After premiering at the Cannes Film Festival The Substance was awarded Best Screenplay of 2024, and from the moment it was dropped into the audience’s hands the film world ignited with immediate, unwavering praise.
As stated in the film’s trailer, they called it “Fearless.” A “takedown of absurd beauty standards”, “sickly entertaining”, “the “experience of the year”. Needless to say, Hollywood was abuzz. With a star-studded cast, a win, and interest piquing controversy under their belt, blockbuster success was practically sewn into the DNA of this film.
If you’re asking me, when the fog of sensational scandalousness is lifted, the ultimate failure of this film is not only abundantly clear but perhaps a self fulfilling prophecy. In its every pursuit, there was a certain quality missing: Substance.
Visual Sensory Overload
Now, in fairness, there are certainly flowers due in some respects. So, I’m willing to afford them sparingly.
To say this The Substance was visually unappealing would require watching it with eyes closed. From the moment this film flashes across the screen, it is entrancing, addicting even. So fast and yet acutely detailed, it is impossible to let your eyes wander. Having not known the horrific blur of flailing limbs and gore that would eventually come, at the time of watching I was calling it a visual masterwork.
With all vibrant pinks and sky blues, the setting itself is a character. LA becomes its own living organism. Sanitized and loud, completely devoid of humanity. So perfectly tailored and catered. And it’s this uncanny, sanitized, perfection that sets the mood first and foremost. With only your eyes to tell you, as a watcher you are already unnerved.
However, it’s this visualization that serves as a first example of what will become a recurring experience within this film. The color, the setting, and the flashy cinematography are the first displays of this unrelenting whole-bodied sensory overload caused by this poignant intensity. And what begins as a strength slowly devolves into an amalgamation of body-jolting, stomach-turning, shock.
Everything, and I mean everything in The Substance is thrown at you with a full forced hand. The visual is simply the first thing hurled. While it isn’t necessarily completely ineffective, I think it begs an important question: if everything is underscored, highlighted, and saturated, is the audience simply left with a flashy neon blur? If everything is loud, can the audience really hear anything at all?
Characterization and Potential Left for Dead
The initial characterization of our core players is another arguable strength. However, a key factor within this claim is the word initial.
We are introduced to Elisabeth Sparkle on her fiftieth birthday, as she engages with what is seemingly the definer and epicenter of her entire life: performing. All flashy, plastic smiles, hair flips, and jazzercise, Elisabeth hosts a weekly televised 80’s referential workout course. What we learn next is that there is a stark distinction between Elisabeth on and off-camera.
We watch her praise the audience and sign off with her half-hearted slogan, a blow of a kiss, and a wink of an eye. Once the lights dim and the director yells cut, she walks off-set and down a gaping, silent hallway. The shot is long and unending, with walls adorned with posters of the ghosts of Elisabeth’s career’s past. It is quiet, unnervingly so, save a few mechanical birthday wishes offered to Elisabeth by passers-by.
Due to a bathroom mix up, Elisabeth enter’s a stall in the mens’s room where in walks our second leading character: Harvey.
The camera is barely an inch from his face as he shouts profanities and distasteful comments regarding Elisabeth’s performance, achievements, and personhood. Mind you, all of which is soundtracked to the tune of his piss lapsing against a porcelain urinal. He is red, puffy, wrinkled, and loud. All bulging eyes, furrowed brows, and sweaty pores. Loud and unbecoming. A Hollywood man in every sense of the term.
Lastly and much later in the film, we meet Sue. She is the definition of the female fantasy Harvey is looking for. Depthless and hairless. She is everything Elisabeth is not, and more.
Becoming what We Argue Against
The blatant sexualization that this character is subject to makes for a hard pill to swallow from a feminist perspective. And I think her character begs yet another question I found myself asking over and over while watching this film: how far can we enter into a conversation before we become what we are critiquing? How deeply can we argue against something before we become exactly that thing?
