Apr 8

Apr 8 Movie Review : The Substance (2024)

I’ve been haunted by an Instababe named Virginia Sanhouse.

Not in the she’s-so-hot-she-lives-in-my-subconscious kind of way. More like the way Jehovah’s Witnesses used to haunt Sunday mornings—uninvited, oddly persistent, and forcing you to reflect on your value system before you've had your coffee. Sometimes, she'll even start back to he camera or wear costumes to trick me into watching her content. She's been persistent (and quite successful) in her pursuit of my attention.

If I haven't blocked her content yet, I believe it means two things:

Part of me wants to see it.
The other part of me knows millions of other guys do too.

That’s Instagram's algorithm’s whole game—it shoves at you what your lizard brain almost hates itself for wanting.

I thought about Virginia Sanhouse while watching Coralie Fargeat’s already celebrated body horror film The Substance. Virginia’s obviously not in it, but the movie draws blood from the same vein.

Our collective obsession with beauty isn’t about individuals like her. It’s not about vanity or narcissism or even Instagram. It’s about something older and dumber—a prehistoric glitch in the human brain that rewards symmetry and punishes decay. Beauty is a culturally subsidized god, and youth is its high priest. And those who ascend to the altar are eventually offered back to the beast the moment time renders them obsolete.

Everyone who wanted to watch The Substance has done so by now, but in case you were living under a rock since October: it tells the story of Elizabeth Sparkle (yes, that is how they named her and she’s played by Demi Moore), a famous television fitness instructor who was deemed disposable by her network as she turned 50. As a way to cling on to the spotlight, she injects a weird, fluorescent goop into herself that promises to give birth to a younger and even better version of herself (played by Margaret Qualley).

Only twist is: both can’t exist at the same time. The new self (Sue) gets seven days to shine before switching back, but Sue is drunk on freedom, addicted to being watched, and not great at sharing the spotlight.

The Substance is like a closer in baseball. It has one single pitch that none of us can hit. It’s a movie that looks at perfection like a performance and makes a solid case. There is an image of Elizabeth Sparkle and an image of Sue you see on television, but none of the sacrifices necessary to these moments of illusory bliss. Sparkle dedicated her existence to sculpting a body that would become a reference in terms of social norms and essentially drained her life of any other markers of self-worth.

That’s how she ends up sacrificing her literal self (both her body and her own time on this Earth) in order to satisfy the voracious gods of entertainment we collectively worship. Sue comes to life and takes everything away from her, but she also feeds like a vampire on Elizabeth’s allotted time. If entertainment is a cosmic God, beauty and youth are vampires that feed on everything around them in order to perpetuate themselves. People wither and die, but that shit continues for as long as there are beautiful people to showcase.

As Elizabeth sees herself literally rot because of Sue’s selfishness and Sue loses pieces of herself, you’re reminded that such a relationship to beauty has a price. That you only can put so much stress on a body before it starts acting up. The relationship to time in The Substance is idiosyncratic, but the body horror works in the same way as it does for us: we're all going to watch ourselves wither away and die and none of us have the luxury to choose when or how. Try to pause it and you’re only gonna speed it up.

Now, less courageous movies would have a third act where Elizabeth slays the monster, learns to accept her aging self, falls in love with her old classmate and becomes a producer or whatever. I'm not gonna spoil what happens, but it's not where Coralie Fargeat goes at all. That's where The Substance earns its rank as a true blue horror movie and eschews any potential Hollywood didactic bullshit. Nothing begins or ends with Elizabeth and Sue. They are mere embodiments of an older and larger problem.

It’s easy to think Elisabeth is being punished for having bad values. But that’s not what the film’s doing. She had no backup plan because she never needed one. Her job was her validation. And the truth is, that’s not unique. That’s not monstrous. That’s just... us. I don’t think Elisabeth had shitty values. I think I do. I probably would’ve watched her show for the wrong reasons. I still click on Virginia Sanhouse reels, knowing full well what’s happening and doing it anyway.

Because the system is broken. And it eats people.

Do I think that The Substance is as great as it was made out to be? Somewhat. To be honest, I'm just happy that movies with such a powerful sense of an identity are being made in 2024 and survived Bob Iger for the last twenty years. It’s different, energetic and most important, it doesn't take all the obvious decisions any other Hollywood movie would. It’s a film that knows exactly what it is, and it never flinches and we should be collectively overjoyed with that.

And Virginia—if you’re reading this—I hope you’ve got people who love you beyond the metrics. I hope you’ve got a plan for the moment the algorithm moves on. Because it will. And when that happens, you’ll still deserve to be loved. Even when you’re not trending. Even when you’re not on your best day.

That’s what The Substance leaves you with: the idea that the scariest part of being human isn’t death. It’s realizing you’ve spent your life being watched, and no one ever really saw you.