The movie is a fabulous take on today’s obsession with beauty, quick-fix weight loss, and cosmetic treatments, as well as pressures on female celebrities. Director Coralie Fargeat takes the body-horror genre and makes it a – decidedly unsubtle – commentary on feminism.
The coup d’etat is to cast Moore, one of the fittest and most beautiful 62-year-olds I have seen to play the ageing and insecure star Elisabeth Sparkle. When we meet Sparkle, she is a TV fitness guru. Sparkle is informed by her TV boss, an old man in a suit deciding what constitutes beauty, that she’s being put out to pasture and replaced by a younger model.
What follows is how Sparkle decides to try ‘the substance’, which will allow her a taste of youth. How will this happen? Each instalment of the ‘substance’, which has vials, syringes, and elixirs that must be injected, is delivered in brown cardboard packages to a post-box – without needing any human interaction. The kit comes with multiple warnings, much like Ozempic and Mounjaro that reportedly make many users nauseous and have bouts of diarrhoea.
Moore injects herself with a liquid which creates a younger self – Margaret Qualley’s character, Sue – who climbs out of her body in a gruesome scene in which Moore’s back splits down her spine. The procedure is completed by inserting an IV shot of nutrients labelled ‘FOOD’ every day. Every week the two selves must switch to regenerate, leaving one version comatose while the other steps out into the world.
Litte sachets of what looks like glucose liquid marked as ‘FOOD’ are not unlike the newly popular glutathione IV drips and injections, which celebrities and anyone so inclined can take for ‘skin whitening, reducing pigmentation, and maintaining overall skin health and hyperpigmentation.’ Glutathione is injected straight into your bloodstream through an IV for 20 minutes – and voila, your skin and hair do look younger. Slight side effects are mild nausea and sometimes a rash. But who cares about nausea and the runs as long as you look like Snow White with Scarlett O’Hara’s waistline?The storyline takes a twist when Moore’s younger self gets greedy and doesn’t want to hibernate for a week, and instead starts stealing more and more time in the real world – ageing Moore’s body like Dorian Gray’s painting. It all ends in a triumph of body horror.What makes this film effective is the fact that while unreal beauty standards have always existed for women and female celebrities, never has the cult of unreal youth been as celebrated as it is today. We have made national icons of Bollywood and industrialist wives who celebrate the use of botox, fish sperm facials, and facelifts, while never lifting a book to read. Nip, tuck, lift, inject. Thin women with stretched, immobile faces trying to be thinner while perpetually looking surprised.
The charm of The Substance lies in Moore’s bravery in choosing this as her comeback vehicle at 62, stripping herself literally and figuratively naked in the process. There is cleverness in casting her as an ageing celebrity who will do anything to remain relevant, even though she looks better than most women at 42. Who knew that this was how we would all become women of substance?