Are We Getting The Substance All Wrong?

The Demi Moore horror film is being hailed for its feminism, but its real strength is in its portrayal of addictive behavior. Photo: MUBI

Warning: Spoilers ahead for the plot of The Substance.

There’s nothing developed or nuanced about the feminism of The Substance. It’s a blunt-force object of a movie that begins with one of the leering men in suits who control show business doing the professional equivalent of taking the female lead behind the barn and shooting her when she hits the age of 50. But does there need to be? We’re so accustomed now to approaching art-house horror as allegorical, with every outlandish menace a stand-in for some real-world wrong, that it’s downright disorienting how literal Coralie Fargeat’s bloody-gummed howl of a body-horror movie is. The Substance doesn’t feel any need to relitigate the existence of the patriarchy. Instead, it treats the toxicity of its heightened version of Hollywood as settled law, using the place as a highly polished magnifying glass for the culture at large’s bottomless appetite for youth and beauty. Sexism and ageism run rampant, but they provide the backdrop against which the film’s narrative unfolds, rather than its focus. What’s really of interest to Fargeat is the relationship her protagonist, Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), an Oscar-winning actor turned fitness celeb, has with an industry that’s openly intent on treating her as disposable, yet that keeps her hooked with the siren song of public affirmation. Fargeat’s film isn’t, at its core, about inequality, but about what keeps us coming back to situations and, yes, substances that harm us. It’s about addiction.

Addiction is why, of all Fargeat’s touchstones — the Shining-esque carpet that lines the hallway leading to Elisabeth’s studio, the Society-style climax that finds Elisabeth transformed into a mass of mutated flesh — it’s Requiem for a Dream, Darren Aronofsky’s four-part symphony of drug-fueled degradation, that she returns to the most. It’s in the visual language, the fisheye lens, the close-ups of eyes, and the rhythmic montage of Elisabeth’s younger counterpart Sue (Margaret Qualley) tossing canisters of “stabilizing fluid� after injections. But it’s present in more prominent ways, too, like the distinctively Tappy Tibbons-esque smarm of Harvey, the impresario network exec played by Dennis Quaid, or the way the syringe going into the increasingly grody fissure on Elisabeth’s back recalls Jared Leto shooting up into his necrotic arm. As in Requiem for a Dream, there are many addictions running through The Substance, the pharmaceutical product of the title being just one of them. Still, it’s a hell of a thing, that product. It arrives in an ominous version of Instagram-minimalist packaging, and requires its recipient to prepare the syringe herself like it’s off-brand Ozempic. All the red flags surrounding the Substance, which comes with stern usage warnings and has to be retrieved from a locker room accessible only by hunching under a half-raised grate in an alley, threaten to overshadow its potential benefits. And then Elisabeth uses it, and her spine splits open, leaving her a rasping husk of flesh while an alternate self rises, in the dewy buff, to survey her taut flesh with a clinical eye in the mirror.

This sounds like the set-up of a story about a younger woman destroying an older one, but while Elisabeth starts referring to Sue as a separate entity right away, the makers of the drug remind her (and us) again and again that they’re the same person. Thinking of Sue as someone with her own agency is a steroidal version of blaming late-night texts to your ex on your drunken self — it’s not just a deflection of agency, it’s a way of framing yourself as the victim of someone else’s bad impulses. For all the swaggering grossness of The Substance, there’s a visceral and emotional rawness to the scenes where Elisabeth awakens to find her body gnarled and aged because Sue overstayed her welcome, or takes up binge eating out of boredom and unhappiness. Wrestling with addictive behavior really does feel like being at war with yourself. You steal time or the well-being of your future self with bouts of overindulgence, and then are later disgusted with your past self for doing things you swear you’ll never repeat. Elisabeth slaps her own face in her efforts to stop what she’s doing. She and Sue aim a joint shriek of “You have to control yourself!� at one other across the weeks of their alternating existence. By the time she’s unable to bring herself to go out on that date with her old classmate, a normie who knew her before she was famous, it’s clear that Elisabeth isn’t going to be able to save herself.

Moore’s gotten a lot of praise for her performance as Elisabeth Sparkle, a role that involves the vulnerability of being nude onscreen, the effort of enduring prosthetics, and the risks of such outré material. But her finest achievement is allowing the character to have pathos without ever softening how off-putting she is — this shell of a person whose interior got hopelessly mangled long before her exterior matched. Elisabeth has nothing outside the career that’s ended against her will, leaving her alone in that outdated luxury apartment that becomes a prison of her own making. She’s no longer a part of Hollywood, but she’s internalized its warped standards and come to believe in them herself — she thinks that, as a middle-aged woman, she has no worth or even visibility if she’s not being adored for her alluring fecundity. The most telling compulsion of them all is that, when given a chance to start anew as Sue, the first thing Elisabeth does is go right back to the same people who discarded her — without even trying to negotiate a stronger position for herself as the “It� girl du jour. Elisabeth is not a triumphant heroine, at the beginning or ever — she’s an addict who can’t manage to overcome the reigning habit of her life, which is her need to be wanted. And in The Substance’s hilariously gruesome ending is a cautionary tale about what it means to be unable to envision a better life — one in which you love yourself.