Monday, February 24, 2025 is Whooping Crane Festival. I drove to the Spectrum Center at noon. The weather was nice, temperatures in the 70s, and it felt like summertime. I walked around, checking out what’s new and what stores were closing. There were some sales. I became hungry. I bought a Rafine at a French café. Then, I bought a cappuccino at Starbucks. I drank a cup of water with ice. I hung out outside, playing with my iPhone, while waiting for a friend to show up for a movie meetup. We bought out tickets at 5:30pm, before walking around until seven. Then, we went into the IMAX theater to watch The Substance. I had watched some YouTubers’ reactions videos of this movie, and I was curious to see the whole movie, from beginning to end.
A 2024 Body Horror Movie, “The Substance” Review
The movie starts out with an egg yolk experiment, where one egg yolk is cloned into its twin. This scene insinuated that the substance is a scientific, medical drug with likely side effects, but often promoted as a miracle drug to solve one’s health or body issues.
A famous actress, who has earned a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, is currently working as an aerobics instructor on a TV show. The leotard outfits the performers wear on this show gave me eighties vibes because no one wears them anymore. Anyway, Elisabeth Sparkle still looks good for her age, and she is happy working in this exercise show.
On her fiftieth birthday, Elisabeth goes into the men’s bathroom because the women’s bathroom was out of order. While inside a bathroom stall, she overhears a movie producer talking on his cell phone about her, calling her an old hag, and they need to find a young and sexy IT girl.
The Substance Movie Trailer
Everything spirals downward from this point. She starts to feel depressed when she is fired because she feels unwanted, dejected, and rejected. While driving home, she becomes distracted by workers tearing down a large billboard with her face on it, and another car hits her in a dramatic accident. At the hospital, she miraculously survived, probably because she is healthy and strong. She was likely wearing her seatbelt. But she appeared traumatized by everything suddenly happening to her on her fiftieth birthday, which led to different shocking incidences. Before leaving the hospital, a young-looking doctor, who actually looks AI because of his perfectly symmetrical features and his cyborg appearance, but with a huge birthmark, examines her spine before giving her a USB drive about The Substance. There is also a handwritten note with it, stating “IT CHANGED MY LIFE.”
She watches the USB drive, which looks like a commercial for the product, selling her eternal perfection, youth, and beauty. She initially doesn’t take it seriously and throws it away. But she later returns to her trash bin to dig it out and call the number on the USB drive. An omniscient man’s voice answers the phone, and he sounds like the man’s voice in the USB commercial. After she orders this product, the voice instructs her to pick it up at an address.
She walks through the LA streets in her stylish and trendy yellow trench coat, which has the same yellow color as the egg yolk. She still looks very trendy and stylish, dressed in this trendy coat, fancy designer sunglasses, and long black hair, and this trendy yellow coat symbolizes her character. Sue also wears this coat as she takes over Elisabeth’s career. Elisabeth arrives at an old street alley, which looks questionable and unsafe but deserted. The underground door only opens halfway into a dark tunnel, which is creepy but adventurous for those who dare to enter, especially very desperate and hopeless people. She crawls through this doorway and slowly walks toward a light at the end of this underground tunnel. She enters a clean, well-lighted white room, filled with numbered lockers for people who have ordered this product. She notices her number 503, as well as the locker number 207. It looks like an Amazon business building. This Substance appears to be sold secretly in the Black Market for elites and rich celebrities, kind of like older celebrities and elites buying adrenochrome for their health and youth purposes.
She returns home to open her box. It has a 3-step simple instruction, making it appear to be easy to follow and use. But it reiterates that she must always remember that both the young version and the older version are one person. The instructions insinuate that if she doesn’t follow the exact instructions, there will likely be side effects.
She goes into her spacious and white bathroom, which kind of looks like an asylum room for people going crazy. She stands naked in front of the mirror and stares at herself, before using the product. She waits for a couple of minutes, before falling to the floor in pain and anguish, giving birth to the younger version of herself through her spine. It is also interesting that she has to perform the surgical procedures on her own, by the younger version, such as sewing her split back together. I am not sure if anyone without a medical degree would go to that extent with this product.
As the twenty-year-old younger version, played by Margaret Qualley, pursues Elisabeth’s old job, she buys a trendy pink leotard before auditioning for the aerobics instructor position to replace Elisabeth. The ruthless men judging the audition choose her as their favorite. She names herself Sue. I thought Sue looked more like a Barbie Doll, doused in pink makeup, accessories, and a shiny pink leotard with cutouts. I actually have a black bathing suit that looks like such leotard, which I bought during the nineties. As I watched Sue’s aerobic show, it appears to be very sexy and erotic, with overexaggerated moves and flirtatious behavior. During the eighties, I remember watching a similar exercise show on Showtime, which was short, around fifteen minutes, but the girls performing on this exercise show looked very sexy and erotic, each dressed in a monochromatic simple red leotard, while performing wild and overexaggerated moves. I used to work out with that show, and I actually got an invigorating workout inside my bedroom, which got me interested in pursuing aerobic classes at a local gym.
Elisabeth apparently enjoys being young again, under Sue, and she often cheats in her usage of the Substance to remain young without switching after seven days. The USB basic instructions reiterated that both the older version and younger version must switch back between the two after seven days for each version. But Elisabeth was probably getting bored, mostly pigging out in front of the television with nothing to do, except watching TV, cooking French cuisines, and shoving food down her throat in her depression. She often watched her younger version on television, especially on interviews, celebrating her youth, beauty, career, and exciting life.
