The Oscar Race Review: "The Substance"

Body horror, meet bawdy horror.

It was a perfect plan. I had a little over a week before the Academy Awards on March 2nd and I was still down way too many Best Picture nominees. But I had a train ride up to New York and a bus ride back home to DC that offered me hours to fill. But what would I watch? The Brutalist and I’m Still Here are still in theaters, and my measly iPad screen didn’t fit the bill for my rewatch of Dune: Part 2.

Thankfully, I had two other perfect options to watch on pseudo public transit. The first required a trial membership to MUBI, a prestige-leaning streaming service whose content selection makes the Criterion Channel look like PlutoTV. The free week on the platform far exceeded the Friday morning that I needed, so with a reminder to cancel my membership set for the next Wednesday, I executed my plan perfectly.

I made the choice of watching The Substance on a crowded Northeast Regional, and I somehow stand by it.

Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) has a problem: despite still being beautiful and talented, she has committed the cardinal Hollywood sin of being a woman who has turned 50. Privately disgusted by this, chauvinistic network executive Harvey (Dennis Quaid) cancels Sparkle’s daytime exercise show and sends its Academy Award winning host to the obscurity of forced retirement. Undeterred, our protagonist learns about The Substance, a secret serum that can create a younger, hotter body for her to inhabit for short stretches, so long as she follows the rules.

This new body, Sue (Margaret Qualley), soon becomes a star in her own right, but as the fame and adoration roll in, those pesky rules start to fall by the wayside. As Elizabeth/Sue start behaving more and more recklessly, they find themselves on a collision course with a nightmare that has to be seen to be believed.

I know this can be annoying to hear, but The Substance is a movie that’s best enjoyed with as little foreknowledge as possible. As such, this review may feel a little light on focused content critique. Believe me when I say it’s for your own good. You should absolutely see this movie as soon as possible.

The first thing you’ll learn about The Substance is that it lacks subtlety. Though overall light on dialogue, its obvious characters behave obviously while representing obvious concepts. Microsoft Word text art of the phrase “THIS IS ABOUT SOCIETAL EXPECATIONS OF WOMEN AS THEY AGE” could have flashed on the screen every thirty seconds and it would have matched the tone of the movie perfectly. There’s hardly any room to wiggle around for meaning or subtext since director Coralie Fargeat blasts it all directly into your face (sometimes literally).

This may sound like a criticism. I think it’s fucking awesome.

The world of The Substance is bright, overbearing, disturbingly simple. At one point, Sue is a guest on an anonymous late-night show simply called “The Show.” The ominous billboard directly outside Elizabeth’s apartment updates itself daily with new, vague proclamations, like “New Year’s Eve Show Tomorrow Night!” Harvey lewdly wiggles a limp shrimp at Elizabeth as he tells her that, unfortunately, people just don’t want to see women over 50 on TV anymore. Do you get it? Do you understand what the movie is saying? Are you sure?

The Substance doesn’t allow any room for uncertainty, which is frankly a great choice. You don’t have to wonder what this movie is about, because just like its worldbuilding and dialogue, its thoughts on how the entertainment business treats women are crystal clear. This leads to a few big narrative beats that are easy to see coming because they’re so obvious, but frankly that’s appropriate for the genre. This is technically a horror movie; you know things are going downhill as soon as you start watching.

Both lead actresses are dynamite. Moore perfectly conveys the final traces of hope trickling away from Sparkle’s life, replacing them with rage and disgust. The actress’s own declining star power due in recent years after a record-breaking 1990s is a wonderful bit of metanarrative, this performance as Sparkle acting as proof that Moore vanishing from major blockbusters was not due to acting ability. Her Best Actress nomination is heartwarming and deserved.

