The 2024 Cannes Film Festival Best Screenplay prizewinner is one of the most grotesque but ironically gorgeous-looking movies anyone will see about beauty and vanity.
Let’s get one thing right out of the way: The Substance is not for the squeamish. Someone’s back gets cracked open, something crawls out of that opened back, and someone is shown eating a bunch of greasy fried shrimps with bare hands—in extreme close-ups. And all that grotesquery is just within the first 30 minutes of the film. There’s so much more in store in the next two hours.
Ironically, this 2024 Cannes Film Festival Best Screenplay prizewinner is one of the most grotesque but ironically gorgeous-looking movies anyone will see about beauty and vanity, specifically the beauty standards crafted and perpetrated by Hollywood — young, creamy, dreamy.
These standards have also been called unrealistic, impossible, and toxic. The film takes that to an absurdist extreme with its body horror tale of a veteran TV star who gets ditched as host of her own aerobics show on her 50th birthday, only to find a potent serum from a mysterious source that allows her to create a much younger version of herself with a different body.
The Substance is certainly not the first film to deal with the topic. For one, the 1992 Meryl Streep starrer Death Becomes Her mined it for laughs with a big, broad, soap operatic revenge story involving two women fighting over the affection of the same man. The new film, starring Demi Moore, looks very much inward, taking a deep dive into the bruised psyche of someone who was very much entrenched in Hollywood’s vanity machinery while building a long career out of it and suddenly getting displaced when her sell-by date is up.
The film covers a lot as Moore’s character, Elizabeth Sparkle, battles in ever-increasing fashion with the younger her, who names herself Sue, and their inner demons — the obsession, the delusion, the ecstacy, the frustration, the disappointment, the confusion, the desperation, the self-pity and self-loathing, the rage, the hopelessness, the resignation.
Moore and Margaret Qually are both sensational, each giving a performance as sharp as a fresh razor blade of the best-of-the-best cosmetic surgeons that take their individual but intimately and intricately related descent into madness.
Twenty-nine-year-old Qualley, daughter of 1990s star Andie MacDowell, captures 21-year-old Sue’s youthful rebelliousness, irresponsibility, and hunger for more. Moore, 61, is even better in the role of her career, putting in an Oscar-worthy turn that indeed sparkles with burnished grandeur while firmly grounding this sci-fi fantasia into the deep end of Hollywood movie mayhem.
But for all of Moore’s and Qualley’s thespian skills and despite an unseen character’s oft-repeated onscreen reminder that Elizabeth and Sue are one, the film doesn’t quite make them feel like they’re the exact same person. Sue isn’t just a better version of Elizabeth, she is her own woman; she isn’t just a younger body double, she is practically a daughter (after all, she literally crawled out of Elizabeth’s body).
This aside, The Substance is a triumph as an audacious indictment of Hollywood’s role in the oppression that double standards torturously subject women to. This is in addition to serving as a mirror to our own culpability, including women themselves. That’s the biggest grotesquerie everyone should be squeamish about and what makes the movie an essential watch.
