The Substance Review
There's blood, and a little more blood, and just some more blood.
Synopsis
Elisabeth Sparkle - a fading celebrity - is fired from her long known job as a fitness icon and decides to take a black market drug that promises a younger, better, and more perfect version of yourself. With a perfect balance of seven days each, nothing can go wrong. Yet, Sue - the younger and more perfect version - does otherwise.
Elisabeth Sparkle
Played by Demi Moore, Elisabeth is the matrix, the main character that sets the rest of the story. Elisabeth is the personification of what every woman in the industry goes through, to always be perfect and to always be young, and if you don't serve anymore to such task and is descarted, everything you can do is just accept and stay quiet because you need to be "cordial." And right from the beginning we see that all Elisabeth wants is to be loved, either by her fans, by someone, but most importantly by herself. But the only answer that she can quickly find to this problem is... THE SUBSTANCE.
Sue
Played by Margaret Qualley, Sue is the other self, the product of the substance injected into Elisabeth. Sue is the complete opposite of Elisabeth, not only physically, but most importantly mentally. After Elisabeth is fired from her agency, Sue catches the chance and takes the spot to be the next fitness icon, by replacing Elisabeth, Sue lives every dream that Elisabeth has either lived through or wanted to live through: the cover of Vogue, her own special show in the New Year's Eve, and much more. However, Sue can't be happy with what she has, and decides to go over the rules, by going over the balance of 7 days, Sue's greediness and egocentrism makes Elisabeth older by using more of the spinal fluid (the liquid that makes Sue survive).
The Main Message
The main message of the substance is the truthful and extreme violent beauty standards that women need to go through in order to be accepted. By presenting that Elisabeth when turning 50 "things just change... and they want something new." Entitling herself only to beauty and looks, and even though by serving on the industry for over 30 years, they discard her like literal trash. While, Sue is what the industry wants. By presenting her like a sweaty bottle of beer and emphasizing every single perfection in her body, Sue becomes the beauty standards herself, and showing that with the looks she has, anything to her is possible.
Symbolism
It's not even possible to describe all of the different symbols in this movie. Coralie - the director - is able to put a tsunami of symbols that every time we can try and understand each one of them we'll only find more and more meanings to it. But the most noticeable ones are:
Food
At every scene in this movie related to food, we see Elisabeth in a situation where food is always the rest and crumbs of it, but never the full meal itself, but always something disgusting and that feels even visceral. Which is exactly how Elisabeth feels like in the movie, always like the rest of the situation, always chewed upon and sometimes even spitted out. All emphasizing with the message of aging, and how much if a person doesn't fit into the beauty standards they are just a rest.
The bathroom
At every transition scene between "selves" (the most important scenes) in this movie happens in a completely cold white tiled bathroom in Elisabeth's house. As though the meaning for the choice of this bathroom can vary between people, we can view it as a way of Elisabeth to always notice her own flaws, and how she can make herslef more "perfect" so she can fit in every beauty standard imposed by her at the industry.
While still having numerous symbolism and different messages, The Substance provides immense technicality, that only improves the quality those different messages are transmitted.
Cinematography
By far the cinematography of this movie is one the most unique ones presented in the horror genre. Always showing extreme wide shots to emphasize the feeling of loneliness and isolation that Elisabeth feels, while also showing extreme close up shots of body parts and objects, to increase the feeling of wanting to be loved and accepted, that both Elisabeth and Sue experience or wish to experience.
Sound Design
The sounds of this movie are something that hardly nobody has ever felt in a movie. It all feels excrutiating and like we are the ones being chewed up and that are inside each other's body. Showing the sounds of food being eaten, cooked, sounds of your own bodys and even the sound of body movements. This is just one of the immense elements that makes us feel completely immersed in this movie.
Clothing Design
Lastly, one of the other importants technical elements in this movie is the choice of clothes, specially shown in both Elisabeth and Sue. And how Elisabeth always wear long and thick coats that cover her completely, while still using vivid colors that show her feeling of wanting to be loved by the outside world. Compared to Sue, where she only wears short and tight clothings with extreme vivid colors that only make her body pop out, showing her need to be loved and the love she has for herself.
Graphicness in The Substance
The Substance is one of the most gory and violent films of 2024, and even the decade may I say? However, it's a movie that asks for this graphic content. We can specially see this type of scenes in the transformation scenes, where we can fully see the process in which the substance works on the human body, where a literal other person comes out of someone's back. But all of this type of scenes shows the graphic and violent reality that women go through to fit into this beauty standards, and Coralie doesn't have any pity on the audience, and gives a well deserved realistic punch in the stomach.
The ending...
The ending of this film may be one of the most divisive endings this year. Where Sue needs to take the substance as she killed Elisabeth in a gory and violent fight after Sue dried out Elisabeth's spinal fluid, making her an extremely old person, and Elisabeth tries and kills Sue, but it's not able to do so, after she realizes the only thing she has left of her beauty is the product of her own body (Sue). Yet, the reaction that the substance causes is horrible, creating a literal monster (Monstro Elisasue) that blends both Elisabeth and Sue where everything is missplaced. After such incident, Monstro Elisasue goes to the New Year's Eve event, and a bloodbath happens after the audience realizes that such creation isn't Sue. In the real finale, we see a part of Elisabeth's face (that was located behind the monster's back) lying on top of her cracked Hollywood star of fame. This ending can mean multiple things, and one of them may be the extreme extent that humans go on beauty procedures to be accepted on the beauty standards proposed by society.
Coralie Fargeat's direction
Fargeat's vision is an immaculate work, right by the begining scene showing a celullar division of an egg yolk (estabilishing the main event of the transformation in the movie) to the last scene of a cleaning machine clearing the rests of Elisabeth's face on top of her star (emphasizing the message of "washing" away someone with no feelings and regret). Her attention to detail and references to other filmmakers like David Croenberg, David Lynch, and John Carpenter adds to the deep messages and meanings presented in the movie. But the main element that emphasizes this message is Coralie's own life events that inspired her to do this movie, and how she always saw the beauty standards imposed on woman as something absurd and violent.