The Substance is a film with a simple premise. What if, instead of ageing, you could have a new form that enabled you to youthfully dominate the environment around you? As with all things in the universe, balance and entropy surely play a role in moderating the use of such things.
Every benefit should have a cost, and well - The Substance doesn't appear to have a monetary one, but by golly does it have some wacky side effects as portrayed.
This film follows Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), an ageing aerobics TV star, with an empire, a TV network contract, and a chauvinistic, one dimensional boss. He wants to replace her with a younger model, and he's not even a certain male Hollywood star who shall not be named here.
The film deploys intense use of macro images (super close up shots) of various things, and its a sharp, confronting representation of all things, almost all the time. Nothing drives this point home more than the viscera that is on display in the later parts of the film, but before we get there, we need to get to what The Substance offers.
A copy of yourself. A younger version. It spawns from you, and you swap every seven days. There's some other strange bio-chem going on, and none of it is explained, nor is the origin of The Substance.
After the protagonist starts to use The Substance, we get a full on session of Eye Bleach in the form of Sue (Margaret Qualley) who represents the new, younger model. Gratuitous, sensual and sexualised aerobic sequences follow, as if to ram home the expendability of age and decay, particularly in hollywood.
Since The Substance requires a "stabiliser" every day (which appears to be spinal fluid) - and a "switch" every seven days, the film enters a cadence whereby the two women switch roles, vanishing from the public eye for a week.
That is, until Sue starts to extend her stay in the world by taking more "Stabiliser" from Elisabeth. This results in some side effects, accelerated ageing, disfigurment, etc.
This all escalates into a bloody, gory mess towards the end of the film, and it gets incredibly graphic.
There's a lot of similarity to Death Becomes Her, but The Substance takes itself more seriously, while remaining fun and absurd ... yet attempting to be poignant. I did not expect it to have as much gore as what eventually was depicted, but hey, that wasn't an unpleasant surprise.
The presentation makes this film seem to want to become a cult-classic, but there just isn't enough depth here in terms of the sciencey side of the tale.
There's also a whole bunch of stuff towards the end that is rife with real societal implications which aren't tackled at all - you don't have a televised theatre audience get drenched in blood and viscera without someone asking questions.
Those questions are never asked, nor answered, but what you do get is a film that is at both trashy and amusing.
I wish it was slightly more serious with the science fiction side of things, but it just leaves me shrugging. It is a film I'd recommend to others, but only if you're prepared to sit among some gross, gory bits before getting to the absurd and hilarious pay off towards the end.