Qualley, meanwhile, nails the sexpot starlet on the brink of total collapse, her role as Sue so different from other, goofier work of hers in movies like Drive-Away Dolls [3/5] and Poor Things [3.5/5]. Her character oozes confidence and femininity in a way I straight up did not expect. The camera makes sure you know that she’s hot stuff too; there were so many lingering shots over Qualley’s naked body in The Substance that you’d think you were watching a seedy skin flick made back in the ‘80s. It’s an intentional, subversive move though; Fargeat is treating Sue like the entertainment business is, putting us in the role of the consumer who tunes in every week to leer at a new young star.

The film takes place primarily in a few small locations, but their evolution through the course of the film adds to maximalist style of the storytelling. These are carefully curated spaces that change their nature as we encounter every bizarre twist and turn of the film. The erosion of Elizabeth’s apartment as she waits for her chance to be Sue again, the long orange hallway that used to be lined with posters of the older star now replaced with ones of her younger alter ego, and the simultaneously decrepit yet high-tech venue where Sparkle picks up her Substance materials all represent obvious things, but their dynamism help keep the movie’s momentum moving forward.

To say too much about the special effects would be spoiling the movie’s best surprises, but I’ll confirm that as a massive fan of good practical gore and prosthetics, The Substance is the most I’ve been able to appreciate the craft in a modern movie. The body horror on display here is real classic stuff; there are some climatic moments that I can only describe as “malignant.” This isn’t a movie for the squeamish, but I promise you that if the end result is chaotic fun, not grisly terror. This is a movie that makes any of your frustrations with it disappear once you get to the final half hour, believe me.

If I have any complaints about The Substance, it’s perhaps just a bit too long. Some storytelling elements are redundant retreads of earlier beats, as though this were somehow a movie where you could miss what Fargeat is going for. A two and a half hour runtime is lengthy for something in this genre, since its hard to maintain that sense of unease over such a long period. Frankly, the middle section of The Substance could have been 10 or 15 minutes shorter and I probably wouldn’t have noticed.

Also, of all the unsubtle elements of the film, Dennis Quaid’s character of a sleazy producer named Harvey (do you get it? Do you get the connection being made to real life?) was perhaps the most crude. Quaid does fine work, and his real life conservative beliefs made for another fun bit of metanarrative, but often he comes off as goofy when he probably should have been frightening.¹ But these are very minor quibbles for a movie that I loved, despite my anxiety over watching such a lewd, gory flick on a crowded train.

Though it achieved enough cult fame earlier in 2024 to become MUBI’s highest grossing movie of all time, The Substance being nominated for Best Picture pleasantly surprised me. You have to go back to 2017 and Get Out [5/5] for the last pure horror film nominated for the category, and that’s a smart, layered movie that hides meaning and subtext for you to uncover with each thoughtful rewatch. The Substance, meanwhile, is a movie that reveals everything to you immediately. It’s gory, crass, and in your face, the opposite of so-called “Oscar bait.”

But it’s also a movie that has a lot to say, even if it says it by shouting at you and throwing a delicious bowl of soup directly into your face. It is one of the best movies of 2024 by almost any metric (The score! The color! The editing!), so to have it nominated so prominently at the Academy Awards is fitting, even if I don’t think it has a snowball’s chance in hell at winning. Moore, however, is my frontrunner for Best Actress, even if it more represents a career legacy worth celebrating rather than an amazing performance in a vacuum.

The true nightmare of The Substance has nothing to do with gore or strange protrusions. Instead, it’s the terrifying existence of being a woman in a patriarchal society. You walk along a razor’s edge, ready at any moment to be both adored and rejected for equally arbitrary reasons, never allowed to just be comfortable in your skin as a real human being. The Substance doesn’t pretend to be about anything else, but its a shock of potent filmmaking that delivers on its message with incredible gusto. Its copious nudity and strange body horror make it a questionable pick for a movie to watch in public, but who am I to be ashamed for appreciating one of the best films of the year?

Rating: 4.5/5

1. It’s a good enough performance to keep him in second place in my Quaid Power Rankings, behind son Jack but ahead of brother Randy