text.” In many ways, I found The Substance to be the antithetical experience.
Writer and director Coralie Fargeat’s film was clearly conceived of as a biting critique on the ageism of Hollywood’s studio system, and the exploitative and gratuitous way that mainstream art commodifies and polices the bodies of women; but at a certain point becomes so concerned with fantastic gross-out sequences that it utterly neglects the ideas driving the fable. Like Longlegs, I still really enjoyed The Substance in spite of its over-indulgences; but on that basis, I didn’t feel it lived up to the hype a lot of its supporters were lobbing about.
The text
For anyone who has been hibernating under a rock somewhere on Mars, the plot sees Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) take drastic measures to remain relevant, when the Hollywood machine finally finishes masticating, and spits her out. Elisabeth is apparently an Academy Award winner, though it is never specified what kind of film that was for, or why at a certain point in her career she simply became a workout instructor on network television. When the network boss Harvey (Dennis Quaid, who somehow manages to be more grotesque than any of the practical gore that is to come) decides he needs to boost viewing figures by bringing in “someone younger”, Elisabeth is left at a loss.
With the words “at 50, well, it just stops” echoing through her mind, she exits the studio – trudging down a corridor adorned with younger versions of herself, when (as she sees it) she was still wanted and loved. A series of strange events lead her to obtaining a vial of the titular substance, with the promise that she can generate a young surrogate, through whom she can vicariously live another happy and exciting life.
After an excruciating birthing sequence in which a new human body somehow forces its way out from Elisabeth’s spinal collum, Sue (Margaret Qualley) is born. After stapling the comatose Elisabeth’s torso back together, Sue sets about getting her/their old job back. Picking up a sparkling leotard on the way to the studio, she auditions as Elisabeth’s ‘replacement’ for a gaggle of salivating men, and eventually Harvey himself – before being handed a new, ‘modern’ (intensely sexualised) workout show.
Everything seems to be going to plan – but the one drawback around which all the ensuing chaos hangs, is that Sue can only play surrogate for Elisabeth for seven days at a time. In the seven days where it is Sue’s turn to sleep naked on the bathroom floor, her would-be mother sinks deeper into depression, having facilitated the very process which led to her being dumped and forgotten by the studio, and having to see a younger, more energetic ‘her’ lap up the plaudits. When Sue wakes, she finds Elisabeth has spent the last week binging shopping network television, and eating leftovers from the fridge. At the same time, offers to break with Sue’s routine abound, leading to her to push those boundaries to disastrous costs.
As has been extensively warned by the backstreet dealer who supplied the substance in the first place, however, this is a symbiosis. If there is no balance between the pair, the extra time taken by one will inevitably be lost by the other – and Elisabeth begins waking in increasing states of decrepitude, eventually only able to hobble about as a balding hunch-back, 50-going-on-150. Despite repeated warnings from the dealer (who is oddly easy to contact, considering how often the illegal chemicals he provides must result in death) the pair are unable to re-align.
Spoilers ahead (though again, if you have social media, the wonderfully helpful algorithm will have shown you the nightmarish final form that is coming).
As the struggle escalates, a series of events transpire which enable both individuals to be conscious at once – leading to an absurd wire-fighting sequence reminiscent of Austin Powers in… Goldmember which the frail (yet conversely agile) Elisabeth ultimately does not survive. Without connecting to her originator, Sue’s own body begins to deteriorate, including an excruciating sequence in which her trademark smile disintegrates, tooth by tooth.
Panicking, Sue returns home, and uses the specifically-marked single-use equipment Elisabeth used to create her. It is a desperate attempt to create a new surrogate which she in turn can work interchangeably with – but as the many, many warnings would suggest, it results in something much more befitting of the messy situation. Elisabeth and Sue are reborn as a fabulously bulbous ‘Monstro Elisasue’, who attempts to host a major New Year’s event put on by Harvey – boasting that Sue is his greatest “creation” yet, and that he “shaped her” himself. When the latest version finally hobbles onto stage to his through her misshapen mouth that she is still Sue, and through a second gasping maw somewhere in her back, also Elisabeth, however, it is not something Harvey is willing to take credit for.
After a bloody fiasco at the party, the ‘monstro’ finally dissolves into a visceral puddle, staggering over Elisabeth’s star on the walk of fame. Her lone head manages to crawl off her mutated body for the last few steps, before bubbling away into an amorphous mess that street-sweepers will scoop up on the following morning.
In many ways, all this is glorious, and deserving of the adoration it has received. Moore is a revelation in her role, putting everything on the line for a fantastic performance, in which she perpetually runs from herself to ever more damaging ends.
At the same time, Quaid, who only took on the role of Harvey after the passing of the originally-cast Ray Liotta, is perfection as the clammy, tone-deaf executive. A gluttonous Id, perpetually salivating over the bodies of women in his employ, or stuffing his overflowing mouth with upsettingly moist shrimp, he is a monstrous illustration of the double-standards enshrined by patriarchal capitalism – that however old and disgusting a man with money gets, he never has to worry how others perceive his looks, even as he domineers and degrades the women around him to those ends.
Then, of course, there is the sheer excess of the production, which is Fargeat’s greatest weapon. As horrific as the gore is, however much it plays into the nightmares most of us have had (who hasn’t had the tooth-loss dream around a big milestone in our lives?), by the end of the film the way the camera perpetually fetishes the form of the women on screen has become just as off-putting. Every crotch-thrusting, bass-pounding workout sequence; every moisturised buttock shown in high-resolution slow-motion; every endless caressing of Sue’s body. It’s inflicted on us enough to start spelling out just how gross generations of sexually exploitative marketing have been. There’s so much that it begins to feel like being Alex in A Clockwork Orange, eyes held open while the synth-driven music and gratuitous exposure of flesh play half of the audience like a fiddle.
