The Substance will become, to everyone who sees it, the most talked about film of the year.
Genre: Body Horror
Premise: A former Hollywood star signs up for a secret service that allows her to split in two, birthing a younger hotter version of herself.
About: I’ve waited five long years to see Fargeat’s follow-up to “Revenge.” Bringing Demi Moore back for a major role? Count me in. Inject some Margaret Qualley into that equation? DOUBLE count me in. The Substance didn’t have the marketing money to get the same awareness as a lot of these other Hollywood movies. But it did win Best Screenplay at Cannes.
Writer: Coralie Fargeat
Details: 2 hours and 20 minutes
Some context is necessary before I get into today’s review.
I knew NOTHING about this movie going into it.
I went because the director directed Revenge and I loved that movie. I couldn’t wait to see what she came up with in her first American film.
That information is key because had I known what I was getting into, I would’ve prepared myself better. It’s the funny thing about expectations. I prefer to know as little as possible about a script or a movie going in. And yet, there are certain types of movies that you need to be in a certain headspace for going in. This was one of those movies.
50 year old former Hollywood star, Elizabeth Sparkle, who’s barely scraping by doing a fitness show for women of a certain age, is mortified when she overhears her evil boss mention that he’s going to fire her and find a younger hotter replacement.
Distracted by that information on her drive home, she gets in a car accident. Luckily, she’s fine. At the doctor’s office, a young attractive man slips her something called “The Substance.” It’s a service that allows you to split into two, basically. This other version of yourself will be young and hot.
Elizabeth injects the substance and births Sue, who immediately auditions for the replacement position, which she gets easily. Good times, right? Ah, but there are rules with the substance. You can only be young for seven days at a time. Your old version then must be reactivated for 7 days to replenish the cells needed to stay young, while you are deactivated. You must keep this schedule or certain body modifications will start happening.
Sue begins loving young life so much that she gradually starts stretching out her seven days. A few hours at first. Then a few days. Elizabeth will wake up with an old finger. Or an old leg. She complains to customer support but they tell her, “You guys are the same. You have to figure it out yourselves.”
Sue then gets on such a hot streak at work that she simply stops switching altogether. When she’s finally out of animation juice, she has no choice but to reactivate Elizabeth, and ohhhhhh boy does Elizabeth look different. She is a beast. And she’s mad as hell at Sue for doing this to her. This can only lead to one thing – a battle to the death.
Let me start with the concept.
I was in.
I’m always telling screenwriters: Start with a big concept. If you start with a big concept, every stage of selling the script becomes a thousand times easier. Getting people to read your script is easier. Getting people to greenlight your movie is easier. And getting people to see your movie is easier.
This idea of being able to trade off with a younger version of yourself half the year via an injectable serum is about as high concept as it gets. Which surprised me. Fargeat’s first film had such a basic premise (a girl is left for dead by her evil boyfriend in the desert and she comes back and kills him and his friends) that I wasn’t expecting something this concept-y.
And I absolutely LOVE Fargeat’s direction. To the point where I’m obsessed with it. That opening sequence where we hold on a top down shot of a sidewalk as Elizabeth Sparkle’s Hollywood star is put in. We see her, top down still, accepting the honor. Then, top down still, we watch the years pass by, overhearing chatter from the people passing over the star. “Who is this?” “I don’t know. She used to be famous a long time ago.” Over more time still, the star starts to crack. Until finally we’re seeing people casually drop food on it. Homeless people wheeling their carts over it. It was such a brilliant way to tell her backstory.
Since Thursday is Scene Showdown (enter here!), I want to highlight the scene-writing as well. My favorite scene occurred in the middle of the movie. Elizabeth decides she wants to go on a date with an old classmate. They set the date for that night. We then show Elizabeth getting ready in the bathroom. She looks at herself in the mirror. But she’s clearly not satisfied. She’s not satisfied because she’s now experienced life as Sue – being younger, tighter, more effortlessly beautiful. So she applies more makeup, trying to hide more of her wrinkles. Mask her imperfections.
But then she’s not happy with her cleavage. It doesn’t look as good as Sue’s. So she grabs a scarf and awkwardly covers herself. We see the clock ticking, getting closer and closer to the date time, but she’s less and less happy with herself, making more and more changes, desperately trying to look as young and pretty as possible, until finally she has a breakdown where she messes up her entire look, climaxing in her sitting, like a lump, on her living room floor, a series of text messages from her date coming in on her nearby phone: “Hello? Are you still coming?” “Are you here yet?” “Are you okay?”
What I liked about the scene is it had that beginning, middle, and end that I’m always advocating for in your scene-writing. And it did it WITHOUT A WORD OF DIALOGUE. That’s not easy to do! So I always rate writers who are able to pull that off.
Now, if the movie would’ve focused on scenes like that the whole time, I would’ve loved it.
But as I slowly began to realize, this was a body-horror movie. Maybe THE body-horror movie. The best of all time, I may proclaim? The problem is, I am NOT a body-horror fan. I don’t enjoy it. It creeps me out. I find it weird. And that was what doomed this movie for me in the final 45 minutes because the final 45 minutes are all body-horror.
Ironically, the things I loved about Coraline’s direction – the extreme close-ups, the unique angles, the unexpected ways she’d shoot a scene – became the things I hated. Cause she wouldn’t just show an eyeball growing on Elizabeth’s shoulder. She would get an extreme close-up of that eyeball, play the various squishy sounds that eyeballs make when they move around, show you pus coming out of the lip of the eye socket. She might keep you there with that eyeball for an entire 60 seconds. It was unsettling.
But for me, the thing that killed The Substance was the absurd amount of blood during the final scene. Have you ever watched a movie where a character gets their arm chopped off and for about 3 seconds, we see them holding their arm, screaming, with blood shooting out everywhere?
Well, I want you to imagine that happening for ten straight minutes. With deafening high-octane metal blasting. And a million close-ups of 200 different people getting sprayed with blood. And we don’t leave the 10,000 square foot room until every wall, every floor, every ceiling, is entirely covered with blood.
It was so bizarrely unnecessary to get the point across. We literally got the point 9 minutes and 30 seconds ago.
And while, at times, Deformed Elizabeth was fun, seeing every crevice of her pulsating decaying body in extreme close-up again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again… oh wait, there’s more… and again and again and again and again and again and again… nope, the movie’s not over yet… and again and again and again, became unbearable.
Unless you’re a body horror junkie, I can’t, in good conscience, recommend this movie. It’s so hard to look at at times, that I don’t know what the entertainment value is supposed to be. And to be honest, I didn’t think the script was very good either. Sue rarely talks. So I never felt like I understood her. The movie is supposed to be taking place in modern day but the New Year’s Finale production seemed to be set in 1950. Coraline played fast and loose with the rules of her story.
I’m bummed out. Cause I expected to love this movie. I thought for sure I’d have another entry for Top Movies of 2024. Twas not to be.
You can read the script here: The Substance
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Learn to tell a scene with a beginning, middle, and end, with no dialogue. If you can write a good scene with that limitation, you should have no problem writing good scenes that contain dialogue.
