I saw The Substance this past weekend, and I am sorry to report I didn’t really like it. Not that it was bad, exactly, but I don’t think it was effective. At least, if it was trying to tell the story I was expecting. SPOILERS AHEAD.
From the marketing, I was going in for a story about a woman whose fear of losing her value as she aged leading her to destroy everything of ANY value about herself. I was preparing myself for this film to, for lack of a better term, trigger the hell out of me, or at least give me big feelings. This is, in theory, a horror movie for me, exploring ideas that I VERY SPECIFICALLY find scary. My fear of aging and becoming ugly is well-documented, after all. But it really didn’t work for me, because I don’t feel like it captured any of what that fear feels like.
To begin with, it is not a subtle film. That’s not necessarily a criticism, but I will say I did not care for it. Anytime a character was remembering something that just happened to them, the moment would be superimposed right on top of things, like it didn’t expect you to make the connection. The misogynist male executive was depicted as loud, gross, and over the top as possible— from having him rant in so many words about how old women sucked, to yucky closeups of him chomping on shrimp. And that’s to say nothing of how over the top the voyeurism of the camera was on Margaret Qualley’s body. I was kind of hoping to see a depiction of pervasive, insidious anti-aging bias is woven into the world, particularly for women, particularly for women in the limelight. It just seemed a bit too easy to have a very yucky man straight-up tell Demi Moore that fifty is too old— especially when she’s so beautiful that she’s able to pass for younger than fifty when she’s actually sixty-two.
Again, I get that this extremity and exaggeration was a deliberate stylistic choice. But to my sensibility, when you create a fantasy of a real experience, you are trying to use the fantastical elements to express true ideas in a manner that makes them stand out even more strongly than they do in life. So it wasn’t that I was expecting this lurid sci fi horror extravaganza to realistically depict the mundane indignities of getting older. But I felt like the representations should be clearly alluding to emotions and experiences that were recognizable enough to evoke horror. But I only saw one moment, maybe one and a half moments, that felt like genuine expression of the struggle of aging.
The first and realest was when her growing insecurity over her appearance in comparison to Sue while getting ready for her date led her to second-guess herself so badly, she not only ruined her appearance, she collapsed entirely. As someone who has wiped off fifty percent of all lipstick she’s ever applied in her entire life, because of staring in the mirror and genuinely being unable to tell if it looks good or clownish— as someone who has wondered if I ought to just get that tiny little poke of flesh at the corners of my jaw “taken care of” before anybody but me starts to notice— I felt that.
The only other one that came close, and to me used the extreme fantastical exaggeration effectively for once, was when her trollishly twisted self stood beside the portrait of herself in her glory days. The comparison— of having been perfect once, having known what it was like to have been beautiful, but intensely aware of how fleeting it is —shivered me, because it evoked a terror that runs genuinely deep. I’ve been lucky enough to have kept my figure up to this point, but my face has visibly aged, losing some roundness around the jawline and loosening up just a tiny bit at the jowls. Even as I exult over the fact that I can still wear a bikini I bought when I was nineteen, the changing shape of my face reminds me that it’s all just a matter of time before it all goes away. No amount of beauty you once had protects you from what’s to come.
It also didn’t manage to capitalize on its compelling premise. The idea was that you use a medical procedure to make a younger hotter self, and trade off weeks of getting to go out and live life. When the selves cannot split time and resources equally and become jealous of each other, they destroy one another. But I think they just didn’t build it out right. In The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Jekyll would maintain consciousness when he became Hyde; he had the same memories and awareness, just like everything about himself and his personality were different. He felt Hyde’s experiences, he knew what Hyde did, because— as was ultimately the point of the book —Hyde WAS him. In The Substance, main self Elisabeth and alternate self Sue shared no consciousness at all, and under most circumstances weren’t even able to meet each other. It wasn’t really like having an alternate self; it was more like having a child you had no relationship with, and no ability to develop one.
It really made it hard for me to see what the advantage of the process was— you miss out on half of your life, you don’t get to personally enjoy any of the benefits of being the young hot self, and you don’t even have any ability to develop love or affection for the other self to make you enjoy their success vicariously. The company that makes the Substance has to continually remind Elisabeth and Sue that they are one, but… they don’t feel that way, to us or to them, because they’re really not. The process really doesn’t facilitate anything that would make them feel that they are.
It made me wonder if maybe it was more a story about jealousy, or living vicariously through your child. But that lack of relationship between them left a lot of even that premise on the table.
I also didn’t quite understand the purpose of the extremely sexualizing camera angles constantly used on Sue. At first, I thought they were trying to establish the excitement of suddenly having an amazing body, and delighting in checking it out. That made sense to me. (Although for the record, if Margaret Qualley is hotter than Demi Moore, it’s only by the tiniest bit, which is saying something since Qualley is 29 and Moore is 62.) But they persisted with the objectifying closeups on her until almost the end of the movie. We get several sequences of her dancing shot like porn movies, with a particular focus on her ass. As I said, this is not a subtle movie, but after a while I didn’t get what it was trying to say by carrying it out so persistently. We knew by that point that she was hot, so… what? I thought eventually they might use the extreme objectification to make her body seem grosser and grosser, the way human physicality can become when you chop it up visually and get too close on the details, but by the time they were ready to do that, they actually started making her body itself fall apart. So it honestly started to feel like fan service to me, which seemed very out of place in a movie like this. If anybody has an idea of what they think it was trying to accomplish, I’d love to hear it.
There was also one element that cracked me up— the intense masculine voice that narrated the commercial for the Substance also was the one who answered the phone anytime Elisabeth and Sue called the company to complain. Poor guy, he probably auditioned for an acting gig and got stuck with a customer service job!
