(Warning: this post contains plot details about The Substance, and some spoilers. If you like to go into movies blind, don’t read this until you’ve seen it for yourself!)
Obviously, I had to go see The Substance immediately upon release because it touches on all of my favorite themes. I went to see it with a friend who is a therapist, and she mentioned that many of her clients had been bringing up the movie in sessions, and talking about how it traumatized them. I don’t know what it says about me and my friend, but we agreed that none of the ideas or even the way they were presented felt very much outside of our day-to-day lives, being women in our mid-thirties who live in a major metropolitan city. I spend far too much time thinking about my own aging process and possible procedures I might get in the future, when they would be best timed, implicit risk vs. external reward, financial investment, and on and on amen. I self-flagellate about the time I waste thinking about all of this crap - which only adds more layers of loathing.
The Substance was a good reminder to take a step back. Like Jemima Kirke replied recently during an Instagram AMA when a fan asked about dealing with body dysmorphia and insecurity: “I think you guys might be thinking about yourselves a little too much.” Touché! If you are over 21 and this movie brought up scary feelings or thoughts about your self worth as you get older for the first time, I am impressed with the boundaries you’ve been able to maintain between yourself and the societal pressures of our time. Keep doing what you’re doing. As for the rest of us . . .
Plastic surgery body horror is fairly well-tread ground at this point. Books like Aesthetica by Allie Rowbottom, Natural Beauty by Ling Ling Huang, and Rouge by Mona Awad all traffic in fictional economies that mirror our own pretty faithfully, albeit without our current limits of science and technology. New tech is the dystopian element in most of these books, and the same goes for The Substance. The procedure, in which the subject (Elisabeth Sparkle, played to the hilt by Demi Moore) injects herself with the titular solution, causes her to ‘birth’ a new, young, perfect version of herself (Sue, played by Margaret Qualley). Elisabeth’s original body then remains unconscious for 7 days, while brand new ‘Sue’ supplies it with liquid food and bops around living her best life. On the seventh day, Sue must ‘switch’ with Elisabeth by intravenously connecting their bodies, at which point Elisabeth wakes and lives as herself for seven more days. Subjects are warned profusely to make the switch in a timely manner, but the consequences of stealing additional time in one body are not expressly explained up front.
There’s a purposeful plot choice here: the new version of the subject and the original subject do not share a consciousness (ultimately, that would make things too easy and would not provide the kind of conflict the plot needs). I found the verbiage of ‘switching’ to be slightly inaccurate. Switching implies one brain, or soul, going between two bodies, and it becomes clear early on that Sue and Elisabeth have different brains and souls, even if their genetic source material is shared.
The first time Elisabeth wakes up as herself, post-substance, she is surprised to find evidence of a one night stand. She doesn’t have access to the version of herself that is Sue, what she was doing or thinking, or her emotional state. With that being the case, I did wonder why both characters had the exact same goal (starring in a fitness television show), but I chalked that up to some notion of shared ambition at the cellular level.
It’s hard to see the point of having a super sexy and hot version of yourself if you don’t get to have the experience of living inside it. Considering Elisabeth doesn’t have this explained to her in the D2C instructions that come with her activation kit, I assume this ‘catch’ is an allegory for the downsides that every procedure has, something you don’t often consider until you’ve already gone through with it.
You can lose a ton of weight quickly on Ozempic, but your face will lose fat too, making you look older, faster. You can get a BBL, but your thighs won’t match your new butt. You can fix your nose, only to realize the “real” problem was your chin. And Elisabeth can create the version of herself she’d like to be, but she doesn’t really get to be her.
Some of my favorite humor in the movie was subtle, for example, the entirely remote way in which Elisabeth retrieves her activation kit from a glorified Amazon warehouse, and injects herself at home without the guidance of a medical professional. I was reminded of that brand, Mindbloom, that sells at-home Ketamine kits for depression treatment. Their ads on Instagram feature people in their 40’s and 50’s, tripping balls while wearing something that looks like the Google Oculus. My point being: we’re not that far off from Substance-land.
Naturally, Sue gets greedy and wants to live her fabulous, young and hot life more than seven days in a row, which goes on to have devastating consequences for Elisabeth, who descends from an already depressed state to a totally hermetic one. Adding insult to injury, she can plainly see evidence of Sue’s success everywhere she turns. When Elisabeth calls the Substance hotline to ask what to do if Sue is stealing time, she is reminded to ‘respect the balance’ of the drug. Frustrated and unable to control her alternate self, she starts acting out.
