I Simply Cannot Get Over The Substance

Join me in a demented breakdown of Demi Moore's demented body horror hit

*Spoilers ahead!*

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Back-splitting body horror. Demi Moore. A feminist director. A French feminist director. DEMI MOORE. A final twenty minutes that made me shriek and scale my chair in a packed picturehouse like a spider when the big light goes on.

WHOMP WHOMP. THE SUBSTANCE. WHOMP WHOMP.

You ready?

Demi Moore (DEMI MOORE!) is Elisabeth Sparkle, a one-time Hollywood mega-star turned telly aerobics queen who, as her 50^th birthday knocks on (Moore is 61 in our reality), looks absolutely cracking in a leotard cut-high. But she’s still committed the cardinal sin as a woman, as a woman on TV, she *gips* has aged! Something the network, and the world, simply cannot forgive.

On the day of that big birthday, Elisabeth has lunch with producer Harvey - yes, you heard me, producer Harvey - a shellfish-sucking misogyboss in a brocade blazer (Dennis Quaid, cast after Ray Liotta’s death and man, that’s a bit of forever-lost screen magic). And well, when I say lunch, I mean a Los Angeles Lunch: the men eating like starving, predatory wolves and the women watching the men eat like starving, predatory wolves while pretending not to be prey (or starving). For Elisabeth though, there’s something worse than being prey. Being nothing at all. “At 50…'“ Harvey trumpets about TV desirability, spitting crustacean brains onto the fisheye lens, “…it stops!”. In other words: Happy Birthday, nana. You’re fired!

Elisabeth’s image, created in the fires of patriarchy and capitalism, is now incinerated by those same forces, her face ripped from freeway billboards while she watches, so aghast she ends up in a traffic accident. Getting the once-over in hospital, Elisabeth is slipped a flash drive by a shiny-faced spine-admiring nurse. On it, and soon filling the widescreen in her sky-high apartment, is an ad for The Substance. “Have you ever dreamt of a better version of yourself?” a deep, silky-smooth voice asks. ER, YES PLEASE, SILKY-SMOOTH.

A back-alley jaunt later, Elisabeth is in possession of the wonder drug that promises to “unlock” her DNA and release a young-hun version of herself (that’s not the actual younger version of herself, and although apparently someone she shares a consciousness with, not someone she shares memories with). Struggling to keep up? Well, the drugs come with handy info cards: instructions for Elisabeth and exposition for us in VERY BIG LETTERS.

The rules: only one woman can wander the world conscious at any one time; every day, the young-hun must inject herself with a stabilising serum; and the two must swap places every seven days or Something Dead Bad But Unspecified will happen. The most important thing, says Silky-Smooth, “the one and only thing not to forget. You. Are. One. You can’t escape from yourself.”

What goes down when Elisabeth sticks herself suggests that if Revenge, writer-director Coralie Fargeat’s debut feature, was her tango with Dario Argento, The Substance is her two-step with David Cronenberg.

Elisabeth’s cosmetic experiment goes full-body-horror-show, as she (and seemingly her reality too) buckle and bend, contort and crack, threaten to shatter completely. The agony serves a purpose though: ripping Elisabeth quite literally open so as to expel the younger, better her into the world (untold pain to allow you-with-the-clocked-turned-back to emerge? WHAT COULD THIS BE A METAPHOR FOR?).

Margaret Qualley’s Sue is Elisabeth’s second self, crawling out of a thick slit in her (unconscious) back, one that opens like a vagina during childbirth (or, let’s be real, is brutally torn open). A clearly-disgusted Sue - YOU DON’T KNOW, SUE - then has to sew the thick, curling lips of Elisabeth’s spine skin back together with heavy black thread (all that’s missing is an offer of tea and toast while you bleed from your third-degree tear and dream of murdering your husband for telling yet another nurse that he watched his favourite pub burn down).

Sue marvels at her hot body as Elisabeth lies sparko and dribbling on the bathroom floor. Soon, she’s landing the opportunities that young-huns with hot bodies do, including Elisabeth’s show. Gentle workouts are out and hip-thrusting, lip-biting, arse-bobbing sexaerobics - Pump It Up With Sue - are in. And as the name suggests, she’s pretty much screen viagra: the camera gobbling up Sue’s springy-smooth skin and labia-skimming leotard with a male-gaze that’s lech-specific and porn-adjacent. After seven days, as instructed, Sue swaps Elisabeth’s unconscious body for her own. And so it goes. Until, well, it really fucking doesn’t.

Elisabeth moons around the apartment and stuffs her face, isolated from a world that can no longer bear to look at her (what does she get out of The Substance? Who knows! Nowt! Don’t ask boring Qs!). While Sue, during her seven-days in the world that craves her image, enjoys a consequence-free life of late-nights, booze and boys. But somebody always pays, Sue. First, Elisabeth, who ages at warp speed as a result of young-hun’s bad-for-the-body antics, and then Sue, as her OG-self’s food intake tries to escape her skin.

