The Substance features a lot of substance, but without the need to overthink it

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

A lot of reviews of The Substance are filled with thinky references to an uncommonly large number of other films, from Carrie to The Shining, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Re-Animator, The Invisible Man and (in the case of Forbes) Death Becomes Her. Special prize goes to The New York Times, whose critic went all in to frame their take through the lens of a 1930 Vladimir Nabokov novel.

The most common comparison is with David Cronenberg, whose body horror-centric oeuvre includes classics such as Scanners, Videodrome, The Fly and Naked Lunch. He’s also responsible for Crash, A History of Violence and Eastern Promises, which all feature unsettling ruminations on the self-hating barbarity that lurks just beneath the veneer of almost all our social interactions.

Demi Moore in The Substance.
Courtesy photo

Most of that is fair — if you’re trying to show off your cinema history credentials — but mostly it’s indicative of the fact that so many professional movie watchers weren’t quite sure what they were watching, and grasped at whatever handholds they could find. What seemed to evade a lot of reviewers was that The Substance isn’t trying to be thinky. Quite the opposite, and that’s among its chiefest accomplishments.

Directed by Coralie Fargeat, the film has garnered five nominations in the 2025 Academy Awards: Best Actress (Demi Moore), Best Directing (Fargeat), Best Makeup and Hairstyling, Best Original Screenplay (Fargeat) and Best Picture.

Despite all the name-dropping and cultural analysis attempted by so many critics, The Substance has such deep resonance for a few simple reasons: it makes blunt satirical points about the objectification of female beauty and how that translates into self-destruction; it makes blunt satirical points about the fool’s game of seeking perpetual youth; and it is bluntly grotesque, cringe-inducing and so woozy with horrific gore that it transcends repellence to achieve true gallows humor.

You aren’t supposed to “think” about The Substance, nor are you supposed to whip out your college film studies notes and start analyzing. You’re supposed to experience this film and take it for what it is unequivocally telling you.

Likewise, the plot is easy to summarize: Moore plays a still-gorgeous but aging former-A-list film star who has been relegated by the studio system to performing on a daytime TV exercise show — until she’s fired because she’s “too old” to be sexy. That throws her into a self-loathing doom spiral, out of which she attempts to climb by injecting herself with the mysterious, titular “substance.” 

What it does is promise you’ll regain a younger version of yourself, but only for seven days at a time. Literally: It’s a younger version of yourself, that is cloned and birthed out of your body with all the gore that would entail. For those seven days, “young you” walks around and lives life while “old you” has to be kept in a husk-like state of living death until the seven-day transfer happens again.

Of course things don’t play out that way, as Moore’s character’s younger version comes to run the show — literally and figuratively. As their dualism gets increasingly out of control, everything (and that’s everything) falls apart.

The odds that The Substance will win all those Oscars is slim — the Academy has long resisted honoring horror with most of its top awards — but it does deserve the recognition. And particularly for Moore, who puts so much of herself into the role that even in its most over-the-top moments, she manages to tether the story in real human emotion and cements her as one of the best artists (though critically unappreciated, except for her recent Golden Globe) of her or any other generation.

Stream The Substance on Amazon Prime. Watch the 97th Academy Awards on Sunday, March 2 at 4 p.m. (PST) on ABC or streaming live on Hulu. For other options, go to oscars.org/how-to-watch.