From the marketing, I was going in for a story about a woman whose fear of losing her value as she aged leading her to destroy everything of ANY value about herself. I was preparing myself for this film to, for lack of a better term, trigger the hell out of me, or at least give me big feelings. This is, in theory, a horror movie for me, exploring ideas that I VERY SPECIFICALLY find scary. My fear of aging and becoming ugly is well-documented, after all. But it really didn’t work for me, because I don’t feel like it captured any of what that fear feels like.
To begin with, it is not a subtle film. That’s not necessarily a criticism, but I will say I did not care for it. Anytime a character was remembering something that just happened to them, the moment would be superimposed right on top of things, like it didn’t expect you to make the connection. The misogynist male executive was depicted as loud, gross, and over the top as possible— from having him rant in so many words about how old women sucked, to yucky closeups of him chomping on shrimp. And that’s to say nothing of how over the top the voyeurism of the camera was on Margaret Qualley’s body. I was kind of hoping to see a depiction of pervasive, insidious anti-aging bias is woven into the world, particularly for women, particularly for women in the limelight. It just seemed a bit too easy to have a very yucky man straight-up tell Demi Moore that fifty is too old— especially when she’s so beautiful that she’s able to pass for younger than fifty when she’s actually sixty-two.
Again, I get that this extremity and exaggeration was a deliberate stylistic choice. But to my sensibility, when you create a fantasy of a real experience, you are trying to use the fantastical elements to express true ideas in a manner that makes them stand out even more strongly than they do in life. So it wasn’t that I was expecting this lurid sci fi horror extravaganza to realistically depict the mundane indignities of getting older. But I felt like the representations should be clearly alluding to emotions and experiences that were recognizable enough to evoke horror. But I only saw one moment, maybe one and a half moments, that felt like genuine expression of the struggle of aging.
The first and realest was when her growing insecurity over her appearance in comparison to Sue while getting ready for her date led her to second-guess herself so badly, she not only ruined her appearance, she collapsed entirely. As someone who has wiped off fifty percent of all lipstick she’s ever applied in her entire life, because of staring in the mirror and genuinely being unable to tell if it looks good or clownish— as someone who has wondered if I ought to just get that tiny little poke of flesh at the corners of my jaw “taken care of” before anybody but me starts to notice— I felt that.
The only other one that came close, and to me used the extreme fantastical exaggeration effectively for once, was when her trollishly twisted self stood beside the portrait of herself in her glory days. The comparison— of having been perfect once, having known what it was like to have been beautiful, but intensely aware of how fleeting it is —shivered me, because it evoked a terror that runs genuinely deep. I’ve been lucky enough to have kept my figure up to this point, but my face has visibly aged, losing some roundness around the jawline and loosening up just a tiny bit at the jowls. Even as I exult over the fact that I can still wear a bikini I bought when I was nineteen, the changing shape of my face reminds me that it’s all just a matter of time before it all goes away. No amount of beauty you once had protects you from what’s to come.
It also didn’t manage to capitalize on its compelling premise. The idea was that you use a medical procedure to make a younger hotter self, and trade off weeks of getting to go out and live life. When the selves cannot split time and resources equally and become jealous of each other, they destroy one another. But I think they just didn’t build it out right. In The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Jekyll would maintain consciousness when he became Hyde; he had the same memories and awareness, just like everything about himself and his personality were different. He felt Hyde’s experiences, he knew what Hyde did, because— as was ultimately the point of the book —Hyde WAS him. In The Substance, main self Elisabeth and alternate self Sue shared no consciousness at all, and under most circumstances weren’t even able to meet each other. It wasn’t really like having an alternate self; it was more like having a child you had no relationship with, and no ability to develop one.
It really made it hard for me to see what the advantage of the process was— you miss out on half of your life, you don’t get to personally enjoy any of the benefits of being the young hot self, and you don’t even have any ability to develop love or affection for the other self to make you enjoy their success vicariously. The company that makes the Substance has to continually remind Elisabeth and Sue that they are one, but… they don’t feel that way, to us or to them, because they’re really not. The process really doesn’t facilitate anything that would make them feel that they are.
It made me wonder if maybe it was more a story about jealousy, or living vicariously through your child. But that lack of relationship between them left a lot of even that premise on the table.
I also didn’t quite understand the purpose of the extremely sexualizing camera angles constantly used on Sue. At first, I thought they were trying to establish the excitement of suddenly having an amazing body, and delighting in checking it out. That made sense to me. (Although for the record, if Margaret Qualley is hotter than Demi Moore, it’s only by the tiniest bit, which is saying something since Qualley is 29 and Moore is 62.) But they persisted with the objectifying closeups on her until almost the end of the movie. We get several sequences of her dancing shot like porn movies, with a particular focus on her ass. As I said, this is not a subtle movie, but after a while I didn’t get what it was trying to say by carrying it out so persistently. We knew by that point that she was hot, so… what? I thought eventually they might use the extreme objectification to make her body seem grosser and grosser, the way human physicality can become when you chop it up visually and get too close on the details, but by the time they were ready to do that, they actually started making her body itself fall apart. So it honestly started to feel like fan service to me, which seemed very out of place in a movie like this. If anybody has an idea of what they think it was trying to accomplish, I’d love to hear it.
There was also one element that cracked me up— the intense masculine voice that narrated the commercial for the Substance also was the one who answered the phone anytime Elisabeth and Sue called the company to complain. Poor guy, he probably auditioned for an acting gig and got stuck with a customer service job!