One question that arose for me was whether the experiment could have worked if Elisabeth had prioritized her own ‘time’ and lived it to the fullest. If Sue had woken up to a clean apartment, healthy, model-friendly meal preps in the fridge, and notes of goodwill from Elisabeth encouraging her in her career aspirations, would she still have stolen time? It initially seemed to me that Sue’s disrespect for Elisabeth stemmed from the evidence of how she was spending her days: binge eating and watching QVC, preoccupations that young and beautiful Sue can’t understand (and that were all too relatable to me, even at my 34 to Elisabeth’s 50). I ran this question by another friend who saw the movie opening weekend, and she brought up a good counterpoint: the first time Sue decides to go beyond her prescribed time limit, it’s not for a big important gig, but to hook up with a guy who is disposable (the near-complete lack of romantic motivation driving the characters in this movie is one of the most refreshing parts). Maybe it wouldn’t have mattered if Elisabeth had ‘mothered’ Sue instead of being angry and jealous of her, as young people do tend to be selfish and think themselves invincible. But perhaps other, unseen Substance customers had better results?
Mothering is a big theme here, as waning fertility is an unavoidable topic of aging. Women like me, who are genetic clones of their mothers, have looked an older version of themselves in the face since the beginning of their lives. Despite not reading anything about this movie before I went to see it, the trailer did give me the distinct impression that Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley’s characters were two versions of the same person, I just didn’t know exactly how. The opening scene of the film features an egg, sunny-side up, spontaneously reproducing itself: a shinier, yellower yolk slides out of an existing one.
Towards the climax, when Elisabeth has lost everything and is finally ready to end the experiment, she can’t bring herself to destroy Sue - because if Elisabeth can’t be That Girl anymore, Sue still can. There is an innate desire to have her legacy continue even if she can’t be present for it, which is the ultimate projection of parents onto their children. Mothers especially often experience jealousy and resentment of their daughters’ youths, even as they also contain a much larger and concurrent desire for them to flourish and achieve.
I thought this was best displayed in a scene that involves Elisabeth cooking (gross) French food while watching Sue’s appearance on a generic late show, wherein she talks about how she can’t relate to Elisabeth’s career due to their generational differences. Elisabeth rages that Sue wouldn’t exist without her, and while that is literally true in the universe of this movie, it’s also true of celebrities who have ‘aged out’ of the cultural focus.
There is the evergreen Hollywood truth that there’s always someone younger and more beautiful on their way to replace you, but in a less obvious sense, celebrities pave the cultural road for whoever comes next simply by giving them references to recreate and reimagine as their own. We’re in an intellectually lazy time right now where everything is a remake, and this has filtered down even to brand new albums (Ariana Grande’s 2024 concept album based around a film that came out only 20 years ago) and music videos (Sabrina Carpenter’s recent homage to Death Becomes Her, a movie I am certain the majority of her fans have never seen). The Sues of the world really don’t have a clue without the Elisabeths - they simply don’t yet have enough life experience to be interesting. (Related thought: how many of Chappell Roan’s Zoomer fans have ever seen a John Waters movie?)
Perhaps the most genius choice of all in the movie is the real world interplay of the cast. Moore is well aware that her appearance and procedures have been ridiculed on the world stage for decades - everything from a botched buccal fat removal to maintaining epically long hair well into her sixties - and of course, it is vulnerable for her play with her own image in the way that this movie required.
While many reviewers have mentioned that in favor of Moore, I’ve seen surprisingly few talk about what I thought was the most trangressive decision of all: casting Margaret Qualley as the hot character. Qualley is undeniably gorgeous, with a pure and wholesome innocence to her, but she is not canonically sexy. While being perceived as beautiful may come down to symmetry and facial harmony, being seen as sexy is ultimately less about how a person looks and more about posture, the physical way they inhabit their body. To me, Qualley has always read as more of an awkward indie queen, and until now, she’s chosen roles accordingly. After watching, I read a few promotional interviews she did for the movie, and she admits that she cried in rehearsal for her dance scenes, as ‘that specific kind of sexuality doesn’t lend itself to me.’ Being a woman who feels similarly shy about ‘performing’ my own sexuality to the extent that I have legitimately wondered if I’m asexual at times (I’m not, just shy and repressed!), I felt tremendous pride in seeing her take this on. If I were in her shoes, I think I would have let the inner voices win, and I love that she confronted her fear head on and it completely paid off. I cannot imagine how uncomfortable this role was for her.
The Substance is definitely something to see in theaters if you can, as the ending is as unhinged as they come and practically begs for audience participation. While I thought the ominous trailer made it clear that this was a body horror of the first degree, I do think some of the audience members at my showing were expecting a neater metaphor about beauty and fame - and neat this movie is not. The two girls seated next to me (slicked back ponytails, matching sweatsuits that looked like they’d not seen a washing machine yet, clean girl makeup) were hiding their faces for the entire last 20 minutes and couldn’t bring themselves to watch. They kept exclaiming “Fuck!” and “Jesus christ!” and “It can’t get any worse?!”
And that alone is a good point. It can always get worse. Even in the narrow view of youth and beauty, the unavoidable truth is that you’ll never be as young as you are right now, so you might as well enjoy the you you’ve got today. No matter how dissatisfied you think you are, the you of tomorrow will surely be looking back with longing.
If you’ve seen the movie, let me know what you thought of it in the comments.