Movie Review: 'The Substance' Starring Demi Moore is the Best Movie of 2024

The Substance (2024)

Directed by Coralie Fargeat

Written by Coralie Fargeat

Starring Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, Dennis Quaid

Release Date September 20th, 2024

Published September 20th, 2024

I love The Substance. I believe that The Substance is the best movie of 2024 so far and one of the best movies that I have ever seen. And yet, I am not sure how I feel about recommending that you see The Substance. This movie messed me up. I think that I am better for the experience but I also believe that I will be describing the experience of The Substance to my therapist so that I may fully recover from this experience. Does that sound like something that I can recommend to anyone?

The Substance stars Demi Moore as Elisabeth Sparkle, a fitness guru of many years experience. Imagine Jane Fonda from the 80s, including her Academy Award winning acting career, and you have the basic template for Elisabeth Sparkle. Though she looks incredible, she's being pushed out of her fitness empire by a sleazy male executive, played by Dennis Quaid at his most ingeniously grotesque.

After surviving a horrifying car accident, almost unscathed, Elisabeth is recommended a special treatment called The Substance. Essentially, The Substance will create a youthful doppelganger who will share Elisabeth's life, splitting things 7 days at a time. With The Substance, Elisabeth brings her younger, supposedly better, self to life in the form of Sue, (Margaret Qualley). She's Elisabeth but with the pert, supple, and perfect body of a twenty-something.

For seven days this younger, allegedly better, version of Elisabeth will get to do all of the things that societal expectations, and stereotypical perceptions prevent Elisabeth from doing. This includes taking Elisabeth's former job as a TV fitness guru, sought after as a model and an actress. All the while, the mysterious people behind The Substance offer only dire warnings about consequences if Elisabeth/Sue fail to adhere to the strict rules of The Substance.

Well, of course, they don't follow the rules and, of course, there are consequences. My friend, dear reader, you are not prepared for the consequences of breaking the rules of The Substance. I am a veteran moviegoer. I have been doing this more than 30 years. I have seen some things at the movies. I've not seen anything quite like The Substance. The body horror of The Substance is terrifying, gut-wrenching, and extreme. It's justifiably extreme, but extreme may be an understatement for just how effective the body horror in The Substance truly is.

I've never been physically ill while watching a movie but The Substance had me on the edge. In the end, I suffered a pretty serious panic attack and, as I write this, I am still recovering from seeing The Substance. Only my therapist will truly be able to help me unpack the feelings inspired by The Substance. This movie ripped into my psyche and found fears and anxieties that I didn't know I had regarding aging and my feelings and fears for the women in my life who have endured the intense, scrutinizing gazes that I've never had to endure.

I am speaking only as myself, other men may feel that they have been scrutinized over their bodies and their attractiveness, that's never been my experience. I can't say I am comfortable with my body but I have never felt the kind of penetrating gaze that comes with people openly assessing, describing and feeling perfectly justified in sharing their feelings about the way I look. That's a privilege I've had as a pretty average looking dude. Demi Moore, on the other hand, none of us can begin to relate to her experience in the public eye.

Reflexively, many people will accuse Demi Moore of asking for it, asking for the attention and scrutiny of her looks. That's true but only to a point. If you say she was asking for the level of obsession with her looks that came with her remarkable fame in the 80s and 90s, you're out of your mind and merely trying to hand wave away the hard and deeply revealing conversation to be had about the way our culture dissects and inspects women's attractiveness in public spaces.

Casting Demi Moore as Elisabeth Sparkle is a master stroke that takes The Substance from being a great movie to a masterpiece. Not only is Demi Moore an incredible actor, her lived experience in being one of the most scrutinized human beings in the world brings a disturbing verisimilitude to The Substance. Demi Moore's bold, brave, raw performance is an all timer. If she doesn't win an Academy Award for her work in The Substance it will be a grave injustice. Spoiler alert, she won't be nominated. The Academy is filled with people who probably won't see a movie like The Substance.

And I can say the same about her remarkable other half, Margaret Qualley. Qualley, ever an actress who is up for anything after working with the likes of Yorgos Lanthimos, Clair Denis, and Quentin Tarantino, goes even further in her fearless approach to exploring characters in The Substance. Qualley's particular talent in The Substance is laying the groundwork for her co-star's performance. Qualley and Moore don't spend much time in the same scene but in playing the same character in a very different context, Qualley is incredible at creating the space that Moore will explore in other scenes. That's an underappreciated talent.

As I said, I believe The Substance is the best movie of 2024 and one of my new favorite movies ever. And I will never be able to sit through it again. This movie was emotionally exhausting. The excruciating details in the production design and the sound design are breathtaking and also way too effective. It's literally too good. I feel like some people won't be able to handle just how effective some of this stuff really is. I don't want to spoil any aspect of this for someone who wants this experience that I had but I want to help those who may not be able to handle this by giving you an example of what you are in for.

