EVERY SECOND COUNTS
The Substance (2024) is essentially Freaky Friday meets All About Eve, reimagined as an excessively gory B-movie body horror with a nod to the films of David Cronenberg along the way. The story follows Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) as she attempts to stave off the aging process by experimenting with The Substance—a mysterious treatment that requires her to undergo a mind-altering process. This leads to a grim dual reality for both her and her younger version, Sue (Margaret Qualley), traumatising the viewer (me) into a feature-length nightmare of grotesquery.
Although I would have preferred a more consistent psychological tone (pun intended) to the building of tension throughout its over two-hour running time (which is way too long), I can see the fun in going all out with the body-swapping schlocky madness. I personally think a more Mankiewicz approach would have made for a much better film, and with fewer clunky story beats to engineer the concept, a far superior film might have emerged. Still, it looks stylish enough, though its aesthetic seems more 1980s than 2020s, particularly in its practical effects, especially the prosthetics, which reminded me of both John Hurt in The Elephant Man and the bullying older brother Brett (Bill Paxton) in John Hughes's Weird Science, who some may remember turned into a hideous slug-like creature at the end of that movie.
One can only imagine how the silicone-injected celebrities of Beverly Hills and a certain family residing in Hidden Hills felt about watching a movie centered on the desperate holding onto youth at any cost to preserve one's fame. They should have done a live stream watch-along with the Kardashians; it would have done some numbers.
As an example of a different, more cerebral form of horror that shares a similar idea to The Substance, I found John Frankenheimer's Seconds (1966) far more effective and unsettling in how it dealt with themes of time, aging, and body transformation. In this story, Arthur Hamilton (John Randolph) is approached by a mysterious organisation that offers him the chance to inhabit the body of a much younger man, Tony Wilson (Rock Hudson), and enjoy a brand-new life in California. But as he tries to embrace his new identity as the younger man, all sorts of psychological doubts and concerns begin to creep into his mind, and slowly he starts to mentally unravel, leading to a dark and sinister ending that has haunted me ever since I first saw it.
Where The Substance overwhelms its audience with shock-and-awe tactics by diving full frontal into the cinema of the absurd, Seconds makes you sit quietly with the characters of Arthur and Tony until you find yourself fully synchronised with them, meditating on the same morbid realisations they’re experiencing regarding the heavy existential consequences of Hamilton's life-altering decision. As the final chilling scene dissolves into complete darkness, you're left questioning your sanity and the sanctity of your soul.
I believe it's the films that take up residence in your mind forever that are the true horror movies, not the more instantly disposable ones like The Substance. Perhaps, though, its overt transience serves as another apt metaphor for the themes it explores—the fact that we're not on this earth for very long, that we're all getting old, and that we're all going to die.