bsolescence
, Elisabeth is willing to do anything to turn back the clock.
This movie feels like what it is like to be doom-scrolling Instagram.
The film is so claustrophobic - we spend most of our time stuck in the protagonist’s apartment - and our lead is so inundated with images of youth and sex.
There are only a few interactions with other humans - and they are the most heightened versions of human interaction.
It felt so terrifyingly familiar and it was not until a few days later, as I was limiting my own access to my social media accounts, that I made the connection.
There is almost no subtext to The Substance - our heroine is surrounded by men who are fixated on their own appetites (or maybe I am just extrapolating from Dennis Quaid shovelling food into his face while ogling ass).
The world she lives in is a superficial hell-scape - almost as though Elisabeth is living in the daydream from one of the rapists from the director’s previous film, Revenge.
The film is blunt and aggressive, but in a way that feels like a reflection of the central character's point of view. Everywhere, she is surrounded by images worshipping youth, the obsession with women’s bodies, and the way ageing is treated as a prison. The characters outside of Elisabeth are cartoonish avatars of her own insecurities.
The body as prison is an idea the movie takes to a grotesque extreme by the final set piece.
Demi Moore’s casting gives the movie a extradiegetic weight - the obsession with the star’s body, especially in how media have broken down and examine sit as she aged.
The bleakest scene in the movie is Moore getting ready for a date. Constantly reminded of her younger self, she keeps returning to the mirror, trying to hide her age.
Eventually she gives up, staring into space while her would-be date texts her.
Her youthful doppelgänger Sue is youth and sex. Her show is relentless closeups of her body. She is not given a personality.
She is an image - and she feels the need to keep feeding her ego.
Margaret Qualley has a sinister tilt to her smile, a whiff of a tease, a sense of ironic fatalism that was well-used in last year’s Sanctuary, and even more diabolic here. Sue’s slightly mocking grin haunts Demi Moore’s Elisabeth Sparkle.
The characters are presented as separate, but as the unseen promoter of the Substance emphasises, they are one.
Elisabeth has opportunities to stop - and she cannot. The obsession with youth robs her of life - both literal and social.
Without meaning to, I watched this film right after Grafted. Viewing this movie became part two of a 'beauty-standards-gone-mad' double feature - with The Substance complementing the former picture by being a parable about society’s obsession with youth.
If anything, this unintended double bill draws attention to the film’s complete side-stepping around how whiteness plays into Elisabeth/Sue’s success and downfall. One can read it into the latter’s rapid rise to celebrity, but it is a curious blank spot.
It is worth a look. I have not had such a visceral response to a picture in a long while.
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