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Yes, I realize I’m late to the party. For quite a while, I actively declined to watch The Substance (2024). The concept seemed engineered to land at the exact moment when GLP-1 medications, plastic surgery, filters, injectables, and dubious anti-aging treatments had become inescapable parts of popular culture. Hollywood has always been obsessed with youth and beauty, but a body-horror film about an aging celebrity taking a miracle drug to create a younger version of herself felt almost too perfectly timed.
It sounded like a film scrambling to be relevant. Worse, it sounded like it wanted credit for saying something that had already been said countless times.
After finally watching it, I’ll admit that I was being slightly too cynical. The Substance is certainly not a bad film. Coralie Fargeat directs it with an extraordinary degree of visual control, Demi Moore gives the material more emotional weight than the screenplay does, and the third act delivers several memorable moments of body horror. There are genuine laughs and even a few real scares buried beneath all the fluorescent colors and close-ups of Margaret Qualley’s body.
Still, my original suspicions were not entirely wrong. The Substance is a kind of bubblegum horror that I don’t find especially appealing. It is bright, sugary, expensive-looking, and immediately digestible. Every image tells us exactly how outrageous it is supposed to be. Every theme is repeated until there is no possibility that anyone in the audience could misunderstand it.
Demi Moore plays Elisabeth Sparkle, an actress and television fitness personality who is abruptly fired after turning 50. The decision comes from Harvey, a grotesque network executive played by Dennis Quaid, who speaks with his mouth full and serves as a walking summary of everything the film wants us to hate about Hollywood.
After learning about a mysterious treatment called “The Substance,” Elisabeth injects herself with an activator. A younger and supposedly improved version of her, named Sue, subsequently emerges from her body. The two must alternate lives every seven days while stabilizing Sue with fluid taken from Elisabeth’s spine.
The rules are simple. They must respect the balance. There is no separate “her.” They are one.
The Substance (2024)
The film repeats these ideas so frequently that they begin to sound less like rules within the story and more like reminders for viewers who might have looked at their phones for a few minutes. Yet the relationship between Elisabeth and Sue never makes much sense on the level of personal identity.
The Substance supposedly creates a younger version of Elisabeth, but Elisabeth does not appear to experience Sue’s life. She does not enjoy Sue’s career, sexual encounters, or renewed celebrity. Instead, the two behave like separate people who wake up to discover what the other has done. Sue gets the pleasure while Elisabeth gets the deteriorating body.
For a film so fixated on the statement “you are one,” it is strangely uninterested in what would actually make Elisabeth and Sue the same person. They share biological material, but there is little evidence of shared memory or consciousness. The story needs them to be one person for its metaphor to function, then treats them as two people whenever it needs conflict.
That could have produced an interesting philosophical problem. Unfortunately, The Substance mostly sidesteps it in favor of another injection scene.
Most of the film’s scares seem aimed at people who feel queasy at the thought of needles.
We repeatedly watch needles penetrate skin. Elisabeth injects the activator. Sue extracts stabilizer fluid. Tubes and syringes enter bodies in extreme close-up. The sound design makes every puncture, extraction, and release of fluid feel as invasive as possible.
The first few instances are effective. The procedure is clinical, secretive, and intentionally dehumanizing. Eventually, however, the repetition stops building tension. Once the film has established that Sue must insert a needle into Elisabeth’s spine, watching it happen again does not reveal anything new. It simply offers another opportunity for the audience to squirm.
This is a recurring problem throughout the film. The Substance mistakes repetition for escalation. Rather than developing its characters or introducing new psychological complications, it returns to the same images: the needle, the naked body, the aging face, the bathroom mirror, the food, and the giant image of Sue looming outside Elisabeth’s apartment.
The billboard positioned directly outside her window feels especially forced. Elisabeth cannot look outside without seeing her younger self towering over her. It is an image that might work in a dream or music video, but within the physical world of the film, it feels like production design screaming the theme at us.
Subtlety is not a requirement for horror. Some of my favorite horror films are unapologetically excessive. The problem is not that The Substance is very loud. The problem is that it keeps making the exact same noise over and over again.
You can nearly count on one hand the number of scenes containing meaningful dialogue.
A film without much exposition is not necessarily an empty film, but The Substance does not use silence to deepen its characters. Elisabeth is given almost no life outside her appearance and career. She has no close relationships, no family, and few identifiable desires beyond remaining desirable. Even her former classmate Fred, who shows sincere interest in her, functions primarily as another test of her insecurity.
The bathroom sequence before their date is one of the film’s strongest moments because Moore briefly gives Elisabeth a recognizable interior life. She applies makeup, removes it, applies more, and continues attacking her reflection until she can no longer leave the apartment. There is no monster and no elaborate prosthetic effect. We simply watch someone become incapable of tolerating her own face.
