It seems like every time you go back to the core myths, the basic structures of morality governing practically any religion or region on the planet, you encounter the same three warnings: Don’t covet money; don’t covet power; don’t covet youth. Abide by these three, and you’ll be right as rain every time.

Would that it were so simple. For Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), she has the money and the penthouse to prove it, the power and the star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame to show it. But she is rapidly running out of youth—as are we all. She was once the darling of the entertainment industry. Now she’s doing 1980s-esque workout videos, and studio exec Harvey (played with repulsive relish by Dennis Quaid) is ready to give her the heave-ho for someone, anyone, young and beautiful.

Written and directed by Coralie Fargeat, The Substance takes a recognizable desire, a familiar addiction, and a routine story and morphs it into something entirely its own. Sure, The Substance is a movie that makes me want to invoke other filmmakers—Frankenheimer! Lynch! Cronenberg! Jeunet!—but that might make The Substance sound derivative and trite when watching it feels fresh and exciting.

The plot: A mysterious proposition finds Elizabeth and promises a new life. For seven days at a time, she can live as a younger version of herself as long as the subsequent seven days she lives as she is now. She must switch every seven days, and she must remember that the split versions of herself are not two but one. Desperate, Elizabeth agrees to the terms, visits an unmarked location, and recovers a packet of neon-colored drugs and some easy-to-follow guidelines. She returns home, takes the drugs, and passes out. Then her back splits down the spine, and Sue (Margaret Qualley) emerges, a younger version of Elizabeth.

Like all births, Sue is as naked as a jaybird. There’s a lot of nudity and plenty of fetishistic shots of female body parts, but none of them are erotic or meant to me. Fargeat’s movie is a not-so-subtle critique of how women’s bodies are commodified, and Sue has that smooth, plasticine look of a Barbie doll (nothing like the sweaty nakedness of Qualley in Clair Denis’ Stars at Noon). To further exaggerate Sue’s porcelain skin and perfect curves, Faraget and cinematographer Benjamin Kracun employ a fisheye lens and tight framing akin to James Wong Howe’s work on Seconds—a spiritual predecessor definitely—to make everything from young and old, beautiful and grotesque even more so.

As for how the substance works, it has to do with a lot of needles and fluids, each producing a magnificent and squeamish sound effect (a tip of the hat to the whole sound team). And while Sue is running around Hollywood and making exercise videos that feel dangerously close to pornography, Elizabeth is lying unconscious on her bathroom floor, hooked up to a bag of intravenous food to keep her alive. But after seven days, Elizabeth runs out of food, and Sue’s body breaks down. So the younger version conks out, the older version wakes up, and Elizabeth spends seven days waiting for Sue’s body to recover and new substance to arrive. And if both Elizabeth and Sue adhere to these rules, they can live like this forever. But who wants to adhere to the rules?

Because while Sue is Elizabeth, Elizabeth doesn’t get the pleasure of being Sue. The substance allows Elizabeth to live as a younger version of herself, but it doesn’t alleviate the burden of growing old. If anything, it just intensifies it. This is most explicit in the scene where Elizabeth is getting ready for a date with an old friend from high school, a man who’s been attracted to Elizabeth since they were teens. He thinks she’s still the most beautiful person in the world, but she doesn’t. And as she stands in front of the mirror, putting on a little of this, taking off a little of that, showing more of that, covering up more of this, the clock tick tick ticks down the seconds to their date. Watching Elizabeth trying to leave the apartment is like watching an alcoholic not drink when the bottle’s right there. You know what’s going to happen before it does. You just hope it doesn’t.

But it does. Elizabeth will never look in the mirror and see the beautiful young person looking back, and Sue will never look at Elizabeth lying on the ground and want to turn their life back over to her. So she finagles to buy herself another day. But the consequences are dire.

And that’s when things start to get really… weird. Honestly, I don’t know what to do with the last 10 minutes of the movie other than say they’re wild.

The Substance ends as it began, with an overhead shot of Elizabeth Sparkle’s Walk of Fame Star. Only this time, a bloody mess resembling the Medusa rests briefly on it before a street sweeper mops it up. In Greek mythology, Pegasus flew out of the Medusa’s severed head and became a constellation, the soul achieving immortality. Is that what Elizabeth has been seeking all along? A quick reverse shot of the sparkling night sky above her Walk of Fame Star ties the whole package together and gives a sense of peace, accomplishment, or, at the very least, contentment.

The Substance(2024)
Written and directed by Coralie Fargeat
Produced by Tim Bevan, Coralie Fargeat, Eric Fellner
Starring: Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, Dennis Quaid, Robin Greer
Mubi, Rated R, Running time 140 minutes, Premiered May 19, 2024 at the Cannes Film Festival

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