The Substance Review: Beauty is a Bloodied Beast
Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram)
Five of us rented ‘The Substance’ on Prime Video on my suggestion, and there was a definite divide between us over its content.
“What are you making us watch?!”
One of them questioned me, puzzled, as the camera zoomed into the bloodied body of Demi Moore’s character Elizabeth, lying naked on a bathroom floor with white tiles.
“I told you… it’s a body horror thriller!”
I had only seen a small teaser for the film, so frankly, I wasn’t sure how much gore and blood to expect either. And woah, woah, woah… nobody among the five of us (three women, two men) were prepared for the amount of nudity on display. If nothing else, there’s plenty of boobs and blood to go around.
Written and directed by Coralie Fargeat, ‘The Substance’ follows how a famous actor succumbs to the temptation of trying out a mysterious black-market drug that promises people a ‘younger, better version’ of them. Demi Moore is Elizabeth, the actor protagonist, who is booted out of her fitness show for a younger host. Desperate and down in the dumps, she tries the drug, simply called ‘The Substance’, and the result is hair-raising. Margaret Qualley plays Sue, the ‘better’ version of Elizabeth, almost plastic-doll like in her perfection. The catch is that Sue and Elizabeth are one person, but they must alternate every week, maintaining a balance between their two selves. Sounds pretty easy until things go morbidly wrong.
The film opens with a strange shot of an egg yolk splitting, looking more like a film studio’s intro logo sequence – think MGM’s iconic lion roaring at the start of movies – so no one except me paid attention. “Guys, I think the movie has already started!”. It had, with some subtle foreshadowing. Next is a sequence featuring a star on the Walk of Fame dedicated to Elizabeth, which endures various forms of wear and tear over the years. Finally, we meet Demi Moore’s Elizabeth, whose fitness level is jaw-dropping, despite creepy male studio executives who think she is too old to have her own TV show.
‘The Substance’ is like a modern horror mash of Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Picture of Dorian Grey’ and Park Jae Joon’s ‘Lookism’ – all of these dwell into the impact surface level beauty has on an individual’s life. But Coraline Fargeat really amps up the ugly side of beauty in her film, giving viewers a shockingly fascinating look at body dysphoria. The cost of looking ‘perfect’ for longer than the natural process of aging comes at a bloody high price for Elizabeth. The initial gains are quick, the eventual experience painfully slow and horrifying.
There is an overdose of nudity in the film, with many close-up shots of breasts, buttocks, and other body parts, which instantly highlights the entertainment industry’s obsession with skin show, something director Coralie Fargeat deliberately overemphasizes. It honestly gets a little irritating, to keep seeing a half-naked Margaret Qualley thrusting and squatting through half the runtime. Instead, a little more action would’ve in the tale would’ve made the pace bearable. Although, on the other hand, its the slow pace that make the sudden bursts of violence outright scary and hard to digest. I definitely screamed a bunch of times and looked away from the screen more than twice.
With its 2 hour 21 minutes runtime, ‘The Substance’ remains dark, serious, and tediously slow for the first two hours, while descending into comedic absurdity in its climactic last minutes. It feels like you’ve turned on a completely different film in the end. The word ‘bloodbath’ is on literal display towards the end, only movies like Saw and that one Evil Dead flick where a flood of blood inundates the creepy cottage characters are trapped in. The creators use a lot of practical special effects in the film, which makes a lot of the ‘scary’ scenes creepy as hell. Demi Moore’s transformation from a beautiful star to a corrupted, rotting piece of living human meat is tragically-comic.
In-fact, both Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley are riveting in their roles, the difference in their age brought out starkly by the make-up team, but strangely, their world exists in a weird bubble. Margaret as Sue is largely just a trophy piece, but towards the ends of the film, she transforms into an unhinged, out of control diva, out to destroy her own self. The pressures of looking a certain way is insanely brought out in ‘The Substance’, even though a lot of parts do not make sense. And I feel like repeating how slow the movie is, it could’ve been 20 minutes shorter, if not more.
“She was traumatized by the boobs but was happy with the blood. I was happy with the boobs but traumatized by the blood.” – that’s how one of the guys recommended ‘The Substance’ to another friend, a few hours after we were done with the film. While not necessarily traumatizing, it’s a disturbing piece of cinema that body horror fans would probably enjoy, especially those with tolerance for slow thrills.
Rating: 6 on 10. The Substance is on Hulu and Prime Video.
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