“Have you ever dreamt of a better version of yourself?” The voice asks. “Younger. More beautiful. More perfect.”
Yes. Yes, Elisabeth Sparkle has.
Elisabeth’s been a celebrity for decades now. She entered Hollywood as its latest pretty young thing, graduated to Oscar-winning actress, and, for an encore, remade herself into a fitness maven. For years, she’s been the star of her very own aerobics show, Sparkle Your Life.
But the shelf life of a female star is short and unforgiving. Elisabeth’s had a good run, but it’s time to find the next pretty young thing.
So say the television producers, looking for ever-higher TV ratings. So say the fans, obsessed as they are with youth and beauty, and how they dogmatically link the two. So says a society that suggests that natural aging is an unnatural affront.
Perhaps Elisabeth Sparkle thought she’d be the exception.
But then she’s fired.
Television exec Harvey does the deed while stuffing himself with shrimp.
“At 50,” he says, “well, it stops.”
What stops?
Harvey doesn’t say. But Elisabeth feels the answer, deep in her bones, in the pit of her gut.
Everything. Everything stops.
Perhaps it was fate that sent that car hurtling into hers; that sent her to the hospital; that introduced her to that young, curiously beautiful male nurse. He told her she’d be a great candidate for The Substance.
“It changed my life,” he said.
And while Elisabeth waved him away, the thumb drive she finds in her coat pocket isn’t so easy to dismiss.
“Have you ever dreamt of a better version of yourself?” The voice on the drive asks. “Younger. More beautiful. More perfect.”
Yes. Yes, Elisabeth Sparkle has.
You’ll not find much to admire in The Substance—other than the point of the story itself. The movie’s vacuous, superficial characters remind us that beauty and love are found beneath the skin. And that epidermal layer we clothe ourselves in does more to hide who we are than show it.
We don’t see explicit nods toward religion here. But the movie’s core theme of meaning is an inherently spiritual one. Twin metaphorical gods stand at the center of The Substance: Youth and Beauty. Both are, in a real sense, worshiped. Both claim to give its adherents meaning. And whatever excesses the film engages in, it makes it clear that those twin gods are false ones.
The Substance and its characters are obsessed with physical, superficial beauty. So little surprise that we see a lot of skin.
The most notable (and extended) scene takes place as Elisabeth prepares to inject the Substance: She stands and sits in her stark-white bathroom in the nude, and we ultimately see almost every inch of her. After the substance takes effect (more on that below), we’re introduced to her much-younger alter-ego, who names herself Sue. She, too, is nude; The camera ogles Sue’s exposed skin, making sure the viewer takes note of the differences between Sue’s body and Elisabeth’s.
We see both women naked elsewhere—sometimes in the shower, sometimes unconscious on the floor.
And those nude scenes aren’t necessarily the movie’s most erotic ones. When Sue takes over Elisabeth’s own time slot with her own modern take on television exercise, she comes with an array of skin-exposing leotards and incredibly erotic “exercise” moves. The camera lingers on critical-but-technically covered body parts, giving the film its most intentionally titillating moments.
The film’s solitary sex scene also feels incredibly tawdry—but ironically, Sue is completely covered in a skin-tight body suit, wrapping around her like thick, black plastic wrap. We see her male paramour grasp her buttocks and grab at her torso.
Another male lover exposes his rear to the camera, and he goes shirtless pretty much the entire time he’s on screen. A lavish TV show features dozens of dancers wearing only thongs and feathers, exposing both breasts and butts to the camera.
Harvey treats both Sue and Elisabeth as commodities, and in one scene he’s accompanied by elderly shareholders—all male—who are seemingly thrilled to be in the company of so many young, pretty women.
Both Elisabeth and Sue wear provocative eveningwear. An old classmate of Elisabeth’s tells her that she’s still “the prettiest girl in the world.” A leering neighbor tries to make moves on Sue (and had clearly not cared one bit about the woman, Elisabeth, who lived there before).
[Warning: Spoilers are contained in this section.]
The voice on Elisabeth’s thumb drive—and the voice both Elisabeth and Sue interact with on the phone—reminds them that they “are one.” But physically, they are two: While one lies comatose on Elisabeth’s bathroom floor (and later, in a secret room), the other lives her life as she sees fit.
So, how does Elisabeth become two separate bodies? Strap yourself in.
Elisabeth essentially births Sue—fully grown—out of her back, pushing out like a baby chick would push out of a shell. The process is a painful and bloody one, and Sue’s first task is to sew Elisabeth’s gaping wound shut. (The stitching procedure is documented in close, painstaking detail.)
That torso-long fissure heals slowly as the film goes on. But Sue must repeatedly inject gargantuan needles into, presumably, Elisabeth’s spine to extract a liquid that “stabilizes” Sue’s body. She must inject herself every day with that fluid: If she doesn’t, her nose begins to bleed—a warning sign that the rest of her body is failing.
