Movie Analysis of The Substance

Warning; this contains spoilers to the 2024 film, "The Substance" please read with discretion.

Intro

I promise this post ties back to what I've been talking about--or at least relates to the topic I may be shifting to.

I sat down to watch a "horror" movie for spooky season as I have been terrible about watching scary and spooky movies in honor of Halloween--I have been terribly busy with work and school so I haven't even watched a movie until today since, like, early August.

Rotten Tomatoes scored "The Substance", listed as a 2024 Horror Film, 89%, which is awfully generous for Rotten Tomatoes. IMDb listed it as 7.2 so I figured the movie had to be good. The casting was pretty impressive starring Demi Moore and Dennis Quaid--and a younger actress I was less familiar with: Margaret Qualley.

Synopsis

The movie starts with Demi Moore's character, Elisabeth Sparkle, on her 50th birthday. We start with a camera pan over her Hollywood star being placed on the Walk of Fame and see how it changes and cracks throughout the length of her career. We fast forward to the woman's aging through the years and she's finishing filming an episode for her dance/palates show when Sparkle has to use the restroom. She ends up in the men's restroom because the women's is out of order (a blatant hint in this movie to imbalance) and Dennis Quaid, Sparkle's boss, walks into the bathroom yelling at someone on the phone how they need someone younger and hotter than Sparkle and that it's a wonder she's made it this far.

We were already being shown this loneliness in Moore's character as she walked through this long hallway alone covered in movie posters from her youthful career and her forced smile as staff walked by saying, "happy birthday" but now we see an even lonelier character who now has had her confidence crushed once her boss walks out of the bathroom.

Essentially, Sparkle walks around depressed and then, when driving home, she sees her picture being torn off a billboard (already being fired before she was actually told) and she gets hit by a car and rolls a few times.

We're in a hospital room with an overly cheerful doctor and a weird nurse who is staring at Sparkle while she's sitting, facing away from them, on the hospital bed. We can see she has no injuries and the doctor confirms that in an awkward one-sided conversation when she starts crying.

I wouldn't have personally believed she could get out of rolling her car without a scratch if I personally hadn't done the same thing a couple years ago. However, this may be a stretch already for most viewers.

Regardless, the doctor gets paged out of the room when suddenly the nurse comes forward with "another exam" and checks her heartbeat and feels out her spine, calling her "the perfect candidate" then saying she's all good to go, handing Sparkle her coat and revealing a birth-mark on his wrist. Sparkle leaves.

She runs into someone--a nerdy white guy who is shouting "Lizzie Sparkle" outside the hospital and saying he knows her from 10th grade homeroom. Sparkle clearly doesn't remember him but smiles and greets him anyway, he calls her "the most beautiful woman in the world" and asks to go for a drink sometime before retracting the offer by stating she's probably too busy for him and Sparkle asks for his card. He writes his number at the bottom of his newly received cholesterol test, tears it off, drops it in a muddy puddle, but then gives it to her anyway.

For some reason, she accepts the muddy phone number, this is essential for later. Anyway, she gets home and realizes she has a thumb drive wrapped in notebook paper in her coat pocket along with the phone number--the thumb drive is long by the way, thumb drives are supposed to be the length of your thumb but this one is like the length of a pre-teen's forearm. It says, "The Substance" on it--which isn't an original name, but it's for satire. There's a number on the back of the drive and the notebook paper says, "it changed my life" which we can conclude came from the weird nurse with the birthmark on his wrist.

Regardless, Sparkle plays the thumb drive on her TV and it's a The Ring-style tape advertising a creation of a younger version of yourself that you trade off lives every week. It seems to be made through rejuvenating your cells and creating an almost reverse osmosis/cell regeneration to create younger version of your specific cells while the video utilizes wrinkly yellow playdough and smooth playdough to symbolize the two versions. The video advocates to remember that both are the same and is why both get one week to live and trade weeks.

