It’s been a long time before a horror movie has gotten its flowers, but The Substance has performed extremely well, both critically and on Twitter. But this body horror film with a bold premise just doesn’t have the body that it promises. The plight of women and beauty standards is turned into a mockery with no definitive message: causing many idiot influencers (re: Tana Mongeau) to go on and on about how they would love to take The Substance, and how Demi Moore looks so good at awards shows.
The Plot
Once the movie starts the plot seems like it’ll be pretty cut and dry. Demi Moore gets canned for being old, she starts spiraling and latches on to the idea of the Substance, a promise that you’ll get a new...body? Maybe? As it turns out, you get no benefit from the Substance at all because all you do is birth a hot adult baby out of your back that has no connection to you: not your memories, not your name, not your face. Essentially, Demi Moore becomes Dorian Grey’s painting, withering away and eating junk food because she's ugly now and that's the only time you can eat Cheetos.
The Message
When Margaret Qualley’s character Sue auditions for the role Demi’s character got fired from, she gets the part immediately. Dennis Quaid’s character is gross and obviously is salivating over her body, while she stands there blinking prettily. This makes sense, but is never counteracted in the rest of the film, perpetuating an idea that you have to be hot in order to get jobs, and you have to be okay with getting sexualized because that’s what girls are for. On Demi’s character's end, she has a terrible rest of her life and ends up melting on to her cracked Hollywood star, fading into obscurity because that’s all that women can and should do when they’re fired from being sexy. But hey, maybe if she learned how to crochet or work retail she could’ve found some purpose in her life.
It’s clear that the film is meant to show how terrible star culture is for women, and it accomplishes that. But the characters themselves are too shallow for the audience to feel any sort of way towards them. There’s no personal growth, there’s no idea that either of them might have an identity outside of “hot” and “declining hot”. I’m tired of the “sexy dumb” thing for women. I’m tired of people thinking that's all famous women are or should be. There are so many men who are in Hollywood who look like they’ve actually crawled out of a dumpster, and aren’t treated with a fraction of the contempt that women who don’t fit traditional Eurocentric beauty standards are.
This movie is fun, it’s punchy, it’s fast paced; but these aspects make the message stand out as shallow even more than it would have originally. Not only that, but there’s a disheartening amount of people whose only takeaways were how good Demi and Margaret looked. Hollywood still has a long way to go.