But that stabilizing fluid requires regeneration—the main reason why the original body (the “matrix”) and the younger body must switch places every seven days. Another needle is injected to the comatose body and connected to some feeding goo, which’ll keep the out-of-commission body to survive its forced hibernation.
It’s not long before Sue begins to cheat, though—staying awake longer and longer and stealing more and more stabilizing fluid from Elisabeth’s spine. This causes some grotesque-looking wounds in Elisabeth’s back, and at one point Sue must push much harder to get through a shell of hardened pus and whatnot. Furthermore, it steals time from Elisabeth; when she comes to after extended comas, she finds parts of her have aged rapidly—and this can lead to painful-looking, age-related ailments.
But honestly, the story’s “fun” is just beginning.
One character ultimately kills the other—bashing her head bloody into a mirror before kicking her to death. And then we’re introduced to another product of the Substance: a messy, misshapen monster. Eyes and rows of teeth have grown on its shoulders and arms. A screaming face covers part of its back. Orifices pop open occasionally, and one pushes out a disembodied breast. When the creature tries to get dolled up for an important evening, it pokes a set of earrings right into its skin.
The evening does not go as the creature likes, and soon people are trying to kill it. The body is unstable as it is, too. Those internal and external forces conspire to destroy the creature; limbs snap off in bloody gushes. Wounds are inflicted, causing blood to firehose out of the body to cover walls, floors and hundreds of people in crimson. Eventually the body itself simply explodes, degenerating into a heaving, gelatinous pile of bloody goo—with one critical part of the corpse crawling, sentient, along a sidewalk.
Elisabeth and Sue sometimes engage in blood transfusions. Someone pulls her teeth out painfully, one by one. An ear falls off.
Elisabeth’s car crash feels incredibly visceral; we’re taken into the inside of the car as it tumbles, the camera focusing on Elisabeth’s hair.
We hear the f-word about 20 times. Also making an appearance: the s-word, “a–,” “b–ch” and four misuses of God’s name (twice with “d–n”).
The Substance is, of course, a drug, and certainly not one the Food and Drug Administration has approved. Characters drink wine and champagne. One minor character admits to being too drunk to drive home.
We’re led to believe that Elisabeth suffers from bulimia: We see her retch in a toilet following a meal. Both she and Sue vomit as a side effect of the Substance.
The film makes the mere act of eating look horrific. And as Elisabeth’s life becomes more truncated—physically and emotionally—she turns to food as solace. That leads to some pretty gross eating scenes. And one day, when Elisabeth’s in her scheduled coma and Sue’s doing her show, a huge lump suddenly appears in her hip/buttock area. The lump migrates near enough to Sue’s gut for her to reach into her belly button and pull out … a drumstick. It’s apparently an after-effect from Elisabeth’s eating binge the week before.
We see pronounced differences in how men behave toward Elisabeth and Sue—illustrating their youth-oriented bias.
Be careful what you wish for.
Such cautionary fables have been around since the inception of story itself. King Midas was given the power to turn anything he touched to gold, but then he turned his own beloved daughter into a cold, shining statue. A couple was granted three wishes via a Monkey’s Paw—and soon regretted each and every one.
And through such stories we’re forced to recognize that the stuff our cultures tend to value—riches, fame, a better car, a better life—often turn out to be empty things compared to family, community and love.
The Substance is a diabolically twisted cautionary tale. It takes the values our own culture seems to value above all—youth, beauty, celebrity—and then adds one more terrible twist: Without them, our characters believe, they won’t find love. They won’t be worthy of it.
At one point, Elisabeth runs into another, elderly user of The Substance: With each new cycle, he says, you feel ever more lonely. With each new cycle, you’re made to feel less like you deserve to live. And when Elisabeth tries to break out of that degenerative pattern, she finds it’s not as easy as you’d think—not with Sue staring down at her from every billboard, through every television screen. Reminding her how much younger she is. How much more beautiful.
Have you ever dreamt of a better version of yourself? The voice whispered. Elisabeth bought the bill of goods that this younger, more beautiful version of herself was better. And The Substance warns us not to do the same.
But clearly, The Substance requires plenty of warnings of its own.
This film has something to say—but, man, it says it in a way that leaves moviegoers wincing. It splices skin-worshiping erotica with skin-exploding gore. It hooks moviegoers with its titillating bait, then goes in for the bloody kill. I’ve seen plenty of movie aiming for excess during my film-critiquing career—but I’m not sure if I’ve seen anything quite this excessive.
The Substance is, to be sure, a movie with plenty of substance itself. But its sensuality and its gore move this film into a place of substance abuse. And going to it might trigger a cautionary tale of its own.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
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