Ryan Moore '25
Historian
[This article contains minor spoilers for the horror movie The Substance. You have been warned.]
We’ve all been there before. Maybe you’re killing some time with friends on a Friday night. Maybe you’re looking for alternatives to bar review.[1] Maybe you're not creative when it comes to planning dates. But we've all had the same experience. You walk out of the movie theater and to your car. You sit down, put on your seat belt, then stare out the window,and you say to yourself: “What the heck did I just watch?”
I repeated this phrase several times when I went to see The Substance at Regal Stonefield last Friday. Rather than attend yet another bar review, three of my friends and I decided we would spend our Friday at the theater. Together we sat through one of the weirdest, most messed up satires of Hollywood’s culture of vanity that I have ever seen. I watched and reviewed this movie so you don't have to. However, as any 1L can tell you, existence is pain. I wrote this movie review because you must suffer like I did.
The Substance is a body horror movie starring former “Brat Pack” member Demi Moore (A Few Good Men, St. Elmo’s Fire), Margaret Qualley (never heard of her before), and Dennis Quaid (wait, that guy from The Parent Trap?). The film centers around the eponymous “substance,” a mysterious drug that basically creates a younger clone of the user. Demi Moore plays a “past-her-prime” movie star who loses her long-time fitness show as the studio looks for younger, hotter talent. Rather than spend her vast fortune on the best plastic surgeons Hollywood has to offer, or get a prescription for Ozempic, Demi buys a mysterious substance marketed through a USB flash drive reverse pickpocketed into her mustard colored jacket by a nurse committing medical malpractice.[2]
In true body horror fashion, the movie is filled with gruesome and grotesque scenes depicting the substance users’ transition process, which basically involves full body cell meiosis. The entire conceit of the movie is that the substance user can only spend seven days inside their younger, hotter, Margaret Qualley body for every seven days spent in their older, also hot-but-in-a-different-way Demi Moore body. Only one body is active at a time; the substance user must manually “switch” between the bodies. A ticket to this movie cost me one Fetty Wap.[3]
My first suspicion that this movie would be a canon event was when the theater usher warned the four of us that “the last ten minutes of The Substance are a lot.” But I definitely should have known this movie was bad when we entered the theater twenty minutes late and were the only viewers.
The Substance is that rare, and perhaps only, body horror movie that, slowly and then all at once, becomes a comedy. For a horror movie first, there was an inverse relationship between the amount of blood on screen and how scary the movie was. The final act of The Substance was heavily influenced by the ending of Stephen King’s Carrie, only without the same level of character development, soundtrack, emotional buildup, practical effects, cinematography, or writing. Instead of serving as the emotional release after two hours of rising suspense, the final “New Year's Eve” scene was so over-the-top and gratuitous that we burst out laughing. I hadn’t laughed that hard, literally, in years. The last twenty minutes of The Substance are dark comedy gold and feel randomly grafted onto the first two hours of the movie.
I would be remiss if I didn’t discuss “the law” in The Substance, and this movie raised a number of legal questions. Who created the substance? Was it FDA approved? And, most importantly, do the individuals harmed by the substance have a valid product liability claim?
In torts, we learned the prima facie case for defective products liability.[4] First, the defendant must be the commercial seller of the product and sell that product to the plaintiff. In the movie, we don’t actually know who or what manufactures or sells the substance, but that’s because The Substance is a stupid movie.
Second, the plaintiff used the substance and clearly suffered numerous injuries (hence why this is a body horror movie). However, the issue is whether the substance was defective when sold, and whether this defect was the actual and proximate cause of the plaintiff’s injury. The manufacturer will argue that the substance worked as designed: it created a second version of the user. But this argument fails because of a defect in marketing. The manufacturer failed to warn users of the latent dangers in the product: abuse turns the user into a murderous Cronenberg-like monster.
I could have spent my Friday night reading for my classes or, even worse, at bar review. Instead, I gave myself emotional and psychic trauma from which I don't know if I will ever recover.
I give this movie two thumbs up… to gouge out my eyes.
---
tqy7zz@virginia.edu