Where We Leave Our Characters is Where They Stay
I also think it’s important to note, we don’t see much of these characters outside of these establishing intros. Hence the aforementioned importance of the word initial. Elisabeth seems to possess no purpose outside of preserving her youth and her career. Sue remains the bouncy, sexualized fantasy she is subject to. And Harvey is only ever seen with a gaggle of boys following him, and or berating women. They never venture outside of these roles.
While these are purposeful caricatures, this lack of depth leaves the audience with no meat to sink their teeth into, only tasteless assumptions made based on vague outlines. While the initial characterization is great, the way these characters are left hanging in terms of growth, transformation, or even personal significance highlights the resounding lack of substance within this film. They are stale, stagnant, and frankly boring.
The Second Act and Losing the Plot
The remainder of the film is where, and with all due respect, we lose the plot completely. As stated in another, more flattering review regarding this film, it was rich with theme. However, at this point in plot it feels that all is lost.
More than anything else, I think this is due to an intense and all around lack of clarity in practically every previously established theme. In fact, when thinking of the latter occurrences of the movie, the word absence comes to mind. Absence of theme, absence of clear opinion, of grounded plot, the list goes on.
Even in the simplest parts of the film regarding topics as central as the shared consciousness or lack thereof between Elisabeth and Sue seemed to grow muddy. Alike Elisabeth’s final form as “Monstro Elisasue”, the rest of the movie feels like a fleshy-mish-mash-amalgamation of a hundred unclear points where conclusion was just out of reach.
As stated in prior The Substance was awarded best screenplay. Out of the one hundred and fifty pages of script, twenty pages included dialogue. Twenty. In a movie with themes of such controversy, it is astounding to me how they abandoned dialogue. There is so much to say regarding ageism, sexism, and misogyny in this film. And yet they forsake this opportunity to speak in exchange for lengthy, exhausting combat scenes. And unwatchable, poorly paced images of gore for seemingly the fun of it.
An Echoing Why?
We see Elisabeth truly unravel but why? Her career was the epicenter of her life (or at least we assume this because it is the only part of her life we are privy to) and Sue has taken that from her, but we don’t hear or truly feel what that is like for Elisabeth. We cannot see the depth of that kind of loss and grief. She is the center of the movie and we cannot see what is going on inside her head. Yes, we see her trash her apartment, cover her windows, and binge-eat, but why? It all seems baseless if we cannot feel for her.
Emotional Whiplash
The most compelling moment of the film occurs as Elisabeth stands over the half terminated body of Sue as she is hit with a realization and stomach turning regret. She says: “I can’t do this. I need you, cause I hate myself.” She continues mounting with rage and insanity, “You’re the only lovable part of me. You have to come back”, it is a devastating and honest moment. And to me, the point of the entire film.
Immediately after this, and with no time to catch one’s breath, we are thrown into an excruciatingly long scene of splattering blood, flailing limbs, and abhorrent gore. The violence and shock eclipses the depth of the last scene entirely. It feels haphazardly placed and nonsensical.
By this point in The Substance I started checking how much time was left, and was shocked to see over half an hour remained. How much more plot could there possibly be to uncover, how could the pacing of a film of this stature and acclaim be this clunky and this exhausting? The loudest failure of this film, however, was just over the horizon.
The Ending
The Substance crawls to its ending, excruciatingly slow and then all at once. Our characters do not change or develop, and they’re punished beyond their already unimaginable arch.
Throughout the film, though it’s commentating on how the patriarchy affects women, neither Sue nor Elisabeth is willing to relinquish the benefits of the patriarchy for their well-being. They die in pursuit of male approval. If that wasn’t punishment enough, Elisabeth’s final ending involved public humiliation and then death! Meanwhile, the villain of the story, Harvey, walks off freely. A failed New Year’s Eve special perhaps, but Elisabeth has ruined her life, lost her sense of self, and no longer possesses a body.
There is no pay-off, no easing up. We simply watch her remains inch along in agonizing pain into the past- to the last place she ever shined: The Hollywood Walk of Fame.
