The Substance

Wickedly smart and subversive to start, this (supposedly) feminist body switcheroo horror flick about our obsession with youth doesn't age very well, overstaying its welcome as it devolves into goofs.

“The Substance” is wickedly smart and subversive, until it’s not.

How ironic and depressing it is to describe a movie about our obsession with beauty and youth, but it doesn’t age very well. It already feels old and played-out by the end of its 140 minutes, overstaying its prime by nearly an hour.

People are describing it as a feminist body horror flick, and while it’s definitely the latter I don’t think the former truly applies. It’s about an aging star, played by Demi Moore, who’s pushed out of the limelight and turns to weird science to spawn a younger and more beautiful version of herself (Margaret Qualley), and the two end up vying for dominance over their shared identity.

If it’s trying to lampoon impossible ideals for the female body, especially in showbiz, then it too gleefully indulges in flaunting them in getting its point across. It’s a cornucopia of leering voyeurism, veritable troughs of boobs and butts and other naked flesh served up for our viewing pleasure.

If anything, it feels almost to have a misogynistic bent, especially in the later going when it turns to increasingly gory celebrations of women’s bodies getting smashed, twisted and violated. Writer/director Coralie Fargeat (“Revenge”) wants to paint a satirical portrait of how females are ill-used in our shallow culture, but she winds up using their anatomy as her canvas.

This movies tickles our prurience while lambasting it.

I’m reminded of the early days of slasher horror movies, when filmmakers insisted they were using graphic portrayals of people getting carved up in order to make a statement about our affinity with violence. Maybe some of them meant it, at least to start, but soon enough it was apparent they and their audiences were just getting off on the fountains of spattering blood for their own sake.

Hey, I’m not judging. I loved those movies as a young’un and still do.

But you don’t get to claim the moral high ground about exploiting women’s bodies while Moore and Qualley spend almost as much time without clothes as with.

Moore plays Elisabeth Sparkle, a once-serious actress and Oscar winner whose career has wound down to hosting a spandex TV exercise show. She’s still the star, if of a much smaller and shrinking territory. The allusions to Jane Fonda’s path in the 1980s seems pretty clear, and there’s very much a tactile evocation of that era even as it is set in modern times.

Celebrating a birthday — it’s not explicitly stated which, but I’d guess around Moore’s own 61 years — Elisabeth learns she is being kicked off the show by the network’s head honcho, Harvey, played by Dennis Quaid in a full-on cackling caricature of Hollywood hollowness. He’s not just a dick, he’s a stand-in for all male attitudes, as every other guy we meet seems similarly judgmental in a completely un-self-aware away.

Fargeat (over)uses hyper-tight closeups to accentuate wrinkles, spots and vein-crossed skin. So even though Harvey is a yellow-toothed, parchment-skinned ghoul, he thinks Elisabeth is too old to appeal to guys like himself. Never mind the audience for a daytime exercise show likely includes few Y-chromosomed eyeballs.

I’ll pause here to argue, from my own privileged male vantage, that the reality is female beauty standards are largely — I’d say overwhelmingly — something imposed by women on women, including their own selves. You can point to plenty of scientific research that shows guys (at least straight ones) are much more positive about women’s bodies than they are themselves.

(To sink the dagger a little deeper, it’s women who are harshing on dudes’ looks more than the other way round.)

After an unexpected medical encounter, Elisabeth is approached by a shadowy group hawking The Substance, a mysterious chemical that promises to turn you into a younger, more beautiful version of yourself. Only a select few are tapped for this offer. Think of it as Ozempic, but only for the ultra-elite.

The marketing about turning into a better version of yourself turns out to be not quite accurate. What actually happens is another, entirely different body emerges from Elisabeth’s. She is indeed decades younger and willowy, and delights in her lithe new body. (Qualley is additionally gifted with a prosthetic of obviously fake boobs to match Moore’s.)

However, there’s still the old body to deal with.

Although they start out with the same mind, part of the deal is they have to switch back into the other body every seven days. A complicated set of chemicals and procedures guards this process, with dire consequences if they fail to do so. The “parked” body lies unconscious and prone while the other goes about their life, and do not seem to share memories for what happens during their separate adventures.

Dubbing herself Sue, she does the most obvious thing possible: she tries out for and gets the job to be Elisabeth’s replacement on the show. They turn it into a hyper-sexualized affair replete with butt cracks and toned abs, with “exercise” moves that better belong in a strip club. Of course, it’s an instant hit.

You can guess what happens next. Sue takes too much delight in being her young, hawt self, and begins to steal more and more time between the switches, which has nasty consequences for Elisabeth. Though the disembodied voice of the Substance agent instructs them they are one entity and must maintain balance, the old and young are soon locked in mortal combat, with each sabotaging the other’s awake-time.

Things get progressively worse, and stranger. The body-switcheroo portion is truly disturbing and creepy, as each version of the same woman awakes to fresh new horrors visited upon them by their “other” self.

But then the last 40 minutes or so takes a sharp turn into goofs. Having already spent a full typical movie runtime in manic schizophrenia, the sudden backflip into black comedy feels like jumping into an empty pool. This is also around the time the special effects get especially wet and messy, and it’s hard to bathe in all that blood ironically when the film has spent all its time very seriously trying to scare the crap out of us.

I’ll say the wetworks are pretty impressive, and not for the faint of stomach. Not since ‘80s Cronenberg — “The Fly,” “Videodrome” — has a flick so delighted in salaciously disgusting malformations of the human form. I grew up with this stuff and still found myself white-knuckling through portions of “The Substance.”

This film is exceedingly gross and disturbing, and not always in the way it intends. Just as few men would watch a show like Elisabeth’s, not many women will likely go to this movie as they tend to disfavor horror. So the audience will be mostly guys, panting over Moore and Qualley’s displayed bodies, but we’ll call it satire so it seems like something more hifalutin than what it is.

That’s the true switcheroo.