Top 15 Movies of 2024: No. 4 - The Substance

4. The Substance, dir. Coralie Fargeat

Nominate this for Best Picture, you cowards!

...oh wait, they actually did? ...Really?

Okay, have this win Best Picture, you cowards! I want to see that acceptance speech.Coralie Fargeat should walk up to the podium with a bucket of blood and then see which front row A-listers get to be in the splash zone.

We are ten years into this "elevated horror" movement, if that even is a thing. (I'm not sure it is all that terribly well-defined.) As much as I enjoy watching horror movies get all this critical interest and praise... something felt off in 2024. I came away not exactly disappointed with but very underwhelmed by a lot of what was out there. I did not disliked Longlegs or Cuckoo, they both get soft recommendations from me. They look great, they have an aesthetic, they have good leads, there's one character actor hamming it up wildly as the villain, and yet... I just did not feel like they went far enough. They just did not have an edge. They never felt dangerous. They never took their ideas to beyond all good taste. Maybe there were just a lot of 3/5 horror movies in 2024 like The Heretic that had pretensions of greater questions, yet offered nothing of... substance.

I walked out of The Substance feeling like perhaps the promise/curse of AI had come true according to all of the wildest investor fantasies. Here was a move machine learning had crafted for my precise perversions. I'll admit, I'm something of a cheap date when it comes to cinema: you show me a ton of pornographic nudity and pornographic gore, I'll cheer. The Substance has a core point about how Hollywood and entertainment treats its aging beauties, and turns it into a Cronenbergian (both David and Brandon!) concept of splitting flesh and identity. Then it just keeps going. And going. It keeps evolving and progressing its disgusting concept to the point that an entire audience is covered in fluids. And I just want to swim in all of it.

This a solid SciFi concept about an aging actress, Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), choosing to undergo a process called "The Substance", in which she will be reborn as Sue (Margaret Qualley), a younger more perfect version of herself. The rules are arbitrary in a fairy tale manner: you must spend one week as your older self, then one week as your younger self. There's a slow devolution of this character into two figures, as Elisabeth breaks down and becomes increasingly unable to function as herself. The Substance has the carefree recklessness of youth face its aging consequences immediately. But also, it's a person tearing themselves in half. Elisabeth is undergoing a process to transform, yet in truth, is trying to reject change. She is just repeating the life that left her such a lonely, empty person with nothing except her fame. She does undergo a different transformation, not into youth, but to the grotesque.

The Substance is only Coralie Fargeat's second movie, which is stunning to consider. This is so polished, with such a strong voice already. Her previous work, Revenge, also had an ending that amazed with its unusually large amount of blood. And it had a highly erotic gaze towards its female star. The Substance is horny with a capital-H. It is drooling at Margaret Qualley's body, fetishized from every angle, often nude. There's a lot of vibrant colors that pop, no color popping more than the pink on that swimsuit. This is all in contrast to Demi Moore, an actress who thirty years ago was the hottest sex symbol on the planet. Her filmography includes sweaty trash like Striptease and Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, yet even her big swing for dramatic bona fides in 1995's The Scarlet Letter had to sell itself on a sex scene. Maybe it is fitting therefore that Demi Moore finally got her Best Actress nomination for The Substance, a movie about her own aging and declining star power, and willingness to degrade herself ever further. Fargeat is playing up the contrast of impossibly glowing white flesh on Qualley while uglying-up Moore.

There is a message here in The Substance, not a complicated one, nor does it need to be: we've known film stardom objectifies women  for over a century now, and that story goes not get any more "trite" even if you've heard it before. (People still cannot handle a woman's body in the public eye, Sydney Sweeney's chest became one of the weirdest stories of 2024's media cycle.) I do not think The Substance becomes any less interesting because its satire is obvious. And I'm not entirely sure if the exploitation is in service to the satire, or if Fargeat is making a satire in service to her exploitation instincts.

Fargeat has visual references to The Shining, the ending is pure Screaming Mad George mixed with De Palma, plus there is a lot of The Fly. But I'll say, The Substance is not just a great movie because it reminds me of several of my favorite horror movies. It is its own kind of unique nasty. Early on in The Substance, we see Dennis Quaid as this producer figure, probably not named "Harvey" by accident, eating a bowl of shrimp in a nasty close-up to his teeth. That's exactly the movie this director wants to make. She wants to film the consumption of bodies, not even swallowing them, just the chewing. She wants to show the most gorgeous vision of objectified femininity juxtaposed with the most horrible, the most unimaginably disgusting, first from the ravages of age, then even a twisted body made out of even more depraved nightmare. These are in-your-face extremes, daring you to keep watching. There are several points where The Substance reaches a logical conclusion, where Sue and Elisabeth's rivalry breaks them both down into ruins of themselves. And no, it is not settling for a logical conclusion. The ending must be entirely illogical, hitting another gear of gross for no necessary reason.

I was sad The Substance ever ended. It was the best time I had at the movies in all of 2024. Cannot believe there are three movies I think are better than this.