Sparkle removes the drive and throws it at the bottom of her trash bin before placing in a bag so we obviously know she's going to use the number on the back. She goes for a lonely birthday drink at some bar (or maybe five birthday drinks) where she's wearing an inappropriate dress for the bar--obviously stuck when her stardom was fresh and she was fresh and went to party-style places. The film also works really hard to make Demi Moore look old and ugly but they fail miserably as Moore is still gorgeous and pretty youthful.

She comes home drunk and ends up dialing the number, writing some sketchy address on her hand and wakes up the next day to mail from the company immediately with a number card in which she goes to some back alley place to retrieve a package from a deposit box. She goes home and stares at herself naked for a very long time before she injects herself with "the activator" and expects to see herself change. Instead, she goes full exorcist-style seizure and grunting on the floor until the younger version literally splits through her back and crawls out of her very Tremors 2 style.

This is where we see that the younger version has all the memories leading up to the cloning, she knows to stitch up her older self and set up the "food supply" which is injected through the arm for seven days and the younger self has to tap into spinal fluid to inject herself with every day so she is "stabilized"--probably for the cells to continue duplication or something since the original DNA is actually in the original model, not the clone.

Either way, we see how the younger version has all these nice assets and we get a lot of closeups of her ass and breasts. She goes to audition to replace her older self's show and obviously gets the part--without anyone realizing she looks like Sparkle did as a younger woman--and the two switch. The younger self calls herself Sue--nothing else.

Well, it goes the same way most cloning goes--the clones begin to rival one another. Sparkle is jealous of the fame and attention Sue is getting, despite it being her plan the entire time to relive her fame through her younger self but issues don't start to rise between the two until Sue steals a couple extra hours on the seven days to have sex with some guy she picked up at one of her parties for being the next hottest actress. Sue then has to steal a little extra spinal fluid from Sparkle to stay stabilized the extra couple hours.

Sue leaves the apartment trashed because obviously she went straight back to Sparkle to switch the two as soon as she was done with her extra time--but Sparkle is outraged by the mess in the apartment and also the stolen extra time starts to age Sparkle faster. Her finger has now become decrepit and is falling apart, the nail cracked and splitting and wrinkles and puss-filled skin is where her pretty, dainty finger once was. After a phone call to the company that gave her the substance, she finds it's irreversible.

Sparkle then eats herself into a depression coma before switching back and Sue is outraged by the disgusting mess left behind for her to clean up--this continues to get worse. Sue steals an extra couple days before Sparkle trashes the entire apartment in a maddened outrage that half her body is now decrepit and rotting; and Sue swears she won't go back to Sparkle and drains an enormous amount of fluid to store and use. She ends up going three months before Sparkle no longer has anymore fluid to drain and Sue has to switch to allow Sparkle to regenerate the fluid. At this point, Sparkle is an enormous monster with enlarged bones, a hunchback, her hair has fallen out completely, and she's missing teeth. She looks one hundred and fifty.

At this point, she calls the company and begs to stop. They send a "termination" serum to the deposit box and Sparkle, who was originally breaking bones just trying to walk, begins sprinting to and from the box to the apartment and dragging Sue from the hidden compartment she built for them when they rested between weeks and stabs her in the heart with the giant termination needle--angry--until there's just a little left and then she tears the needle out and wants Sue to come back because "they" have a New Year's Eve event that same evening and it's a big deal since Sparkle still wants to relive this fame and stardom even though the jealousy was killing her the same way Sue was.

Well, she tries to switch them back which ends up just waking Sue up and the two clones are faced with each other for the first time, ever. Sue is confused until she sees the termination needle and goes ballistic and ends up murdering Sparkle in cold blood, it's a dramatic scene.

Sue gets ready for event that night, leaving the viewers with more questions than ever--when she starts coughing while getting ready. Honestly, the viewers probably suspect she needs fluid--instead she is decaying. She coughs out her own teeth and tries to run home to see if she can do something about this issue. Harvey, Dennis Quaid's character, stops her in the hallway and tries to get her to smile for shareholders he's trying to impress and introduce her to. The profound statement he makes, is "pretty girls should always smile" and this is also important.

