Long-running TV aerobic star Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) is aging out, her looks being deemed as too old by her smarmy showrunner (Dennis Quaid), so when she is booted from her show, a search for a new, younger, sexier host begins. After being examined during a checkup, a handsome young nurse hands Elizabeth a piece of paper with a phone number on it, noting "It changed my life." The desperate Elizabeth calls the mysterious voice and a mysterious voice on the other end requests her mailing address and once it is received, the voice hangs up. She soon receives a flash drive containing a promotional video for "The Substance," a chemical means by which the user will physically divide into two bodies — the original and a new, younger iteration — with the original body laying dormant for seven days while the new body, containing all of the original's memories, roams free. There are a number of rules that must be strictly adhered to if one opts to use the Substance, and the terse communication of the customer help line only provides the most minimal of information. At first reluctant to use the stuff, Elizabeth finally relents and goes to pick up her first regular shipment of the chemical, plus the equipment for administering it, as well as assorted nutrient supplements for the dormant original body, and a kit for stitching up the huge, gaping wound on the original body's back after the new self is birthed like a crab molting its shell.
When Elizabeth injects the Substance, she ends up naked and comatose on the bathroom floor of her luxury apartment while the younger, almost inhumanly beautiful and sexy new her emerges. Taking the singular moniker of "Sue" (Margaret Qualley), she auditions to be her own replacement on the aerobics show that launched her to wealth and fame, and in no time Sue has taken the popular zeitgeist by storm with her hyper-sexualized workout routines.
But in tales of this nature there's always a catch, and it's only a matter of time before things rapidly spiral into a maelstrom of gruesome, gory, and occasionally stomach-churning body horror (which I would love to show you, but you should really experience it for yourself).
Okay…
I enjoyed most of THE SUBSTANCE. Everyone and their parakeet recommended THE SUBSTANCE to me up and down for months, and when I finally saw it I was entertained, but I found its examination of female insecurity over the inevitability of aging and loss of youthful sexy "oomph" to be overlong for the story it has to tell and perhaps intentionally cartoonishly ridiculous in its lampooning of the "male gaze." The film is a jet black satire, replete with the nudity of its female leads, but the scenes of that involving the body switching and resulting nakedness are strictly in service of the story and make organic sense, rather than being mere gratuitous titillation. The gratuitousness comes in the form of. the hilariously over-the-top aerobics show starring Sue, with much gyration and crotch-thrusting straight into the camera as she is flanked by a cadre of similarly toned eye candy mirroring her moves. As for the inevitable body horror, it's well-executed and a lot of it is done practically, which can be quite visceral and squirm-inducing, but it all goes off the rail and gets downright ridiculous during the third act. When it comes to movie examining women willing to do anything to maintain their youth, I’ll take the B movies THE LEECH WOMAN and THE WASP WOMAN over THE SUBSTANCE. They’re shorter and they got right to the point. Also, the ending evokes BLACK SWAN's disastrous final ballet. Was I meant to find the climactic reveal as hilarious as I did, rather than simply grotesque?
The film includes many nods to the stylistic touches of John Carpenter, Stanley Kubrick. Ken Russell, and, inevitably, the legendary body horror of David Cronenberg, but while fun for sharp-eyed cinephiles, such flourishes add nothing to the final work and only serve to remind viewers of superior films. But don;t get me wrong. I was very entertained by THE SUBSTANCE and found it to feel like an extended episode of either THE TWILIGHT ZONE or BLACK MIRROR. My only major gripe with it is its needless overlength, so keep that in mind if you opt to check it out.