The young version starts to dissociate from the older version because her successful career goes to her head, and she treats her old version as her sick mother or just a vintage celebrity before her time, a has-been nobody, invalid and irrevelant during the current time.
Elisabeth starts to deteriorate because she had abused The Substance, wanting to remain in her youth longer for more jobs, for admiration and love from her fans and the general public, as well as for a successful career in her fifties. She eventually realizes she needs to quit this Substance, but she would have to deal with remaining in the decrepit state she put herself in when abusing the product. So, she decides to work with it and create a balance between her two versions. But she cannot because it turns into an addiction to remain youthful, beautiful, slim, and desirable for others’ approval and love. It is a sad story about aging and dealing with aging issues.
She reaches a point where she appears to have given up on using this product because it has aged her too much that she looks like Gollum. She calls the number and tells the omniscient male voice that she wants to quit. They send her the termination kit, which she uses on the younger version to kill her for destroying her current older version body from a normal fifty-year-old woman to a scary Gollum hermit. After injecting 90% of the termination death sentence, she pulls it out to revive the younger version because she wants to appear on the New Year’s Show. But Sue irately attacks Elisabeth, angry that Elisabeth tried to kill her, attacking Elisabeth with such vigor, super strength, and power, similar to a cartoonish superhero, such as Goku. The action-filled attack appears similar to a cartoon character robot getting revenge. Elisabeth’s penthouse turns into a bloodbath war between the younger version and the older version, ending in the death of the older version because the younger version destroyed and bloodied the older version. Sue showers and prepares for the New Year’s Show, dressed in a huge blue gown and blue eyeshadow. She looks young and perfect again, similar to a Disney Princess.
But right before she gets ready to go on stage, she starts to fall apart. Her teeth, fingernail, and ear fall out. She runs home to inject the Substance into her bloodstream to make her younger version look younger, which is an addictive cycle to now improve the younger version. It was also instructed that this step can only be used once, during the first time and only on the original older version. The birth process on this younger version goes bad by destroying the younger version and turning her into a creepy blob character, similar to The Elephant Man, or in this case, the Elephant Woman. But I think that the younger version’s better version is actually the younger version’s deformed fetus, due to abusing the Substance. Elisabeth’s body parts are embedded into Sue’s blob body transformation, making her into a creepy outcast of society to be shunned by all because of fear and shock, due to the deformity of this new birth, the Elisasue blob-thing or a deformed fetus baby. She now accepts her fifty-year-old look, realizing that she looked normal and good for her age, and she glues a cutout picture of Elisabeth’s face over her deformed blob-thing face. She draws red lipstick over the lips in the photograph, which displays her distorted view of herself and her body.
She walks out on stage to meet her fans. She still looks strange, creepy, and weird, with both versions’ body parts, embedded together in this deformed blob-thing, sticking out of the blue gown, even though no one notices right away. The minimally dressed young female performers notice this strange creature on stage. The audience eventually notice her deformities, but stare in shock and horror, before many people in the audience start to scream and cry. It turns into a huge bloodbath on stage as others attack Elisasue, calling her a creepy monster. She runs out into the street and falls apart all over the sidewalk. Elisabeth’s face crawls toward her star on the Walk of Fame, and she melts away into a bloodstain on her star, but still appearing to be finally happy as herself because she is now free.
A street cleaner uses a machine to wipe the bloody mess over her star, and it appears that life goes on because she is now free and happy from her issues. I thought it was interesting the way Elisabeth Sparkle transformed from a normal and trendy fifty-year-old women into a witch, and then into Gollum, before transforming into a blob-thing, mostly because of her desperation to remain youthful and beautiful. She did it to herself because she didn’t follow the exact instructions. It also destroyed her life as well as her current fifty-year-old body because she lacked self-love and self-acceptance. She also appeared to be alone, but wealthy, living in a nice penthouse. But it wasn’t enough for her because she lacked love, both self-love and love from other people in her life. Her younger version had sexual encounters with different men as well as adoration and admiration from her fans, which gave her temporary satisfaction but false love. And, Elisabeth needed to continuously work to feel that love from others on a daily basis. Before she tried the Substance, she should have started a relationship with Fred, who seemed to appear at the right time, during a sudden street encounter. He remembered her from high school homeroom, and he still thought she was beautiful at fifty, before she even tried The Substance. That encounter should have been enough affirmation for her ego that she was beautiful enough at her current age, even though she didn’t seem to remember Fred from her tenth grade homeroom. She should have moved on with her life and started a relationship with Fred, even as friends.
Dennis Quaid’s character, Harvey, is a sleazy and disgusting Hollywood producer, resembling Harvey Weinstein. For him, it is all about the money, and he felt Elisabeth was getting too old to make much money for the industry. He wanted to look for a younger version who is thin, young, sexy, and a fresh face in order to attract a larger audience and be used as a cash cow.
I thought it was an interesting movie, similar to the 1992 Black Comedy, Death Becomes Her, directed by Robert Zemeckis, and starred Bruce Willis, Meryl Streep, Goldie Hawn, and Isabella Rosellini.
Where to watch “The Substance”?
The Substance is a 2024 body horror film, written and directed by Coralie Fargeat. This movie starred Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, and Dennis Quaid. I think this movie is also a black comedy because it takes the main character into a dark journey toward self-acceptance and self-love, as she fights with herself to exist in society. It is available to watch on MUBI Via Prime Video.