There was still a stigma about actresses getting naked on camera in the 1990s, when Demi Moore became a Hollywood leading lady. She aimed to take that away, but while she certainly had the looks for it, she didn’t have the projects. Her very different late 1990s showcases for her physique, Striptease and G.I. Jane, weren’t good, and audiences didn’t turn out for them.
True, her turns in Mortal Thoughts, A Few Good Men, and even Deconstructing Harry (none of which really used her beauty) showed that there was a real actor behind those sumptuous good looks, but her inability to choose scripts blighted her career: Indecent Proposal, Disclosure, The Scarlet Letter. Fairly or not, the badness of the movies made her nudity seem like pandering. It was the actresses of the following generation — Margot Robbie in The Wolf of Wall Street, Scarlett Johansson in Under the Skin, Emma Stone in Poor Things — who would pick good movies that used their nudity provocatively, rather than mediocre ones that needed the titillation. Well, after so many failures, Moore finally joins their company in The Substance, maybe the rawest and most vivid female nightmare I’ve ever seen. The performance she gives here is the culmination of what she was trying to do, and I don’t think she would have given it if she had been any younger than her 62 years.
She portrays Elisabeth Sparkle, a Hollywood star whose career has gone the Jane Fonda route, winning an Oscar in her youth before hosting a wildly successful fitness TV show. While she’s using the men’s restroom at her studio because the women’s one is out of order, she overhears her show’s producer (Dennis Quaid) calling her an old hag and demanding that the network replace her with someone younger and hotter. That same day, a doctor slips her a USB drive containing a cryptic ad for something called “The Substance,” a black-market product that promises youthful rejuvenation. When she injects herself with it, her naked body splits open like an insect cocoon — along with other things that I will not be able to unsee — and out pops a younger self (Margaret Qualley) with better muscle tone in all areas. The younger self adopts the name Sue and takes over Elisabeth’s show, but ooh, The Substance has some killer side effects.
In fairness, the regimen would go a lot better if Elisabeth and Sue obeyed the instructions that come with The Substance, or if those instructions were more clearly worded. It does advise the person taking it to alternate weeks between inhabiting the younger and older selves, but alas, Elisabeth wants to stay in Sue’s body longer than that. She also equates her physical attractiveness with love. Her older self runs into an ex-classmate who wants to date her, but when it comes time to go out, Elisabeth is tormented by the specter of Sue’s pretty face and winds up staying home. Indeed, when she is in Elisabeth’s body, she starts living like a recluse and stuffing herself with ultraprocessed food in front of her TV.
French writer-director Coralie Fargeat previously made a terrific rape-revenge thriller simply called Revenge, which showed a great visual talent working on a minuscule budget. Here she films Quaid to look as terrible as possible, with extreme close-ups showing every wrinkle as he pisses in a urinal or scarfs down shrimp cocktail in a disgusting manner. It’s meant to show how men do not face the same pressures to maintain their looks as women, and while that’s undoubtedly true, I could have wished for a deeper critique of male power. A sequence near the opening has Elisabeth’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame being laid and then becoming old and cracked over the years as pedestrians walk over it. This director clearly doesn’t have much use for subtlety.
Fargeat does better at imitating the look of pharmaceutical ads or filming Sue’s workout video in ways that porn filmmakers could take cues from. She keeps her lead actresses naked for much of the movie’s running time, and it forms a sharp commentary on impossible standards of female beauty — Elisabeth is in a shape that most sexagenarians would envy, but she can’t resist lusting after Sue’s hotness when it’s lying on her bathroom floor. If the film’s third act drags on too long, it features a climactic sequence that’s bloodier than the prom from Carrie, as Sue’s studio audience pays dearly for their craving for the spectacle of female beauty.
It all plays like David Cronenberg meets The Picture of Dorian Gray from a female perspective, and that is something we haven’t seen. However, the acting by the two leads keeps this from being some cold, clinical exercise. Qualley often plays self-possessed types, but here she comes memorably unhinged as Sue turns her rage against the march of time onto Elisabeth’s aging body, with completely self-defeating consequences. Moore, too, seems to be tapping into a deep well of anger as Elisabeth rage-cooks a bunch of French dishes in her kitchen while watching Sue disparage her work on a TV talk show. Like the best movie monsters, Elisabeth is pitiable to a degree, and she’s especially relatable since we know that even the fittest of us are headed for where she is. Her palpable rage at the onslaught of the aging process is what gives substance to The Substance underneath its considerable style.
The Substance
Starring Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley. Written and directed by Coralie Fargeat. Rated R.
