If you want to see The Substance, I definitely recommend going to see it in theaters. A big portion of the watching experience for me was being in a theater and hearing the collective gasps everyone else in there and I would take. Now, going into this film, I did not know much about it besides a vague sense of the plot and that it was a body horror movie. I had heard some people I know talk about how it was one of the new greatest horror movies and had also seen some of the hype around it online.
I think there are two aspects to this movie that I need to talk about, and it’s ironically the style and the substance of it (no pun intended). Stylistically, I think the film did great. For me, it wasn’t even primarily carried by the visuals or gore, but the sound design. There was so much squelching in every scene from many different things, that it was the sound that had me turning in my seat. The intensified sound combined with the frequent extreme close-ups were what made me recoil the most.
In all honesty, I think I have seen films with more gore than this, but the body horror aspect of this movie doesn’t rely on the gore to be what makes you uncomfortable (but if you’re sensitive to needles, be aware that that discomfort will be amplified!). This isn’t to say the gore isn’t disgusting and didn’t make me uncomfortable (because it did at a lot of parts), but the use of sound and cinematography to emphasize what was being done to the human body made it exponentially better in that regard. The filmmakers succeeded 100% in making the excessive aging of the human body very unsettling. The movie is also aware of its campy nature, which I appreciate, and the style of several scenes showcased some humor.
As for the substance of the film, it clearly speaks to the expectations women in society face and the way we put value on women based on their bodies. Both Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley give great performances showing how women are devalued as they age and what this does for one’s mental health. While the film makes it clear both women are one and the same (both Elisabeth Sparkle), both we in the audience and the women themselves begin to view their counterparts as someone else, as two separate entities. While they are the same person, just different versions, it shows how women tend to become jealous of their past selves and even begin to harbor resentment and envy for their youth.
The movie also exemplifies how the desire to remain young and fit within society’s beauty standards can become an addiction. The parallels to today’s society and how girls younger and younger are getting into anti-aging skincare are clear. In my opinion, the film presented these ideas in a very over-the-top manner, but I think that was the point and what made it camp. I will say that I thought the film’s message, although still true, was very surface-level and didn’t explore it in as nuanced or deep of a way as I expected. Nonetheless, I thought it was a successful body horror, it conveyed what it wanted to convey, and I left the theater with my mouth agape.