"The Substance" Review: A Terrible Movie About Nothing Worth Hearing

In this wretched body horror flick, Coralie Fargeat has neither style nor substance.

February 21, 2025

There are many ways to be annoying. You can sing on public transportation or small talk with someone rushing out the door. You can go to the express checkout with a Mount Vesuvius worth of items or heat fish in the break room microwave. But there’s one way to be annoying that dominates the discourse surrounding anything that’s a matter of opinion: taking everything as a personal attack.

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We are who we are and like what we like: nothing can change that. With 8 billion people in the world, people will think differently from one another. Accepting this fact is vital to peaceful discussion. Refusing to do so because the idea of a different perspective inexplicably feels like an attack is, well, annoying.

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Thus, we arrive at “cinephiles,” who don’t actually like movies, only what they can gain from exploiting them. The more abstract, bizarre, “unique,” and subversive a film is, the more unpalatable to a mainstream audience, the better. Quality is irrelevant; they only want something they can use to convince themselves they understand something others can only guess at: they “get it.”

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As such, we arrive at films like The Substance, one of the worst movies ever created. You have three choices:

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1. Acknowledge its shortcomings as you explain your enjoyment.

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2. Express your discontent under the delusion that someone who feels differently can read your opinion and move on.

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3. Armed with the self-consciousness that led you to use its trappings to rationalize your baseless superiority complex, throw a Grade-A hissy fit when anyone raises a contrasting viewpoint because you’re too overcome with insecurity.

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Sadly, the overwhelming majority of The Substance’s legion of undeserved fans are Option 3 people, and they should be held solely responsible for one of the worst films ever made getting exalted as the great movie it never even comes remotely close to being.

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The premise is simple and profoundly stupid. Aging former film star Elizabeth Sparkle does her daily Jane Fonda impression on a televised morning aerobics show. The studio head, looking to usher in a new age of fresh, young fun, cans her. Desperate to recapture her youth, she takes the advice of a young man and procures “The Substance,” a black market means of creating the best version of yourself. Although the initial onset accomplishes her age-defying goals, her new self ultimately jeopardizes Elizabeth’s life.

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When something doesn’t work, the people who like it, those “Option 3” people, will drum up any generality to dismiss criticism. Conveniently, the very nature of those generalities prevents anyone from responding in a way that doesn’t end with getting even more harshly dismissed, because generalities are, by definition, irrefutable. Yes, if someone says, “All gay people are lazy,” one can refute that by finding literally one gay person who’s not lazy and thus dismantle the generality. However, art isn’t affected by this concept. The Substance is a movie where you can say whoever doesn’t like it “didn’t get it,” or “missed the point,” or the all-time favorite “Did they even watch the movie?”

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It’s crucial to remember an important fact: in film, there is no “A for effort.” You either get the job done or you don’t.

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Imagine it: you’re a seasoned baker tasked with bringing a homemade pecan pie to the family potluck. You prepare your crust, make the custard, fold in the pecans, and bake. It comes out, you cool it, and head for the reunion. Aunt Barb takes the first bite aaaand…

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the crust is raw, the custard is goop, and the pecans taste like they’ve been sitting in a pantry for 20 years. You tried, but you had one job to do and failed.

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The whole concept of “social commentary” in movies is mostly stupid. Movies aren’t usually long enough to dissect anything. Miniseries or TV shows can do that, but, in films, it's usually an exercise in futility. One could say The Substance was doomed to fail because of that, but it fails more because of a common trend among indie filmmakers: using genre gimmickry to state the obvious and thinking said gimmickry masks the fact that they are stating the obvious.

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For women in the industry, aging is brutal.

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Thanks, we know.

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Some will go to ludicrous lengths to stay young.

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Thanks, we know.

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Despite those efforts, we have a subconscious aversion to letting them back into the fold regardless, rendering their aims pointless.

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Thanks, we know.

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Sometimes, society needs a refresher, but movies that do this usually exploit societal flaws to seem profound so that film lovers will fawn over them. It’s bad enough that The Substance is one of the most poorly-paced, overlong films released in years. It’s bad enough that the central performance of Demi Moore, while good, is receiving praise as the second coming of Meryl Streep in Sophie’s Choice, a wholly undeserved level of acclaim that doesn’t reflect how thin Elizabeth’s characterization is and how little she ultimately does to elevate her beyond the ghastly screenplay’s limitations.

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Of course, those don’t stop at the two main characters’ limp imagining. Another combat of those shielding their carefully curated tastes from criticism is to dismiss any holes in the narrative as unimportant. “Those things don’t matter;” “Not EVERYTHING needs to be explained;” “All of this commentary is happening, and you’re worried about a social security card?”

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Well, yes, because the fact that a creature can spawn from a slit in someone’s back, show up at a production studio, and become a morning television star without any identification is stupid. Yes, we know it’s “commentary” on how young, attractive women aren’t even viewed as people, and any opportunity to sexualize them will get capitalized on swiftly with zero regard for anything but their perky butts in glistening spandex. It’s not relevant. If you want your commentary to land, your story shouldn’t be Swiss cheese. The closer it feels to society, the more license you have to lean into all the body horror components it uses to hammer its points home less typically.

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Sadly, while that atypicality exists compared to your average studio movie with similar thematic aims, one doesn’t even need to be a fan of body horror to know it’s subdued in exploring even that, which proves quite irrefutably that everything The Substance does is a cynical ploy to draw raves from crowds who will fawn over anything “different.”

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The grotesqueness of its physical horror is muted. It earns a sharp wince or a quickly averted gaze, but nothing will make anyone look at Elizabeth Sparkle and say, “Sweetie, this can’t be worth it.”

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If the connection between Elizabeth and her pseudo-spawn, Sue, was more firmly established, maybe The Substance could’ve genuinely explored how much what Elizabeth seeks is worth, but it fails at this as well. Although it repeatedly tells us through phone calls between Elizabeth and the mysterious voice on the other end of the customer service line that she and Sue are one, the film does virtually nothing to show us the truth of this on a psychological level. It relies on physical changes as Elizabeth’s finger ages into Old Rose from Titanic territory when Sue disregards the stringent changing schedule, but a balance is needed. The most unfortunate thing is that a competent filmmaker could have struck it, creating a physical manifestation and a psychological link. Alas, we get… this.

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Due to the need for the two women to switch out once a week, and without a genuine psychological link that’s shown and not told, what precisely Elizabeth gains from Sue’s stardom is missing.

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We see her stare in awe at Sue’s billboard just as she goes to shut her down permanently. The implication is that she gains from Sue’s fame so much that she’ll continue aging into even worse physical deformity, but the film does such a poor job displaying how deep the tie between the two women runs that they always feel like two separate beings, not two halves of a larger whole. Thus, much of the film’s drama (if one can even call something so dull in any way, shape, or form “drama”) falls flat.

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The Substance is not only a failure in every conceivable way, but due to it being absurdly long, histrionic in hammering home basic ideas, and a complete snooze even as a body horror flick that should theoretically grab your attention, it’s one of the worst movies ever made. If nothing else, it’s a fantastic example that there should be no “A for effort” in filmmaking. Yes, we need people willing to try new things, but only if they have the talent to legitimize what they’re doing. If they don’t, damn them for putting us through cinematic hell, watching their self-indulgent movies that do nothing, say nothing, mean nothing, and would be better off not existing at all.