“Would you like to stop?” asks Silky-Smooth, already-knowing the answer. “I’m fine. Everything’s fine,” says a not-fine Elisabeth (I’m presuming they’re holding back “No worries if not!” for a sequel). Still, something, it’s clear, is gonna have to give. And that something is largely chunks of Elisabeth, as Sue begins to push the seven-day rule to its limits.

And here’s where The Substance becomes absolutely deranged (this is not a complaint, BTW). Did I ever think I’d see Demi Moore as an actual Old Crone gnawing on a chicken carcass and screaming like a banshee? No, no I did not. But do I want to carry her around on my shoulders for her absolute abandon of ego, vanity, and sense in a Hollywood still measuring an actresses’ worth by whether her nipples point to the ceiling? Yes, yes I do.

(Would you like to stop?)

(Oh, baby it’s too late).

*Seriously, spoilers. Only read on if you’ve seen it/are up for it, huns*

What follows is a loud, bloody, unhinged primal scream of fury against ageing, of what it costs you, and me. One that ends with Sue - booked for a career-making NYE telecast and in no way willing to give it up for nana or some stupid rules - beating a seemingly 135-year-old Elisabeth to death in a gratuitous, brutal (longgggg) way. It’s the inverse of the usual titillating ways women are brutalised and murdered on screen, and so dementedly over the top as to be made unreal (and yet still somehow more real than 99% of female deaths).

The primal scream, says The Substance, can’t just be against the patriarchy, the idea of ageing, but one we must unleash in the mirror. For it isn’t just about how men lech on women, but on how women need it. It’s not just on the futility of trying to defeat ageing, but our complicity in attempting it. It isn’t just about the male gaze, but the female one that meets it and internalises how they’re seen. It’s a primal scream against each other for buying into the bullshit that tells women they have a shelf life, one they have to do everything possible - no matter the cost - to delay. That killing our old selves is preferable to becoming them. Because we don’t just fear our older selves – who we will inevitably, always become – we fucking hate them. AND our younger selves, too, so painfully reminding us of who we once were, of who and what we’ve lost, of the value we’ve lost. We hate them. Her. OK, us. Me. I. You.

(“You. Are. One”.)

This theory is made, er, flesh and blood in the film’s second birth and the arrival of Elisabeth’s third self, Monstro ElisaSue (I know, I know. This is when I started screaming and scaling). Who’s brought into the world by the young-hun’s crazed misuse of The Substance, misuse which causes Sue’s body to break apart The Fly-style. Though while Seth Brundle lost his humanity when his teeth fell out, his ear dropped off, this is when both Elisabeth and Sue find theirs.

For this warped mash-up of both women, where youth and age twist around each other (Elisabeth’s face bursts out of Sue’s back), this baroque monster has the balance and serenity neither woman has ever had, finally freed from the gaze of men and the world created in the image of their youth-and-porn-obsessed fantasies.

But wait, ElisaSue has a goddamn live telecast to host!

And so, to the denouement. And if there’s a funnier moment in cinema this year than ElisaSue dragging herself on stage wearing an Elisabeth Sparkle cardboard mask like she’s pitching up for the world’s shittest hen do (by which I mean, any hen do), I’ll eat ElisaSue’s tiara.

When her full monstrous self - the logical conclusion of needing youth so much, doing owt to get it - is revealed to the audience, men and women scream, clamber and climb, trying in vain to flee the auditorium (complemented by a note-perfect Carrie topshot of a spinning ElisaSue). There’s no walking out while they all perish though. This ain’t that kind of fairytale. ElisaSue is decapitated by – OF COURSE – a random man (you know, the kind who pops up on Twitter with an unsolicited opinion), the audience sprayed with blood like a water sprinkler timed to go off at sunset.

ElisaSue is reduced to lumps of skin and fat (and god-knows-what) that inch and slide away, until just Elisabeth’s original face crawls to her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame where it gradually soaks into the concrete before being scrubbed clean. The mess of another dirty day in Hollywood, the remnants of another destroyed woman, washed away, ready to go again tomorrow (and honestly, put the final shots in the fucking Louvre).

Hang on, you’re probably thinking, that doesn’t all make sense! There are logic holes as big as her back slit! I’m sorry, did you not hear the bit where a woman crawls out of another woman’s vagina-spine? Or where Elisabeth’s face crawls down the street like a crab doing the shuffle across St Annes beach? Come on now. This is a fairytale turned parable turned absolute fucking horror show.

This is not a film to imprison with rationale and real-world rules, but one to surrender to, arms and brains and eyes wide open. With throats readied to squeal, chairs to be scaled. As Coralie Fargeat told Vogue.“We don’t care about realism or reality – we’re in the world of The Substance”.

So, abandon all hope, ye who enter here…

And welcome to our world.

The Substance (MUBI) is still in cinemas