Unfortunately, that also counts against the film’s climax. Because so much of the film’s extremely streamlined storytelling, its simple dialogue and stripped-back cast, seem to have been built to make way for horrific and extended special effects sequences. And when the time comes for Sue to gush blood over every single member of an audience, before her bubbling and tumorous form finally gushes into a pile of entrails, it frankly doesn’t feel all that disgusting. It’s a bit underwhelming, even. That’s not to say it’s bad, because it is phenomenally executed – but when everything is delivered all the way to eleven, there is no way of turning the volume up again for what should be a crescendo.
The subtext
This doesn’t seem to have hurt The Substance, because everyone and their dog has gushed (less bloodily) over the film since it came out. And far be it from me to piss on anyone’s bonfire. I am thrilled that an indy horror like this is getting such near-universal plaudits.
But I do think that even in a film where there is so much of almost everything, there was still room for more. The film’s conclusion as it is – ironically for a film called The Substance – is a little insubstantial. There was more room to play with the subtext here, and leave us with a bit more to think about while still delivering all of the sickening highs and lows of the primary story.
That needs to go beyond references to other classic films, however impeccably those nods were. For example, there is the drowning fly in Elisabeth’s cocktail after she has been fired is a lovely nod to David Cronenberg’s infamous body-horror, which provides an ominous bit of foreshadowing about the ending. Similarly, Elisabeth’s crawling, detached head harks back to the iconic “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me” moment from John Carpenter’s The Thing – in which various people lose themselves in an all-consuming, amorphous extraterrestrial, just as Elisabeth utterly loses sight of herself and sacrifices her mind and body to the all-consuming ideology of the modern economy. And the late Sunset Boulevard sequence, in which Monstro Elisasue greets her ‘loving public’, reflecting a mind which has been broken under the ideological crux that the only form of ‘love’ which matters is the kind that sells tickets.
As well as those little moments work, however, there are not enough opportunities for the characters to tie into the subtext more directly. Elisabeth’s origins are unspecified; while Sue hints at coming from a small town in Indianna (which could be a lie, or a half-truth tied to where her originator hails from), we need something more. Is she from a family of previously successful yet unloving people, whose approval she is desperately chasing; or could she be from a dirt-poor background, and having achieved fame and fortune at the same time, she associates a loss of the former with a potential return to those past hardships? Whatever the case, there would be a discussion about how we got here; how someone who has become so despairingly loyal to a system which thanklessly exploited and abused them, that they would feed every part of themselves into the mulcher to remain part of it.
At the same time, Quaid’s obviously-named character of Harvey seems to get off a little lightly in terms of an examination. Fargeat is great at producing the text, producing an utterly detestable villain, but seems disinterested with how people like him have come to dominate Hollywood in such a way that their very presence is unmistakable shorthand for evil in a fable like this. Why – despite being a talentless hack who gets easily distracted by brightly coloured feathers or a fresh bowl of shrimp to disembowel – is this human carbuncle so indispensable to the network? Why is his job the one that is apparently so utterly safe, even when things go hideously wrong? Why have people like him continued to head up the studio system, even after his namesake was taken into custody? There are power dynamics at play here, important ones involving the class and gender issues which The Substance seems to concern itself with, but ultimately does not care to explore.
Even Harvey’s semi-comeuppance in this film seems underdelivered. For his many crimes, he gets drenched in someone else’s blood, and his New Year’s party is a bit of a flop. That’s it. If that is purposefully underwhelming, because he is so assured of his supremacy, there is no real flagging up of that fact – we are left to come up with our own conclusions, which isn’t inherently a bad thing, but it feels pointedly non-committal in a film that is otherwise so unashamedly unsubtle.
Happy New Year
With allllllll that being said, though, there is one way in which The Substance delivers wholesale as an exercise in subtext. Setting its huge climax on New Year’s Eve is a masterstroke.
As the years tick on by, most of us have noticed in some form, just how arbitrary the changing of a couple of numbers really is. Looking back on December 31st 2020, people were only too happy to celebrate the end of the year, as if it were a sentient demon that had inflicted the pandemic upon us itself. But the death of 2020 did not bring about the end of any of the existential threats that had emerged or worsened during its 12 months. In fact, despite having a vaccine that could have eliminated the virus with a bit more time, our determination that it was ‘over’ led to a total suspension of lockdown, and new, resilient and still-deadly strains, which we’re just expected to live with forever.
We were alive in the same world, with the same conditions and contradictions, but a different set of numerals stamped on it. And that desperate ignorance has led to a crisis that will never leave us.
Similarly, 2021 promised the end of Trump, as the Democrats promised us. That did not transpire either. Because the same crumbling society that yielded his first victory remained, its tumbling living standards unchallenged by a Biden administration that dissolved into bloodshed and farce. Now, having neglected that nightmarish past on the insistence of that administration, we find ourselves once more grafted to the gore-drenched homunculus that is a second Trump Whitehouse.
With its warning that unaddressed paradoxes and inequalities lead one way or another to a hellish synthesis, The Substance takes aim at this dangerous obsession with burying our past. Our attempts to sever ourselves from the realities of recent history, with some magical and imagined process – and to make-believe in a fresh start that in actuality hinges entirely on the state of what came before.
As 2025 gets under way, we can’t afford to keep investing in this voluntary amnesia. If we want things to improve, we have to love ourselves, past and present, enough to talk about the ways we have been hurt, and what caused them. And we cannot afford to fall into the trappings of simply treating every calendar change as a line drawn under every disaster (or success) that came before.
We have to stop shrinking from our past, or we will be doomed to keep living in a present best summed up as: New Year, Worse Me.