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The Substance (2024)

Premise: An aging Hollywood star chases youth with a medical serum and very specific instructions that promise consequences if not followed.

Rating: An instant body-horror classic

Before I review this film, I feel like I need to give a little bit of a lesson on what body horror is.  It is a genre or sometimes a trope within another genre that delivers upset or horror through the contortion or transformation of the human body.  It's not scary, per se, in so far as people are jumping out and trying to kill you, but the danger comes from within.  Sometimes that is an upsetting/painful/gross/gory sequence in another genre of movie, like a classic werewolf transformation.  But sometimes, the slow transformation encompasses the entire narrative, like in District 9, The Fly, or Kafka's The Metamorphosis.  And almost always, the assault on the body serves as a metaphor for some kind of real-life body-altering part of the human experience: adolescence, pregnancy, cancer, to name a few.

And The Substance revolves around the undefeated nature father time -- the horrors of getting old.

Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley both play versions of a Suzanne Sommers-style fitness/aerobics guru.  And for women in Hollywood, sex sells and age matters.  Both are great in the role and will likely be nominated for major awards.  There is a lot of non-sexual nudity, showing a warts-and-all version of Moore.  As beautiful as she is, the movie goes out of its way to show her dumpiest parts.  It asks without asking: What is beauty?  What does beautiful aging look like?  What does it mean to be happy with who you are?  It compares the aging lives of men.  It comments on sexuality in media.  It's all pretty on-the-nose.

If fact, my biggest gripe with the film is that it fairly sets up lots of interesting moments, but doesn't trust its audience to connect the dots and, in editing, will re-play the thing they showed you before, so that you remember it for the callback.  I don't like that.  I find the experience of making those connections myself and the joy of those realizations to be a fundamental part of what I like about movies, so having that spoon-fed to me just isn't my style.

Despite that, I did find this movie to be effective and thought-provoking.  I think that this will be a standard whenever the genre is discussed, from now on.  As many body horror films are, this is gross.  ...not just the transformation stuff (but that too), but in the way that it depicts the human form and regular human interaction.  People are sometimes shown in unflattering ways, too close, in fish-eye lenses, or while eating -- smacking, sloppy, and grotesque. 

My favorite thing about it, though, was that it seemed to have a bunch of little references to other body horror, horror classics, and even fantasy films.  I'll just give you one of the more obvious ones: Prior to the transformation, one of the extreme close-ups is of a struggling fly in her martini, which is a callback to The Fly (1986) and a bit of foreshadowing of what's to come.  I noticed references to The Fly, District 9, The Shining, The Metamorphosis, Cinderella, and Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.  I'm sure there were a ton more that slipped past me.  But I liked that it seemed to pay homage to all these movies that focused on similar themes, while cementing itself as an instant classic in the genre.

I really enjoyed the movie until the end. I felt I had wasted my time then.