The Substance (2024)

directed by Coralie Fargeat

Claudia Lewis

This morning I discovered my first grey pubic hair. I should not have been surprised. Since I hit 50, all hell has broken loose. My boobs and bum have embarked on a slow descent towards my knees, my jawline bears definite hints of a jow,l and I even found a solitary hair making a break for it under my chin. So, to all my sisters-in-increasingly-batwinged arms, I know you stand with me when I say, oh Demi Moore, I too have dreamt of a magic jab that transports me back to my unlined, pert-of-breast salad days when, if only I'd known then what I know now, I wouldn't have squandered my perfect skin on Malibu and pineapple and fags and sticking my unappreciated dewy face in the frickin' sun without factor 1000. So, to say I empathise with poor old (she’s not old) Demi Moore in The Substance, is a massive understatement.

In this primary-coloured visceral body horror, Demi plays TV presenter Elisabeth Sparkle, whose career comes to a screeching halt when her show’s producer, Harvey, played to full oily ickiness by Dennis Quaid, decides “At 50, it stops.” Harvey himself is definitely on the wrong side of 50 but as a man, the same rules of course don’t apply. Imagining a bleak future, Sparkle takes up the offer of a mysterious Substance, a potion that once injected will transform her into a bouncy, impossibly juicy-skinned nymph called Sue, played by the gorgeous Margaret Qualley. (“Have you ever dreamt of a better version of yourself? Younger? More perfect? This is the Substance.”)

The only catch: Elisabeth can only spend one week as Sue before she must reinject the Substance and switch back to her old self for another week. (“One week for one, one  week for the other. The only thing not to forget: you are one. You cannot escape from yourself.”) As is the way of all good hubris-based horrors—think the original Frankenstein—it’s much more fun being Sue and shagging hot biker dudes and having her perfect abs splashed across billboards than being boring old Lizzy huddled up at home watching daytime TV and eating carbs. So, understandably, Sue stops switching back and forth—with horrific consequences. Rapidly aging, Sue transforms into a grotesque hybrid mutation of the two of them, “Monstro Elisasue,” as her flesh boils and bubbles and spurts, eventually exploding into a bloodied mess on Elisabeth Sparkle’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

As I examine my own quietly receding hairline, I acknowledge of course that the galling irony of The Substance is that there has never been a better example of art imitating life. Sparkle is not so far from Moore herself, dumped by toy-boy Ashton Kutcher when she hit 50, which set in motion a phase of increasingly unsubtle cosmetic surgery work on her face.

All credit to Demi then, that she agreed to be filmed naked for the movie. She was in fact 60 when she shot the film. In the unforgiving world of Hollywood, and of course society as a whole, I think it’s incredibly brave of her to go starkers alongside gorgeous young Qualley. Demi, by the way, has a great body and has every reason to want to show it off. But the truth is, in the eyes of society, as Harvey said, “At 50, it stops” i.e. no one wants to look at us once we’ve hit 50, especially not—shudder—our naked aging bodies. As the old man tells Sparkle in the scene in the diner, “It gets harder each time to remember that you still deserve to exist. That this part of yourself is still worth something. That YOU still matter.” There’s also a feeling, instilled in us by society, that us older women shouldn’t feel or look sexy after 50. Look at all the flak Madonna or J-Lo get for daring to be proud of their bodies or flaunting their sexuality. Many of us. though, internalise what society tells us. In the scene where Demi gets ready for her date with Fred, she looks absolutely gorgeous and, yes, sexy. But as soon as she catches a glimpse of the prone body of Sue at her feet, she immediately feels “less than” and has a meltdown. She wipes off her lipstick and covers up her cleavage. We are so indoctrinated to believe that youth=beauty that so many of us now feel ugly in comparison, which is tragic.

I too have botoxed and filled and starved and extended. I too, like Sparkle, intend to rage, rage against the dying of the light. How far away really are any of us aging women to Elisabeth Sparkle—what would any of us sacrifice to recapture our youth and spend a bit of time as the Sue version of ourselves? Just like poor desperate Lizzy puts on her best coat and goes to a dodgy part of town and crawls under a metal barrier to get hold of the Substance, I too have visited the darkest corners of the internet to acquire some suspicious weight loss pills or a knock-off skin peel that promises to help me find my teenage self.

Imagine the joy of waking up and finding Margaret Qualley in the bathroom mirror. Who wouldn’t want that, and who wouldn’t be prepared to risk a bit of gut-wrenching body disfigurement in the faraway future to achieve endless youth right now? Aren’t we all secretly waiting for the Silicon Valley wunderkind to come up with a Substance that won’t end up with us exploded into a bloody mess on a Hollywood sidewalk? And actually, even if I do end up as a splodge on the pavement, at least I won’t have to worry about grey pubes any more.

Claudia Lewis is a British TV Producer and writer. She has contributed to the Business Insider and the i-Paper. She is aging reluctantly and is a keen but incompetent horse rider.