Peggy Hepburn’s 3-word review: Fame! Luxury! Gore!
The concept is a simple Faustian bargain at the heart of our youth-worshipping culture: inject yourself with “The Substance”, birth a younger, prettier version of yourself, & trade consciousness with this other self every seven days — NO EXCEPTIONS! The fun & suspense, of course, is when this simple rule is broken & the growing height of the consequences that must be faced.
Brilliantly cast in the lead is Demi Moore, an icon of beauty from yesteryear who is essentially playing herself: an aging female star, though in the movie she’s Elizabeth Sparkle, an aging tv fitness guru with a star on the Walk of Fame (a tight opening sequence shot entirely in birds-eye view depicting the installation & subsequent fading of this star on the Walk of Fame cleverly introduces us to the character & her plight before we even lay eyes on her). The film is slick & tight overall, with a heightened focus on imagery that is married to the themes of our society’s toxic obsession with beauty, image, & fame.
Does Demi take the bargain? Of course she does, that’s the movie. Does she obey the rules? Well… let’s just say it’s Cronenburg meets Dorian Gray via Death Becomes Her. Who wouldn’t want to remain in the younger body longer, if not all the time? The pendulum swing between the two, Elizabeth & ‘Sue’, the “new self” (played by a smiling, supple Margaret Qualley) makes up the dizzyingly fun bulk of the film. “Sue” auditions & lands the role as Elizabeth Sparkle’s replacement on her fitness show (quite literally the “new Elizabeth”), the camera lasciviously caressing this “more perfect” young girl, all of which is overseen by the odious tv executive played with campy elan by Denis Quaid, bedecked in busily-patterned & brightly colored tailored suits that enmesh him into the oppressive aesthetic environment that forms the capsulized visual prison of this film. The colors are bright & acidic (Elizabeth’s yellow coat & the electric orange hallway with the posters mapping her career reminiscent of The Shining are a couple key examples), the framing is often rigidly centered — all of it building & playing on the idea of perfection & beauty, but also, with the camera’s intense early closeups & use of fisheye, (a particularly disturbing early sequence featuring the amplified sounds of Denis Quaid eating shrimp as he’s essentially firing Ms. Sparkle for being too old acts as a repugnant reminder of male appetite dictating female value), prepare us for the lusciously depicted gore (using practical effects! how refreshing!) that make up the squirmiest parts of the film that you may or may not watch through your hands.
Here’s the deal: when our heroine stays as Sue too long, the original Elizabeth’s body grows not only older but more grotesque & cartoon witch-like: a logical balance. The tension in the film is between these two versions of the same character, the womanly desire to be forever young playing out in a very literal & brilliantly sick way. The two versions quickly adopt contentious opinions of one another; Elizabeth, anxiously waiting to be Sue again, soon lets herself go, leaving entire chicken carcasses for Sue to clean up (creating yet another food/flesh comparison that is then mined throughout) & Sue leaving beer bottles & party remnants for Elizabeth, creating a comical mother-daughter conflict & essentially splitting a single consciousness. Thus are the stakes of beauty in a world where we all are briefly young & beautiful, then grow old & yearn for what we once had. If you’re going to make a body-horror film, it might as well be about the distorting abilities of consciousness on beauty. The real world, meanwhile, is replete with Faustian medical bargains based on gambling health & longevity for the wobbly promise of perceived beauty, however brief: from plastic surgery aimed at achieving Instagram-face to 12-year-old girls using retinol & everyone who’s anyone using Ozempic (with varyingly haggard results) we were certainly due for a reminder on the toxically futile seduction of pursuing eternal youth.
The film makes its point like a loudspeaker held directly against your skull. It builds a claustrophobic world of inner turmoil played out in sun-soaked LA, making the city itself a kind of lurking evil character, especially in the form of the slightly sinister billboard of Sue outside Elizabeth/Sue’s huge apartment window, which gazes in silence at Elizabeth, who in one especially memorable sequence attempts to reclaim her own sense of beauty & value by making herself up & going on a date, only to find herself repeatedly trying to edit her makeup every time she approaches her front door under the watchful stare of Sue on the billboard, eventually ripping at her skin, frustrated with what she now regards as her “old body”.
If you don’t leave the theatre questioning your own relationship to your body & feeling a little queasy, you were probably at a different movie. It is a film one experiences rather than simply watches, & boy what an experience! I can’t remember the last time I saw style matched so perfectly with substance. What a movie!
—Peggy Hepburn