The film could have used more scenes like this. Instead, it relies on visual candy. The sleek hallways, aerobics choreography, neon-green liquid, symmetrical rooms, and close-ups of bodies make the film feel like an extended music video. The images are polished, but they rarely allow Elisabeth or Sue to become complete people.
The Substance (2024)
This is particularly noticeable in the way Sue is filmed. The camera studies Margaret Qualley’s legs, breasts, buttocks, lips, and hips with the same enthusiasm as the television executives within the story. Presumably, this is meant to implicate the audience and expose how the entertainment industry packages the female body.
However, reproducing fetishistic images does not automatically constitute a critique of fetishization.
I had a similar issue with the relentless nudity and “male gaze” in Lifeforce. Once you strip away the beautiful naked woman and the creature effects, there is not much left. The Substance is far more technically accomplished, but it occasionally falls into the same trap. It condemns an industry that reduces women to images while spending much of its runtime turning Sue into precisely that kind of image.
A Sight and Sound review raises a similar problem, arguing that the film adopts the sexualizing gaze it ostensibly wants to criticize. The review describes The Substance as thrilling but ultimately hollow, which is probably the most concise assessment of the film I have encountered.
There is also something strangely corporate about the film’s campiness.
The Substance uses the visual vocabulary of camp and queer cinema: exaggerated femininity, bright colors, theatrical performances, bodily transformation, grotesque makeup, and a finale that turns humiliation into spectacle. Yet it often feels like what I can only describe as “queer-coded by big Hollywood.”
This is not a criticism of camp or queer aesthetics. The problem is that these elements feel overly manufactured and prepackaged, as though the film were carefully designed to become a cult classic before anyone had seen it. There were moments when I was reminded of lesser horror films like M3GAN, which begs to be lauded as an icon of modern queer horror. The Substance wants to be excessive, transgressive, and trashy, but every transgression has been polished until it shines like a commercial.
Real camp often comes from awkwardness, sincerity, cheapness, or failure. It is difficult to manufacture because it frequently emerges when a film reaches for one thing and accidentally creates something much stranger. The Substance never feels accidental. Every grotesque image arrives with the confidence of a marketing department that already knows it will appear in reaction videos.
The difference becomes clearer when comparing it to lower-budget body horror. In my review of Society, I argued that the film’s grotesque final sequence could not entirely compensate for its weak writing and dull preceding hour. The Substance has the same structural problem, although its superior performances and technical polish make the journey more entertaining.
Both films save their most memorable material for the end. Both use bodily mutation to criticize wealthy or image-conscious social environments. Yet the infamous “shunting” in Society feels genuinely grubby and disreputable. The Substance feels like a luxury product pretending to be disreputable.
The Substance (2024)
The third act is where The Substance finally stops trying to maintain its polished surface and becomes a much more entertaining film.
The transformation effects become increasingly absurd. Bodies no longer obey the rules established earlier, identities collapse, and the film’s glamorous television spectacle deteriorates into a grotesque public performance. There are moments when Fargeat allows the creature effects to be frightening, pathetic, and funny at the same time.
This is the kind of body horror the film had been promising. The effects are imaginative, and physical comedy and escalating chaos work well. For once, the film gets out of its own way.
Moore deserves particular credit for committing to the material. She understands that Elisabeth’s horror is not simply that she is aging. It is that she has accepted the industry’s judgment and learned to experience herself as disposable. Margaret Qualley is also effective as Sue, particularly when her artificial enthusiasm begins to resemble panic.
Even Dennis Quaid’s absurd performance works better in the final stretch. Harvey is never a believable human being, but by this point, plausibility is no longer relevant. Everyone has become part of the same grotesque television spectacle.
The film finally delivers real scares and laughs, but it takes a little too long to get there.
The Substance (2024) Movie Rating: ★★★ out of 5
The Substance is stylish, technically impressive, and occasionally very funny. Its body horror reaches spectacular heights in the final act, and Demi Moore gives a committed performance that deservedly attracted attention.
However, the film is so desperate to make its themes visible that it never allows them to develop naturally. The constant needle shots, fetishized images of the female body, repetitive procedures, forced symbolism, and limited dialogue make it feel more like an extended music video than a fully developed story.
Perhaps that is why it connected with such a large audience. It is body horror designed for immediate consumption. The colors are bright, the message is simple, and the gross-out moments arrive at regular intervals. It is easy to watch, easy to understand, and easy to market.
That does not make it bad. It simply makes it bubblegum horror.
If you’d like to watch The Substance (2024), the film is currently available to stream, rent, or purchase via Amazon. For more film reviews like this one, be sure to check out the Philosophy in Film homepage!
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