The usual advice for writers is: show, don’t tell. I will tell you more about this film for a change. Substance will defy all expectations of cinema watching experience. Every scene will attack your sensations, engaging all your sensitivities with non-stop sights and sounds that are designed to evoke the reaction from you to either ogle, run or scream. Coralie Fargeat is the director of this film, and along with Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley, the trio will shock you, and scandalise your family for watching it. It achieves all these effects with style, blood and beauty while keeping the spotlight on the beastly nature of the human condition.
In the film, the substance is a miracle drug that promises a better version of the heroine and realises that fantasy through a horrific procedure on her body. A user has to inject the activator liquid with a syringe. The body will rip apart at the spinal line, which will push out a younger self as in child delivery, except that the younger self is a lot more ravishing. Two conditions to comply: the old and young must switch between venturing outside and staying home for nutrition with IV tubes for seven days at a time, by rotation.
Demi Moore plays an ageing celebrity introduced as a fitness star with her own show on a TV network. As she turns 50, the male TV producer begins looking for her replacement. He does this and terminates her from the show in the most business-like manner, making a fetishisation of age factor. Returning home, Moore stands in front of the mirror and looks at her body like its expiry date has exceeded its utility—full frontal nudity with zero eros.
Margaret Qualley plays Sue, the younger embodiment, and she looks the part in her shimmering fitness costume, perfect from any angle. The TV audience loves her, and her boss treats her like royalty. She is living her wildest dream and starts wondering whether she could extend the seven-day limit and live as the younger Sue by locking up the older Elisabeth, Moore’s role. Sue tried, and a war between the two selves erupted.
The side effects are not pretty in this war for both personas, who are actually one person in two bodies. Elisabeth aged more quickly than was expected as she became malnourished by Sue’s deliberate overstaying in the outside world. First, Demi Moore’s fingers rotted, bones fractured, and hairs greyed, more intensively as the days passed and Sue’s violations escalated. On her part, Elisabeth consumes junk and greasy foods to damage Sue’s perfect body. This symbolic inner conflict is shown in an aerobic routine scene in which a chicken lollipop swallowed by Elisabeth emerges from Sue’s perfect bum.
Finally, better sense prevailed, and Elisabeth, now looking like an old disfigured witch, decided to stop using the Substance. Sue somehow discovered this rollback plan, and they fought to survive for themselves. Finally, over many insane episodes, they became a unified monster, so ugly and disgusting. The beast walks, dangling the body parts of the old and young, entwined into one another and in haphazard places of the body like molten plastic without a sense of geometry or proportion.
This is a simplistic story of Substance. The filmmaking is aesthetically out of the world, just like the fantasy it captures. In terms of messages, I drew few undercurrent ideas from the film. First, there is tremendous pressure on women to conform to the beauty standards set by societal expectations. You have to look young, slim, and healthy; no wrinkles, please. Second, women succumb to these unattainable ideals, and they somehow are complicit in perpetuating these sexist notions of beauty by resorting to extreme measures like going under the knife or inserting foreign substances into their anatomy. Third, it is biologically impossible to remain fresh and attractive forever. Self-acceptance and living authentically in one’s temporal age are life-saving hacks. Time always wins. The yoga poses, gym sessions, and intermittent fasting are temporary ways to slow down the finitude of life. All roads ultimately lead to Rome, the symbolic destiny where all judgement dies, aesthetic or otherwise.
Another idea that pops up is the definition of beauty itself. Why do people want to exhibit their slim waists and six-pack abs? Because these bodily shapes and figures signal a desired status. Your fit and lithe body is a tell-tale sign that you have the money to afford a gym membership, time to spare, and an awareness of proper diet and education. As food becomes abundant, cheaper, and junkier, starvation is no longer an issue. People in poor countries have become oversized, with obesity signalling poverty and lack of education. Any intelligent person would try to be slim and at least publicise their efforts to tell the world they are trying to cut the visceral fat from their abdomens. (Have you ever seen your friends making a reel of binge eating and food wastage to signal their status?).
Conversely, if there is a miracle drug that can eliminate excess body weight, then being slimmer or lighter will no longer be coveted (a scenario within reach). People will shift their attention to other unattainable and scarce goods—another marketable obsession.
The Substance movie is about our obsession with the signalling of the artefacts of scarcity in society, mainly ageism, beauty myths and substance abuse. It does so with style, horror, and lots of nudity, not to titillate but to see ourselves in the mirror.