Start the year right with The Substance 💉

Have you ever dreamt of a better version of yourself?

Welcome to 2025! Can you stomach another article filled with resolutions soon to be discarded or life coaching advice from people you wouldn’t trust to water your plants? I can’t, so let’s skip the formalities and get to the good stuff.

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The Substance

Over Christmas I finally watched The Substance (2024). Written and directed by Coralie Fargeat, and starring Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley and Dennis Quaid, The Substance is a breakthrough body horror film that brings an intense physicality and over-the-top gore to mainstream audiences in a way that I’m not sure any male directors had previously achieved.

If you haven’t watched The Substance yet and you’re a fan of horror, I seriously recommend that you do. If you haven’t watched The Substance yet and you’re a woman, or work in the film or television industries, or are a person who intends to age gracefully, or try to defy the ageing process, I seriously recommend watching it.

“Have you ever dreamt of a better version of yourself? Younger, more beautiful, more perfect. One single injection unlocks your DNA, starting a new cellular division, that will release another version of yourself. This is the Substance. You are the matrix. Everything comes from you. Everything is you. This is simply a better version of yourself. You just have to share. One week for one and one week for the other. A perfect balance of seven days each. The one and only thing not to forget: You. Are. One. You can't escape from yourself.” – The Substance

I don’t want to discuss the plot in great depth, but this is a film best watched cold and without any preparation, so please be warned that your time would be better spent watching The Substance before reading the rest of this newsletter. With such a clean concept, approached so directly, there’s no way to talk about the film without spoiling aspects that are better experienced for yourself.

I was blown away by The Substance from start to finish. The mise en scene is exceptional throughout, creating a powerful, sustained vehicle for the director’s vision that never wavers and plunges the viewer into a nightmare that amplifies and scrutinises a number of universal truths for women, and uncomfortable truths for the entertainment industry.

There are a lot of criticisms online that The Substance somehow lacks substance, that it takes a superficial approach to character development, but that feels like criticising a film for not being what you want it to be, rather than genuine engagement with a brilliantly accomplished piece of art.

Dream logic holds the world of The Substance together. As such, the characters are archetypes and subject to the whims of the director rather than fully realised people who could step out of the screen and into the real world, but this fits perfectly with the hyper-stylised imagery, jarring sound design, the grotesque physicality and the tight thematic focus.

I’ll concede that such a visual and aural assault might not be able to fully sustain a runtime of 140+ minutes, indulging in some unnecessary scenes and repetition that added little to the experience. From memory, I don’t feel like I needed to see Sue construct a dedicated hidden room when a walk-in wardrobe would have served the same purpose.

There were also a few hints remaining at what I assume were either dropped plot points or changes of direction, such as Elisabeth’s nausea-inducing temporary obsession with cooking meat. At that point in the narrative, when Sue had already begun metaphorically feeding on Elisabeth’s vitality, it felt like all signs were indicating that Elisabeth was preparing to return the favour in a less metaphorical way, so I was surprised when that didn’t materialise.

Minor criticisms aside, however, The Substance is a powerhouse of a movie that rarely deviates from its core goal and offers an exceptional payoff in the excesses of its denouement, paying tribute to and in many ways exceeding the achievements of the numerous creative teams whose footsteps the film follows in.

There are many ways to interpret The Substance. What interested me the most was the way that the finished film brilliantly spotlights the pressures on women to stay young and beautiful, the barbarism of the way many men treat women (who will inevitably fail, in varying degrees, to meet the standards demanded of them), and the vicious cruelty of the entertainment industry, whilst also creating a love letter to the horror genre and the numerous creative teams who came before them.

Some of the films that The Substance pays homage to feel like obvious choices, based on the widespread acclaim that the films or their creative teams have received. Nods to David Lynch abound, both in the easy to spot plays on The Elephant Man (1980) to nods to the psychogenic fugue of Lost Highway (1997). There are also numerous references to the work of Stanley Kubrick, which first become apparent with the long corridors and carpets that play on the theme of cell-division while echoing those from the Overlook Hotel in The Shining (1980).

