Demi Moore is bruised, battered and brazenly broken in body horror thriller The Substance (2024): Film Review
- Deadend
- Nov 3, 2024
- 7 min read
The first time I saw Demi Moore naked was in Striptease (1996), a critically-panned black comedy about an FBI secretary-turned-stripper battling a child custody dispute and a corrupt politician who is infatuated with her. In 2024's critical darling The Substance, Demi Moore is a whole lot more naked and equally, if not more, beguiling. But I disagree with the critics on both films.
Demi Moore was paid an unprecedented $12.5 million to star in Striptease, making her the highest paid actress at the time. The film grossed more than double its budget, but it was shot down by critics and marked the end of Moore's golden run in Hollywood which included blockbusters like Ghost (1990), A Few Good Men (1992), Indecent Proposal (1993) and Disclosure (1994). The actress has done plenty of note-worthy work on both film and television since Striptease, but her stardom never quite regained the luminosity of early 90s Demi Moore.
In The Substance, Demi Moore plays Elisabeth Sparkle, a once-luminous, now-fading Hollywood star who is abruptly fired from hosting her long-running aerobics show on network television on the morning of her 50th birthday. The reason being, as network chief Harvey (played by Dennis Quaid, who is cast wonderfully against-type) puts it, that television audiences constantly want something new. "And at 50," Harvey explains over a plate of particularly squelchy shrimps, "it stops." Elisabeth asks him what he means. Harvey doesn't really furnish a satisfactory answer as to what "it" is, but we have grown up watching Hollywood studios sunset so many talented female performers before their time that we know exactly what Harvey means. We know.
Elisabeth is still reeling from the shock of being fired when she is offered a wonder drug that can generate "a younger, more beautiful, more perfect" version of herself. Elisabeth accepts (after some trepidation), and injects the serum into her body causing Sue, a younger version of Elisabeth (played by Margaret Qualley) to emerge out of a slit in the back of her body, and we now have a body horror flick on our hands. The rules of usage of the drug are clear: Elisabeth and Sue are symbiotic beings, and must "switch" places every seven days in order to maintain "the balance". While one version is out and about, the other remains comatose in their apartment, carefully stabilized with daily doses of the drug by the active self.
Demi Moore, Dennis Quaid and Margaret Qualley are excellent in The Substance.
Right from her endogenous conception to every silken fibre of her being, Sue is a miracle. The camera lingers on her, not objectifyingly, but with wonder, much as Sue does. Sue feels her slick, taut body; the camera gazes at her unlined skin; Sue and camera both marvel at her effortless, radiant Youth. In bubblegum-pink-and-blue-Technicolour, Sue sets about conquering the world, and begins by taking over Elisabeth's old job as a Jane Fondaesque dance instructor.
And then - Sue begins to get careless. Sloppy. A little too casual about the rules of the body swap. Her youth and beauty are simply too good to be paused; the opportunities and advantages that come with youth and beauty simply too urgent to be put on hold. Why should she not have more than seven days, when she makes such good use of those days? Sue - well, Sue- is a Hollywood star. Elisabeth merely a sad old lady who spends her allotted week in front of daytime soaps with buckets of fried chicken for company.
But the rules are clear and unequivocal about this sort of thing. Any excess on one end must be accounted for by a deficit on the other. Every extra second that Sue spends in her enviable body means an extra whammy of ugliness for Elisabeth. And so we watch as Sue's selfishness begins to eat away at Elisabeth's hands and feet, as they crack up and shrivel her skin and begin the inevitable project of making her a monster.
All this cracking up and shrivelling -external and internal- means that Demi Moore puts in perhaps the most physical performance by an actress in ages, using not just her expressions but every exposed muscle and vein of her body to communicate. In fact all three of the primary cast is excellent throughout. Dennis Quaid owns his scenes, and Margaret Qualley is clearly a phenomenal talent. But I couldn't help feeling that the film failed its own intriguing -and important- premise, by not letting Sue and Elisabeth share a single consciousness. You see Elisabeth is not just physically inactive when Sue goes out into the world, she is all-systems-down. Elisabeth doesn't live vicariously through Sue or share her experiences or memories; they are literally two different people, living two different lives, one week-in, one week-out. Which begs the question: why do this at all?
