Review of The Substance (2024)
Seen in 2026.
Instead of an anti-ageing treatment, an aerobics instructor chooses a folk-tale treatment. Taking “the Substance”, she births a Doppelgänger out of her spine, and it looks 30 years younger than her. The advertising for this treatment cautions that the two people are one, but they do not share thoughts, feelings, new memories, or bodies. They have two connections: While one is active, the other is unconscious, and if they stay active instead of “switching” on schedule, it hurts the other person.
Comparisons to David Cronenberg are surprisingly irrelevant. This is Sunset Blvd. (1950), but in Tromaville, not as Gothic horror or film noir, with the superficiality of Cuties (2020) and the straight face of Carrie (1976). Cinematically, it just barely works.
I’m into board games as well as movies. It seems obvious to me that the supernatural premises of the script—its “rules”—were not selected to tee up a feminist point. They are not an analog for the GLP-1 drugs (receptor agonists) that were being popularized at the time of production either. I think the premises are suitable for making a fictional analogy with The Trap (2007), investigating the alienation that comes with incentives toward a too-narrowly defined selfishness, but that doesn’t happen in this movie. In the same way that the characters are simple, that kind of symbolic depth doesn’t exist here.