There is an early scene in The Substance, before the 'Substance' of the title has actually been fully introduced. It's a scene in a restaurant where Dennis Quaid's slimeball executive is firing Elisabeth without actually saying he's firing her. Throughout the scene, Quaid is eating shrimp and the camera is in a deep, fish-eye close up of his face and mouth. The sound is getting every noise of chewing, crunching, swallowing and lip-smacking as he licks his fingers and dribbles food back onto his plate, his messy fingers throwing little bits of shrimp and sauce as he gestures. For me, this is a horror greater than any Saw movie has demonstrated.

And that's an early scene in The Substance. There is still plenty of extreme body horror to come after that that I won't go into. I could write a lengthy essay on just the food horror of The Substance as director Coralie Fargeat uses food so effectively that more than 12 hours after seeing the movie, my appetite has not returned. Elisabeth is gifted a French Cookbook in the movie and where many other movies have turned such food into works of art, The Substance turns food into horror that could put David Cronenberg off his dinner.

Writer-Director Coralie Fargeat is an auteur of the highest order. She's made a movie in The Substance that hit me harder than any movie I've ever seen. I will never forget seeing the movie Midsommar for the first time and feeling like I had seen movies for the first time again. The Substance gave me that same feeling, as if I am seeing movies with new eyes. I feel as if I walked into The Substance as one person and I came out a very different person. Which is ironic and quite funny considering the premise of the movie. This comes not just from the remarkably horrifying visuals but equally from the grotesque sights and the depth of the ideas.

Despite my heavy focus on the disturbing visuals, what unmoored my psyche was the deep level of empathy at the heart of this movie. The Substance is an angry, agonized cry from the soul on behalf of those who can't speak for themselves. This is a movie that takes our cultural obsessions with women's bodies and aging and forces us to confront the way we've all been complicit in warping the minds of women for decades, centuries even. I am someone who believed that I empathized and felt for women and was an ally to women in trying to be conscious and mindful of the ways women have been exploited by society and evil men in particular.

The harsh reality that The Substance exposed to me is that I am complicit. We all are. We've all engaged in this conduct of cruelly assessing the looks of others. We congratulate ourselves when we have the good taste to keep our ugly assessments of others to ourselves but that really is the bare minimum and yet we reassure ourselves that this means we're a good person. And then we go about doing nothing to help battle back against the people who continually make others feel shame regarding their looks, their body specifically.

The lasting effect for me from The Substance is as raging middle finger not only to those who enact overt cruelty towards others or those who objectify others, but also to those who do nothing to curb the behavior of those who are cruel and objectifying. We are all guilty in the eyes of Elisabeth Sparkle and The Substance is our reckoning. Do better, be better. At the very least, have the awareness to understand your own behavior beyond merely keeping your opinions to yourself.

So, I said, I cannot recommend The Substance. That's not true. I do recommend the movie. It's a movie that many, many people need to see. That said, I worry for some who will see this and not be fully prepared for how destabilizing this experience can be. I follow a creator on YouTube who suffers from Dysmorphia and she's shared the emotional journey she's been on in trying to get a handle on how she sees herself. Her honesty and grace in sharing herself with the world is so beautiful and inspiring. I highly recommend her work, linked here. I worry about the kinds of thoughts a movie like The Substance could have on people who struggle far more than I do with body image and or aging.

But that doesn't change the fact that this is one of the most transformative experiences that I have had watching a movie. This is a film of remarkable care and skill. It's exceptionally detailed with every aspect of filmmaking feeding the central ideas, themes and the over-arching message which will likely be different, yet equally impactful for anyone who sees it. The Substance is not a movie for all audiences. But it is a movie for a very specific audience who will be better for the experience, even as the experience is difficult, emotionally exhausting, and physically gut-wrenching.

I am physically and emotionally spent from watching The Substance and reliving the memory for this review. But, I also feel more mindful and aware. I don't yet know what I will do with this newfound knowledge of myself but I am changed in a way that feels needed and necessary. I'm not sure that I have ever said that about a work of art. Perhaps, my favorite movie of all time, Everything Everywhere, All at Once, had a similar effect but that was an entirely inspiring, uplifting and beautiful experience. This was hard. The Substance was a hard watch. I wasn't ready to do this kind of work on myself and you may not be ready for it.

Or you might not react to it all. I don't know you. You might watch The Substance and completely dismiss the experience. That's possible, it feels unlikely to me, but it's not impossible. Other critics seem to have watched The Substance and been able to view it as just another movie. I don't see The Substance as just another movie. For me, The Substance is a transformative work of art that forced me to examine myself in ways I was not prepared for. It's also a body horror experience that even having seen all of David Cronenberg's filmography, I was still not prepared for.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is like a romantic comedy for me in comparison to my experience of The Substance. I love The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, it's an incredible, deeply underrated work of art. It's not half as terrifying for me as The Substance. Where Chainsaw can't get under my skin, The Substance has fully moved into my mind and will be living there for the rest of my life. I will never watch The Substance again but I will also never forget having seen it. It's an experience I will never be able to take for granted.

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