The Substance

publish Opened 2024-11-24. Watched 2024-11-22. Related to Movies I’ve seen.

Bullet point takeaways

SPOILERS: I have a lot of complaints with this film that I need to call out explicitly to critique. Thar be spoilers from here on out.

• I didn’t like this movie.
• It’s so slow. And it has minimal dialogue. The script must be magazine-thin.
  • … which I take issue with because we don’t get to watch actors act. It’s difficult to praise the actors in a movie where minimal dialogue gets delivered.
  • The nonverbal acting wasn’t very compelling. Why do characters in pain or terrible predicaments never curse nor look at their situation, wide-eyed in horror. They seem unnervingly chill. Maybe that’s how Elisabeth/Sue’s character was intended to be portrayed — mentally aloof from any topic other than themselves — but it’s too bad the characters as they were acted didn’t leave much room for actors to do their job compellingly.
    • Dennis Quaid is an exception. He was not given particularly compelling lines but he delivered them fantastically.
• Furthermore, the short dialogue that exists seems a bit… simple? The writers seem afraid they will leave the audience behind if the script is too complicated, so the dialogue often becomes exposition.
  • For example: The Dennis Quaid character in the opening urinal scene basically lays out the entire plot for the next hour in a few sentences of dialogue.
    • Let’s pretend this is a good thing, and the dialogue is reductive to the point of surrealism as an aesthetic choice. Maybe some folks like that. But it only works for me if the rest of the movie speeds up to match the pace of reductive information being conveyed. In this case, the info is extremely reductive (“find me a girl who is young and hot!!”) and interspersed with silent scenes where almost nothing happens. It just feels like the audience should be watching on 2x speed until he meets Sue. We all know what’s going to happen. It just doesn’t feel very cerebral.
  • I have another example. When Elisabeth has lost her finger and goes to the diner, she meets another guy who is using The Substance.
    • The script is begging the audience to notice this:
      • Elisabeth asks: “are you following me?” and the guy responds cryptically, something to the tune of “doesn’t it get hard to justify why the older part of you exists?”
      • There is a full-screen flashback to the face of the young nurse who told her she was a good specimen.
      • The guy drops his wallet, revealing his Substance ID card.
      • The guy bends over, revealing the massive scar along his spine caused by the Substance.
      • The movie only needed the first bullet point to convey that he was also a Substance user!
• Aesthetically derivative of Poor Things and Kubrick aesthetics. Scenes will randomly be oversaturated with color or have aggressive symmetrical perspective shots for no reason.
  • At least, no reason I can discern. If there’s a reason governing these choices I’d upgrade my review to higher.
• It does a thing which I’ve noticed in films lately and dislike, where movie props (in this case, a billboard poster) will be overly simplistic.
  • The billboard poster reads “New Show soon” and a photo of Sue.
  • That’s it.
  • No real life poster does that kind of thing.
  • I love reductive surrealism but because it isn’t matched by reductive surrealism anywhere else in frame, it just feels like it’s treating the audience as dumb.

The greatest sin of all of this film, IMO

• The subject matter here — body dysmorphia in movie stars — is super rich and impactful. And yet the film seems to sidestep it entirely. The movie isn’t deep even though it seems like it’s trying to be.
• It’s just about a single self-destructive character. No larger implication for the industry as a whole.
  • I feel so strongly about this I’ve brainstormed some IMPROVEMENTS that could be made.
    • Instead of a cookbook as a parting gift to Elisabeth, she should be sent some subtly-lewd book containing pictures of her best years.
    • In the final scene of the NYE show, have some impressionable young girls in the front row, implying that the cycle continues.
    • Have the locker room for the substance be bigger, implying that there is a huge customer base for body dysmorphia
    • Make all the scenes from the teeth-falling-out scene onwards hallucinations. It would give the director a great chance to fit in more surreal body horror stuff, while also being a cool parallel with Elisabeth’s self-sabotaged date. In the same way that Elisabeth psyched herself out of an otherwise lovely date, Sue could psych herself out of an otherwise great modeling event. And then end the film on some unclear note as to which parts of the hallucinations are real. Then, people like me would actually have material to ponder, instead of just a completely literal interpretation of what happened!
• It’s annoying that the film seems to go out of its way to not make a statement.
  • The only other character who is taking The Substance is a random dude whose younger persona is a nurse. Not an actor, just a medical nurse who is shown in one scene.