If you're a regular-joe, late-stage millennial like me, you're probably thinking, "Sure I'd love to shut down every other week and catch up on some much-needed sleep". But Elisabeth is no ordinary Jane, late-stage though she may be. She's a celebrity. A star. She doesn't work a corporate job she hates to pay EMIs for things she doesn't really need; she's Rich! Apple probably pays her to use their latest stupid gadget. There's a reason why rich people would never want to shut down every other week. It's because they're too busy being -and enjoying- being rich!
Elisabeth and Sue sharing a consciousness would have made The Substance a much more interesting, and meaningful, movie.
If Sue were to go out into the world on Elisabeth's behalf, and Elisabeth -now older and wiser- got to see the world not just through Sue's eyes but for what it is, would she feel differently about fame? Would she revel in her newly regained youth or would she hate Sue -and herself- for craving validation from a system that only rewards youth? At a time when tech billionaires are biohacking their way to immortality and uploading your "mind" to the cloud seems a distinct possibility, an ageing Hollywood star ruminating on the nature of fame by re-living her own glamorous life through a younger self would have been not just interesting, but timely. Instead, we get two different, unconnected Elisabeths with the younger Elisabeth's unwillingness to honour "the balance" leading to an extremely farcical climax.
Okay maybe I'm being a little unfair to The Substance writer-director Coralie Fargeat here, because the film is clearly meant to be a hammy body horror that you can squeamishly and joyously watch with your friends. There's enough bodily discharges and dismemberment and disembodiment to make even the most hardcore fans of the genre happy. So I write the next few paragraphs painfully aware of the absurdity of rejecting a film on the grounds that it did what it set out to do too well, but here goes:
I think why The Substance disappointed me as a work of art is because the film is so much more before it changes gears into the campy-genre-caper that its creators set out to make. Sure, the directorial hand is a bit heavy on the wheel at times and there are bouts of what I like to call the "Youtube School of Cinematic Film Making", but The Substance really fools you into thinking it has something important to say over the first thirty minutes of its runtime. The Substance could have been a movie about how the world (and Hollywood) views women, and how that lens influences women's relationship with their bodies. Instead, it's literally a movie about two female bodies. By which I mean that neither female protagonist is given the chance to reflect or have an internal journey and are instead thrown into a ring to physically battle each other instead. The acting is excellent, the set design and prosthetic work are brilliant, the shock-and-awe is real (and fun), but the film ironically lacks substance.
The Substance feels like an opportunity lost especially because Coralie couldn't have picked a better actress to play the protagonist of a film about sexism and ageism in Hollywood, given the tabloid's love-hate relationship with Demi over the years. Here is a veteran actress who was the undisputed draw of some of Hollywood's biggest blockbusters at a time when Arnold Schwarzenegger and Van Damne reigned supreme; a rebel who posed nude on the cover of Vanity Fair while seven months pregnant just to say fuck-you to prevailing Hollywood attitudes about femininity, a star who was nastily nicknamed "Gimme Moore" by the media because she refused roles that didn't pay what she thought she deserved; a woman whose marriage to Ashton Kutcher, 15 years her junior, helped spread the term “cougar” into societal consciousness; a perma-celebrity whose then-husband's infidelities and her own struggles with addiction have all informed social media's perception of her more than her stellar record as one of Hollywood's biggest-ever leading ladies. If you asked Demi Moore her thoughts about how Hollywood and its media machine treats women, you suspect she would have quite a bit to say.
Yet, setting up Moore in a role that at this stage of her career she is unquestionably the best-suited to play and then flipping the script to let her just go hammer-and-tongs at her dual selves -GI Jane style- ripping nails and drawing blood and spewing phlegm, and later entrusting the theatrical release of the film to streaming platform Mubi, is maybe the most fittingly 2024 way to tell big studios to go fuck themselves and their ideas of female beauty. Much like Demi Moore did all those years ago as the muse of another female collaborator, Annie Leibovitz.
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