The Substance: an ironic title?

A movie with nothing much beyond the façade.

Question: why has Hollywood stopped being able to make good movies about itself?

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Good things first: Demi Moore is excellent. There was a time when the Oscars fell head over heels for beautiful women who were “brave” enough to go ugly for a role, and had she made this film back then she’d have been a shoe-in come awards season. But make-up aside, even, she’s very good.

Demi Moore not accepting any awards for getting ugly in The Substance

She is grotesque and she hits the notes of all good body-horror experiences: she makes you feel the irreversible terror of the degradation of the physical entity and the effect that has on the mind. Body horror is about existential dread, not disfigurement. Moore carries that well, even though the movie might want you think she’s horrified at “getting ugly”.

The Substance also does the WTF schlock horror gore well. I admire directors who go too far. If I find myself laughing out of discomfort, you’ve had a good go at me. I respect that. That might not be your preference.

The bad things: it is long. Take out some of the prurient leering camera work (we geddit) in the first hour and you could shave 30 precious minutes.

It is a satire with absolutely nothing interesting or new to say. The metaphors are clunky and boring, the whole thing is waaaaay too “on-the-nose” (as they say), and it treats the audience like idiots (might explain why this was Mark Kermode’s choice for best film of 2024). For such a sledgehammer satire it utterly loses its mind in the final act. I have no idea what the ending was supposed to be saying (although I enjoyed the excess of it all) — not because it was complex or layered, but because it didn’t seem attached to the tedious clarity of the film’s message up to that point. There was an imbalance between the lumpen obviousness of the satirical intent and the ending that seemed torn between ambiguous rage and the satire-for-idiots playbook it was reading from.

(SPOILER ALERT: if you make a film about the anti-woman abusive decadence of the Hollywood machine and at the end you decide a severed head growing back is your killer line, you are boring, and the entire rich history of satire, from Juvenal to George Romero, has been wasted on you).

The disappointment sprouts from the fact the satirical history on the Hollywood sensibility could have done with an update. A film about virtual signalling, California fires, or the state’s catastrophic economy is ripe for the picking. But The Substance is not the film to do it. The Substance is about the ultimate destructive force of Hollywood’s image-obsessed misogyny. This story has been done soooo many time before, and in every instance that comes to mind, it was done better.

One recommendation would be 2014’s Starry Eyes, which does many things The Substance doesn’t, one of which being that it creates a sense of tragedy through a focus on character depth and development. The Substance makes no effort to make us care for any of the characters. They are all 0.5 dimensional (which may be part of the point, but it does make for a tedious confection of a movie).

I’m also curious as to the director’s strange visual calls to Kubrick’s The Shining (and some echoes to other Kubrick movies - the way Denis Quaid is shot like he’s in A Clockwork Orange at times). The Shining stuff adds nothing to the movie and only makes a distraction for those who notice them (they are frequent and weird, some obscure and some quite in-your-face). I ended up suspicious it was just self-indulgence, which is just another fatty injection into an already flabby thing.

Some might respond well to the vacuum the film creates and in which it operates, but without decent characterisation it’s just airless, bloated, quite stupid, patronising, and boring. And in the middle of it all is a quite marvellous Demi Moore doing her darnedest to carve something iconic out of what she’s been given.

Finally, the protagonist’s name: Elisabeth Sparkle. It’s a stupid name for a character — more “on the nose” writing (as she battles with her other self, is she in danger of… uhu… losing her “sparkle”?!?). You see the name revealed on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in the first scene and it’s then difficult to escape the idea that The Substance actually comes from a desire to be a Body Horror Barbie. And Barbie was also rubbish.