Any story involving body horror invariably touches on the work of David Cronenberg, and the physical degradation of the main characters frequently uses Jeff Goldblum’s transformation in The Fly (1986) as a touchpoint, though there are numerous other scenes and images that also reference the godfather of body horror cinema.

Moving away from hardcore horror for a moment, there are also references to the work of Alfred Hitchcock, particularly mirroring imagery and borrowing soundtrack excerpts from Vertigo (1958), which also addressed issues of duality and doppelgangers. Vertigo star Kim Novak offered vitriolic criticism during the release of The Artist (2011), which also licensed excerpts from the Vertigo soundtrack for sections of the film (arguably borrowing an emotional heft that the composer for the film should have been able to achieve with an original score). In the case of The Substance, however, Novak is an obvious casualty of Hollywood’s obsession with youth and beauty, making the comparison much more apt.

What I loved most about The Substance, however, was not the references to some of the most famous films and creative teams of the twentieth century. It was the number of references to the films of director Brian Yuzna, a name that will be familiar to anybody with an earnest love of underappreciated horror from the 1980s and 1990s, but not an obvious pick to inspire an art-house horror vehicle to reappraise the career of Demi Moore.

The Substance itself glows bright green, much like Herbert West’s concoction in the spellbinding Re-Animator (1985). The eventual transformation that The Substance culminates in owes a heavy debt to Society (1989), carrying the torch for a body horror classic, though the same could also be said for From Beyond (1986), another Yuzna classic. As an aside, Yuzna’s Return of the Living Dead 3 (1993, basically zombie Romeo and Juliette) is one of my favourite films, but I’m not sure that I can legitimately say that The Substance was influenced by it.

I could continue writing about The Substance for days, which is surely the sign of a great piece of art that will stand the test of time. I could talk about the genius of casting Demi Moore, a woman who is now in her sixties and was formerly the poster girl for glamour and sex appeal in a male-dominated film industry. I could reflect on the brilliance of setting Dennis Quaid as her tormentor, a 70-year old man who is in many ways her peer and contemporary, but is married to a 34-year-old.

We could criticise Quaid’s politics and question whether a multiple divorcee with a taste for women half his age could learn anything from The Substance. Or we could take the opposite stance and say that he’s gone on record as suffering from anorexia and suggest that he might be more closely acquainted with Elizabeth Sparkle’s suffering that it seems.

Whatever angle you choose to approach it from, The Substance is a masterpiece of body horror and is definitely worth watching at least once. Start 2025 the right way, with a crushing reflection on the impossibility of meeting the standards demanded of women, and 36,000 gallons of fake blood.

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“The balance must be respected.”

In personal news, we survived Christmas in the Buchan house and are gearing up for the year ahead. Any parent with neurodivergence in the family will likely attest to the fact that holidays and special occasions hold just as much potential to cause chaos and strife as they can bring joy. One thing that they never bring is relaxation. We did, however, manage to watch Wicked (2024) at the cinema, which I loved, and visited Devil’s Gate escape room at the Trafford Centre in Manchester, successfully closing the gates of Hell, which was a blast.

The first couple of months of the year in Devon are always tough. The sun sets early and the sea is cold and often unsafe to swim in, because South West Water insist on pumping sewage into the rivers and seas ostensibly after even the mildest and most moderate levels of rainfall (South West Water were responsible for 530,000 hours of sewage overspill into rivers and seas in 2023).

I’m hoping to catch Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu (2024) at the cinema soon and we’re booked to watch The Book of Mormon and Pride & Prejudice * (*Sort Of) at the theatre this month, so hopefully having a few things to look forward to will see us through the darker part of the year until the approach of spring.

I don’t know of any great UK horror events that I should be looking forward to in the early part of the year, so let me know if you’ve heard of something that I’ve missed.

– P M Buchan