Harvey and the shareholders quickly get distracted when a handful of showgirls in feathers go running by. This allows Sue to run home where she tries to clone herself with what was left of "the activator" serum to prevent the decay and save her appearance for the New Year's Eve show.

Well, what walks out of her is honestly the least expected part of the movie yet somehow not at the same time--a walking teratoma of different body parts emerges. It tries to get dolled up in the dress Sue was wearing and jewelry and runs to the event where it actually steps foot on stage. This ends up terrifying the crowd and once they're out of shock, a couple of men try to kill her. She keeps growing parts that they cut off, one of the first ones she dropped was a breast. Mind you, the show girls are full tits-out ass-out, it's insane. The monster has two tits hanging over the dress, and they're not pretty.

She ends up losing a limb and spinning in a circle spraying blood full 80's style horror film before she finally leaves the building and falls apart on the sidewalk--like literally falls apart. There's a face that looks like Demi Moore's face that squelches away like the skin-thin lady from Doctor Who that yells "moisturize me!" every thirty seconds and she settles on her Walk of Fame star before just melting away and being cleaned up the next day by some sidewalk cleaner not paying attention.

Analysis

Now to the part where I really want to talk--the why of this movie and why this might relate to some topics I want to talk about. First, Demi Moore's character is an entire symbolism for all the ugly women tropes even though she isn't ugly the first half of the movie. We see where she's the old-washed-up actress turning 50 where Harvey basically calls her old as dirt who is desperately trying to be young again. We see this in the way she took her career, still doing palates like a Jane Fonda of whatever era this movie is supposed to be set in--and in the dress she tries to wear on her date with Ted (nerdy white guy who gave her the muddy phone number) and also what she wears on her birthday. The birthday dress is a long dress that drapes on the floor without any back to it--very inappropriate for her body as you can see her spine and ribs and wrinkles. It's also inappropriate for the bar she's in as we get to see a young couple wearing casual clothes next to her.

Overall, Moore's character represents how women feel about themselves compared to fame, beauty standards, and aging. Despite the fact that Moore is gorgeous, she was casted in this character to show that doesn't matter compared to the age in a patriarchy-dominated society.

We are shown this through Harvey, a wonderfully satirical character who represents patriarchy and how even disgusting men play innocent when shaming a woman. Harvey is pompous, abrasive, arrogant, likes to hear himself talk, and overall disgusting. During the lunch he takes Moore to so he can fire her, he's eating shrimp and talking with his mouth open and leaving shrimp tails all over the table and stains the tablecloth. The monologue he is using doesn't make any sense and when Moore politely questions the point, he claims he has to go and inappropriately runs off with someone he recognizes from across the restaurant. This is just a blatant symbol of men in power (on the satirical level, of course).

Then, we have Sue who represents the greed and also adhering to Male Gaze. Sue's dance routine isn't even a dance, it's a showcase of different potential sexual positions, flaunting her ass, twerking, and making herself sexually desirable. She seems to get off on it, showing how men want women to feel in the face of patriarchy. An overall character tick that Sue has is to bite her lip seductively, which is another intentional placement by the writer.

For fair warning, this movie has a lot of nudity and not just in a sense of sex--we stare at Moore and Qualley's naked bodies probably for half the film if not over a quarter. We also get a lot of re-used shots of ass and tits. At first while I was sitting down watching this movie, I thought it was written by a man because of the theme and angles.

"The Substance" was actually written by a woman, and that's when it started to make more sense later in the movie for me. I will admit, though, I really didn't understand the movie until the end and was just overall disgusted and horrified the majority of this film. And not even horrified in the fun horror movie way, in the way that I almost wanted to turn the movie off immediately.

A few major complains that Reddit had about "The Substance" was the amount of body horror there was throughout the film--which, I will admit, there is a lot but I think it's so on purpose. First, more than a quarter of this movie is just nudity. And there's really only female nudity. We get one male butt and that's it, everything else is plain women.

And that's where a lot of the body horror comes in is specifically when we're looking at women sexually--during Sue's exploration with the biker guy she picks up from her party, we see a nightmare on Sparkle's end where organs fall from Sue's bodysuit when the biker guy unzips her outfit.

