I'm going to lead with this so no one gets mad at me later: of the thousands of you who read this article, maybe 20 will like this movie. This is one of those films critics fawn all over, saying that it's an audacious and strikingly original piece of work of the kind that comes out maybe once or twice a year, but then audiences think it's weird or gross or something in between. Personally, I thought it was easily (EASILY!) one of the best movies of the year and without question (WITHOUT QUESTION!) the most fun experience I've had with a crowd in a movie theater all year. But don't let that sway you. It's so weird and gross.
"The Substance" stars Demi Moore as Elizabeth Sparkle, a TV aerobics personality who overhears her disgusting boss (played by a mesmerizingly unappealing Dennis Quaid) saying how the network needs to hire someone younger, sexier and fresher to take over for her since he thinks Sparkle is too old to be attractive to audiences anymore. In a moment of fortuitous timing, Sparkle is given a flash drive advertising something called "The Substance," an injection program that will apparently create a younger, more beautiful, exceedingly perfect version of herself. Doesn't remind me of Ozempic at all.
MINOR SPOILERS: After picking up the injection from a sterile and uncomfortably creepy storage facility, Sparkle gives herself the shot and immediately starts writhing in pain. She falls to the floor, her back splits open and out crawls Margaret Qualley (giving a sneakily affecting performance, one of the best of her career). Here's how it works: Qualley (calling herself Sue) lives for seven days at a time, intravenously feeding a comatose Elizabeth Sparkle, who then switches with Sue on the seventh day and lives for a week as Elizabeth. Every week Sue and Sparkle trade places, with Sue getting to become rich, famous and desired by everyone and Sparkle getting to (ostensibly) relive her glory days. They don't share memories, but they're basically the same person. END SPOILERS.
Obviously, with a setup like that, it's a strange and genuinely unpredictable movie, but more than being equal parts dark comedy, body horror thriller and razor-sharp satire, the film is a primal scream of rage at the unfair and insane beauty standards that the world is run on, and the lengths society goes to in order to pit women against each other. The irony of having Demi Moore, who (while absolutely stunning in her early 60s), has certainly been chewed up multiple times by Hollywood's sex symbol industry, being replaced by Margaret Qualley, who is occupying the dead center of that world right now (in her late 20s) is a flawless meta-textual commentary on art imitating life.
So much of Moore's career has been built around how staggeringly gorgeous she is. But she's always been so much more than her beauty, layering her performances with so much intelligence and wit that she was never discounted as an actor. With movies like "Indecent Proposal," "Disclosure" and "Striptease," Hollywood very much played to Moore's sexuality, treating her more as a symbol than a person. Then she would counteract that by always being incredible.
Qualley, while having had a genuinely impressive career so far in projects like "Maid," "Drive-Away Dolls" and "The Leftovers," is still being hugely sexualized in things like "Donnybrook," "Stars at Noon" and "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood." Just as Moore before her, Qualley brings so much intelligence and grace to her work that it will be impossible for Hollywood to treat her like "just a pretty face." She's a movie star and this should be the movie that helps cement that.
Moore and Qualley's performances, along with Coralie Fargeat's fearless script and directorial style, cement "The Substance" as one of the finest movies of the year, for sure. But it also has exploding bodies, hundreds of gallons of spraying blood and gore, close-ups of people loudly chewing food with their mouths open, oodles of graphic nudity, bodies shifting and changing into nightmarish visions of monstrousness and a whole lot of goo. So very much goo. Yet Fargeat won Best Screenplay at Cannes, so believe me when I say that all of the goo, gore and grossness exists for a purpose: to get people to legitimately look at the way women are treated in society and the unfair weight of those standards. To look and to maybe make a change.
But also, even simply as a horror movie, it's so gross, fun and exciting. It's 140 minutes, and I could have kept watching it for another hour. If they gave audiences lil barfbags or something before a screening, it genuinely wouldn't surprise me (and it would be great marketing).
"The Substance" does it all: it's subversively feminist, a staggering dissection of vanity, a splatterfest that would play beautifully for a Halloween crowd and a visionary masterpiece that riveted me to my chair from the very first frame to the last.
Yet, you will probably hate it. So much. Most people don't like really gooey horror like I do. But if you can look past the violence and gore, "The Substance" has something important to say and does so in ways I've never seen before. There are moments of such staggering originality throughout that I was in awe of what I was watching. Over the closing credits I found myself loudly applauding — something I haven't done outside of a film festival setting since the first time I saw "Pulp Fiction."
F**king cinema, man. It's the best.