The Substance
This is not a subtle movie. It is not a movie that does anything close to building a believable world. Demi Moore’s Elisabeth gets told by some hospital tech that she’s “a good candidate” and gets a USB stick with THE SUBSTANCE written along the side. She sticks it directly into the TV, which is not my first instinct. The title sets the tone, there’s not even a pretense of what this substance might be, where it came from, why it’s free, who should use it and why. It’s just the substance, shut up. You switch every seven days. Feed daily. Go on, I guess, forever. Those are the rules, shut up. The thesis, unless I’m being dense, is that you were once young and now you’re not. When you’re young you don’t consider your old self, and when you’re old you’re jealous of the youth you once had. Despite, obviously, old you and young you being the same person. Let’s make an insane phantasmagoria from this idea.
Elisabeth takes the substance. A young, hot, constantly nude Margaret Qualley climbs out of her spine. In keeping with the surface level detail of everything, her name is Sue. No last name. Nobody asks any questions, she’s young and hot, that’s all that matters. She gets hired by Dennis Quaid to star in - as the gigantic billboard says - “a new show”. The new show is a direct continuation of what Elisabeth was doing, a weekly (daily?) workout show on TV, an entirely obsolete concept, but thematically makes sense with Elisabeth trying to recapture her own literal youth (though she apparently was a huge movie star and Oscar winner). She gets leered at by the camera constantly and so gets a shot at the ultimate prize, and another obsolete institution, the “new year’s show”. I was amused that the billboard seems to get updated daily with the countdown to this show.
In the midst of all this there is constant, gross body horror with a strong debt to David Cronenberg. The fluid extraction is right from eXistenZ and Videodrome. It also made me think a lot about at least two of the character endpoints of Requiem for a Dream, Jared Leto injecting into his rotting arm and Ellen Burstyn wasting away eating in front of the TV. And while I’m at it, I swear that carpet and bathroom from the studio are straight out of The Shining. Ok one more, Dennis Quaid gives me strong Lermontov from The Red Shoes vibes, he doesn’t seem to have any sexual interest in Sue, just only what she can do for his TV ratings. He also gets some body horror in eating about 400 shrimp in extreme close up, which is as gross as anything else.
Predictably, things go awry. Sue likes being young and doesn’t want to spend every other week locked in the bathroom annex/cell that she for some reason built personally. Every time she has to switch back to stay alive, Elisabeth has turned more and more into some kind of warped crone. Surprised that Elisabeth didn’t overstay her seven days to try and claw back something from Sue. Suppose it doesn’t work like that. Demi Moore really throws everything at this, I thought fair play at the beginning when she was just standing around nude in extremely harsh light - she still looks good at nearly 60 - but she gets put under more and more layers of latex before becoming what the large title card calls MONSTRO ELISASUE.
The new year’s show is really something. How much blood can one (two?) creature contain? I’ve never seen anything spontaneously vomit up a fresh boob before. That’s surely a commentary on something. Why were all the dancers topless? There was clearly at least one child in the audience, what kind of show is this? Maybe it’s just because the director is French. I did also like the the audience did pretty much entirely remain seated for the whole spectacle. I’m glad this kind of bonkers shit exists.