Review: The Substance

As Demi Moore awoke from unsettling dreams one morning, she found herself transformed on her bathroom floor into Margaret Qualley.

The Substance touches on a frequently quoted bit of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing about how men look at women while women watch themselves being looked at. In the first act of The Substance, we accompany (Demi Moore in perhaps her most meta role) through her decaying world. Elisabeth’s world is one where her body is commodified, where she is forced to look at herself as a spectacle everywhere she goes. Like all spectacles, she wears down; she’s treated as disposable, ephemeral, like a piece of chicken rotting in her apartment.

When Elisabeth’s double Sue (Margaret Qualley) emerges, we first see her from her own perspective: we see her through her eyes, as the object she was created to be. Sue and Elisabeth’s connection is symbiotic-turned-parasitic-turned-symbiotic-again. Elisabeth’s curse is to see herself as the world sees her: something to be used, enjoyed, and disposed of. It’s body horror, but equally, it’s economic horror, depicting a Hollywood where women are a prized commodity — a world that enlightened, post-#MeToo Hollywood pretends not to be anymore.

Imagine Cinderella meets The Metamorphosis crossed with Sunset Boulevard via Videodrome mixed with Twin Peaks: The Return, and you’d have something almost but not entirely unlike The Substance. It’s bizarre, disgusting, and one of the only intelligent statements about Hollywood this side of the turn of the century. Watching this movie slowly turn into a grosser Carrie is delicious. I giggled at some of the nastiest bits — always a sign that a movie is really effectively horrific. What a beautiful year for horror.