Through a Glass Darkly

 

This year's TikTok fad movie is a parable of eternal youth filmed in the style of one of those queasy cartoon-imitation comedies of the 2000s like The Cat in the Hat (2003). Our protagonist is Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), a middle-aged TV fitness personality whose rapacious male producer, ingeniously named Harvey (Dennis Quaid), is replacing her with a younger star. (The role seems to have autobiographical significance for Moore, an enormous actress of the 1990s with close-to-zero cachet with anyone under 30). In her panic, she undergoes a mysterious and medically risky reverse-aging process called The Substance, a metaphor for plastic surgery (or drugs, or...), which transforms her into a twenty-something avatar of stereotypical female sexuality, Sue (Margaret Qualley). At first she revels in her physical rejuvenation, but as you might have guessed, things do not work out as planned. I will avoid further spoilers...

Vulgar obviousness looms

In Grade 11 English class I co-wrote my first play, a moth-eaten thing we called Unseen Deeds. It had an extremely improbable premise about a superhero with the power of invisibility, whose every good deed was falsely claimed by a demagogue posing as a superhero for advertising profits. This antediluvian artefact of untrained teenage playwrights, with its lazy, unconvincing construction of a fictional world, its trite and ham-fisted messaging, and its stock dramatic scenarios, has become a critical benchmark of mine when judging a work of art: if it reminds me of Unseen Deeds, the author messed up.

Coralie Fargeat, the director of The Substance, received millions in funding and the collaboration of famous Hollywood actors to essentially adapt our play to the screen. The youthful mistakes I described before are all found here. Fargeat's vision of Hollywood is a cardboard cutout less convincing than Grand Theft Auto V. There's a scene where Elisabeth clambers into what is supposed to be a grotty L.A. back alley, and the "trash" and posters adorning it look like someone placed them all there 30 minutes before she arrived. A motif throughout the film is a conspicuous billboard of Sue outside her and Elisabeth's apartment, which tortures Elisabeth and stokes her jealousy against her younger alter-ego; this was an idea we used in Unseen Deeds, to set the play in the apartment of the true, invisible superhero with a bright neon billboard of the fake superhero placed outside his window. There's a perverse hilarity in seeing the horrible theatrical device you used in your Grade 11 play taken up seriously by a critically acclaimed film that has made $80 million in theatres worldwide.

Obviousness is the name of the game here: every single thought that the film has will be spelled out for the viewer in a shot, then a line of dialogue, then three more shots and two more clarifying lines of dialogue; innocuous details that later prove narratively prescient, instead of being left for re-watchers to discover, are just bluntly shown again to the audience with no realistic motivation. This is a movie so dumb that the director has to make sure you don't feel an urge to see it more than once. The horror genre, which in the hands of its best artists was almost always handled with unpretentious economy – short runtimes, "smuggled" subtexts – is turned here into the most blazingly on-the-nose mammoth of a film you'll ever see, running at 140 minutes with a 20-minute epilogue that feels like a deleted scene.

Score: 1.5/5. At this rate, I hope to write a positive post on this blog before the end of 2025.