The Substance

The titular substance of writer/director Coralie Fargeat’s film is a green kinda goo that comes packaged in a sleek little tube with big black and white lettering that says THE SUBSTANCE, so comically literal that it put me in mind of The Process, the MacGuffin in David Mamet’s 90s thriller “The Spanish Prisoner.” The Substance, though, might work to set up the plot, but it is no mere device. It is the emblem, the idea, the fountain of youth in a beauty tube, inject a little into your body and you become young again. That doesn’t mean the lines on your face disappear, however, or that your gray hair returns to its natural color. No, becoming young again means replicating your cells to create a second version of yourself, a younger one that literally emerges from your body, as the opening image in which one egg yolk magically turns into two evokes. It’s a hell of an idea, and one executed well for a considerable amount of time, though “The Substance” also never quite grows beyond it, stretching its grisly body horror to the breaking point.

No industry is more focused on aging and beauty than Hollywood and so it makes sense for Fargeat to choose it as the setting of “The Substance.” She creates a more heightened version of the Los Angeles that Anna Kendrick created in another 2024 movie, “Woman of the Hour,” where every virtually every encounter is filtered through the lens of misogyny. That lens becomes literal in the fisheye that almost permanently frames Harvey, a television exec played by Dennis Quaid in a state of perpetual leer, who fires the star of his aerobics show, Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), for having crossed the industry’s invisible date line of 50. So, when she learns about the black-market Substance, she naturally views it as the only way to salvage her career, acquiring it in a Los Angeles back alley that effectively underlines how the world at large casts women off for aging and then moralizes when they seek to reverse it.

Despite some requisite gobbledygook, the process of The Substance is straightforward. Upon injecting the serum, Elizabeth alternates between her current self and a younger version of herself, christened Sue (Margaret Qualley), every seven days, no exceptions. If this weeklong boundary is passed, her original body ages at a rapider rate until the switch is made once again, setting the table for Sue to push that every-seven-days-mandate as far as it will go, dooming her older self in a literal attempt to reclaim her youth. And yet, as “The Substance” would seem to gather narrative force, the more its meaning comes unglued from its visual storytelling; by the end Fargeat starts having her characters just literally say aloud what she wants to impart. It’s hard to explain without giving the moment away, but when Elizabeth declares “It’s still me,” it was like getting punched in the face while being hit with a frying pan.

Qualley is mostly excellent, in congress with Fargeat creating a character that does not so much hunger for the camera’s gaze as subsist on it, pointedly absent any other sense of identity, which is effective, if only up to a point. Because no matter how many times Elizabeth is reminded that she and Sue are one, the same person, this idea never comes across, Moore and Qualley never in conversation, and Fargeat seemingly entirely uninterested in exploring that ostensible connection. What’s more, she over-relies on Moore’s real-life backstory to infuse humanity where, alas, there otherwise isn’t any. “The Substance” would skewer an industry, if not a world, that sees no deeper than the surface and, yet winds up only skimming the surface itself, gruesome, and gruesomely spectacular, but in the end, not quite gut-wrenching.