Control Review: The Substance…
I, Dalton Lewis, watched The Substance.
That’s the name of a Demi Moore horror movie that barely had a theatrical release. It sounded awful.
It was borderline pornographic, had razor-thin male characters, started out with outrageous pretension, and ended with disgusting body horror nastiness.
But it was also really good.
In it Demi Moore plays an aging starlet whose exercise show is no longer relevant to younger audiences. She is going to be replaced by someone younger and prettier.
Why does this work? This works because this is how the world works. Older people are pushed out in favor of the younger, stronger, healthier people. Younger starlets often get better roles over the aging actresses. There is a cartoonish man who is offensively obsessed with beautiful young women — but there are lots of men who really do feel this way. The woman who directed this movie identified the truth about reality and is showing us that truth. That’s why this movie — with stereotypes for characters and little conflict between the characters — works so well.
The aging starlet hears about the Substance, something which creates a clone that one can enter the body of — one can spend one week on and one week off. For one week Elizabeth becomes Sue, a beautiful young twentysomething woman who easily gets the gig replacing her older self. Every other week she has to be her “real” older self and wallow in no longer being in show business.
People love Sue, her younger self, and hate and fear Elizabeth, her older self. She also begins to disagree with her other self — each self resents the other one’s time and doesn’t remember that both people are the same person.
The movie degenerates into horror and massacre and death and murder.
This is about sex.
It’s about nudity.
It’s about youth and our obsession with it.
Sue is beautiful. Insanely beautiful. She’s naked and looks great naked. Then the character is horribly ugly, and it’s the same character — only hideously ugly. It’s bizarre and fascinating how differently people treat the two personas.
Demi Moore is great as the disturbed older actress who is desperate and angry at no longer being relevant and jealous of her younger self being pretty and successful. Margaret Qualley plays the most beautiful woman imaginable with skill and cleverness. Dennis Quaid portrays the womanizing scumbag producer and makes him believable — you think that this caricature could be a real person.
This is a movie about the beautiful and the disgusting and how a person can be both — and how both are treated by society. It’s quite interesting how a woman director feels about the subject. I enjoyed the film. Be warned — if you find content inappropriate you will find this movie inappropriate. If you like such things see this movie — and remember that the Terrifier 3 comes out in a few weeks, and that the Terrifier 2 is the best horror movie of the last few years. Anyway.
Thanks, and take care, friends.