There's also the nightmare from Sue having a chicken bone in her body from Sparkle's binge-eating that pops out of her ass when she's twerking on her show.

Not to mention, the different effects of boobs that were being used. The biggest contrast was between the Elisa-Sue Monster and the showgirls. The showgirls and the monster had tits hanging out but the difference was that the showgirls were young/perky and attractive while the monster was, well, a monster and the tits were not perky and young and pretty. Dropping an entire tit-eyeball on stage was meant to symbolize that breasts are not pretty, just sexualized and is why they're such a big deal, especially in horror films.

How Does This Relate?

You may be wondering how this ties back to anything I have been talking about.

Well, this is inherently sexist issue.

Women are higher targets of domestic violence and sexual assault and abuse. And the issue all lies in the cultural sexualizing of women and how that seems to be okay. "The Substance" is touching on a lot of issues and I feel like I could go on and on and on about this movie. I have been writing this since Monday and was originally supposed to post on Monday but there's just been so much to digest and unpack.

But also, I see where Coralie Fargeat, the screenplay writer, was trying to point fingers at patriarchy and how it boils down to sex. Sexism, sexualization, the image of inferiority in sex based on, well, sex and age and composition.

Patriarchy turns women against women--an overall alliance one would think would be unbroken. Older women against younger women, and, in the case of this movie--women against themselves.

And no, I don't want to just blame patriarchy because it's the overall sexualization of the cultures. First off, Fargeat is French--where we know that there are a lot of sexualized stereotypes around the French--French women to be more specific. This is portrayed in all sorts of different forms of media which will take too long to dive into here.

It's not hard to overlook that American (and I mean the United States here, another pet peeve of mine I will talk about some other time) culture specifically has really relied heavily on sexualization anywhere from "sex sells" to Porn Hub being easily accessible to anyone with internet and a browser.

"The Substance" touches on how Sue and Elisabeth are from "different generations" in one of Sue's interviews on a late-night show. It made me think of how, just sixty years ago and some change, Dick Van Dyke aired and caused a bit of a disruption on TV that the man and wife were in a bedroom--despite the beds being separate. This was one of the first appearances of alluded sexualization in United States television despite that there was nothing sexual about the scenes in the bedroom. Most just incorporated what bedrooms are for--sleeping.

This was another uproar with The Brady Bunch with Carol and Mike being in the same bed as one another.

Not to mention that there was overall a movement for bullet bras before both these shows as well that made breasts look better in a bra.

We jump 75 years from the release of the bullet bra, to Americans in the U.S. cringing to a family-friendly TV show being filmed in a bedroom, to now body horror of a movie with 40% if the film being female nudity.

We have taken quite the jump.

What was left out of "The Substance" that I found interesting was that Sue did not need to sleep her way to the top--Quaid's character never even alluded to wanting to have sex with Sue. He mentions having a wife so we know he's at least somewhat straight-presenting, but no one touches Sue inappropriately or puts either Elisabeth or Sue in a position where they are sexually compromised without consent.

However, in fame and stardom, that's usually an issue women are faced with.

This was a purposeful move, leaving this out of the film. I found myself holding my breath every time that Sue was faced with Harvey, expecting something to happen to her but nothing did. I think Fargeat did this on purpose because why was I expecting that? Why was I holding my breath waiting for something that was never alluded in the film and never came?

Because we're so used to women being assaulted and harassed in some way or another. It's a societal norm--especially when it comes to fame.

I could continue on and on about the concept of the female sex and sexualization of such and what it means and why--using "The Substance" as my argumentative point, but I will save those ideas for now.

I want to switch to this idea of sex in today's norms and why our comfort level keeps growing with the act of sex but we are all still so uncomfortable with talking about sexual violence.

I don't really recommend "The Substance" unless you want to waste two hours and twenty-two minutes of your time just being grossed out and frustrated. However, if you want to pick apart the movie from a feminist-point-of-view, then I cannot recommend this movie enough just like The Barbie Movie.