Heads up, if you’ve not watched the 2024 horror movie The Substance yet, don’t read this article unless you really want massive spoilers. As one of the most shocking horror movies I’ve seen in a long time, the film has a lot to talk about, and for me a lot of questions that we can dive into and explore. In this discussion, I’ll look at a few of the most burning questions and theories I have about The Substance.
Last warning, if you’ve not seen the movie, you should see it before reading…
OK, let’s get into it.
The Substance is a movie about Demi Moore’s character Elizabeth Sparkle who is a fading star in Hollywood and who is fired from her long running exercise show and replaced by a younger woman. The younger woman, is of course herself who has used this miracle medicine known as The Substance to create a younger clone of herself.
The movie can be compared to the liked of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and The Nutty Professor for showing a medically induced second version of a person and the movie Death Becomes Her someone who seeks a miracle medicine to become younger again.
Trusting that you have indeed seen the movie, you’ll know that with this miracle medicine comes something of a curse and terrible consequences for not following the rules to the letter.
The Substance allowed Elizabeth to create a second and younger version of herself, and the rules are that the older and younger versions have to swap every seven days, and it’s established that the reason for this is that the younger version needs an injection of spinal fluid taken from the older version every day, and that the seven day swap cycle gives time for the older version to heal from the lumbar punctures and regenerate the spinal fluid.
It’s also established that when the younger version, known as Sue, breaks the rule of the seven day swap, the result is that the older version starts to whither and age rapidly on random body parts. The first time this happens, Elizabeth gets an old looking finger for a few hours of extra time without swapping and the next time this results in her whole leg going mankey.
So here’s my first big question and theory.
Why can’t Elizabeth and Sue swap more frequently than every seven days?
The film sets up the rule that the older Elizabeth and the younger Sue have to swap places every seven days and that if they don’t, the older version will start to whither and age. But what the film doesn’t explore is what if they swapped more frequently.
If I were Sue, the younger version, I’d want to be the younger version so that I could look my best out in public and get every opportunity and benefit afforded to me from being young and beautiful. So why not just swap back at night time?
The main reason that the film establishes for why Sue cannot permanently stay in the younger form is that the stabiliser fluid, which as far as I could see just seen to be spinal fluid from Elizabeth, needs time to regenerate, and the injection site needs time to heal.
If it’s the case that the older Elizabeth form needs to be active whilst Sue is dormant to enable the body to heal and the spinal fluid to regenerate, why not just turn back into Elizabeth as soon as Sue returns home from her daily life? Once she’s done at the filming studio, Sue could go and swap places with Elizabeth and probably have the whole evening and the entire night as Elizabeth and let the spinal fluid regenerate.
There’s nothing to suggest that Elizabeth has to be active for days at a time for it to start to regenerate and it makes sense that it would begin regenerating as soon as she is back as the active version.
Elizabeth could simply transform into Sue just like you would put on your work clothes each day that you go out to work.
This would still require some discipline from Elizabeth/Sue though. Because if Sue wanted to have a boyfriend stay overnight, it would mean she would have to stay as Sue longer, but at the same time, there’s no reason to think that Sue worked seven days a week, so if Sue only worked Monday to Friday, Sue could then turn back into Elizabeth from Friday evening until Monday morning and have a good line while for lots of that stabilising spinal fluid to regenerate.
Also, in terms of letting the wounds heal, it’s still likely that with the method I’d proposed here, that Sue would only need to extract stabiliser from Elizabeth once a week. This would give the same amount of time for the wound to heal, or at least the majority of the time if you were to say that the wound doesn’t heal whilst Elizabeth was is in Sue form each day.
The film suggests that Elizabeth and Sue are not one person
Throughout the film Elizabeth/Sue speak to a mysterious person on the phone who works for the company that sell her the substance. Often in the movie this voice reminds Elizabeth/Sue that they are a single person and yet despite this, the younger and older version start resenting one another and start playing games to cause issues for the other half of themselves.
Despite the claim that they are one, I’d actually argue that the film does more to show that Elizabeth and Sue are in fact not one person and are two separate individuals.
To begin with, I’m not sure that the film ever explicitly does anything to show that either Elizabeth or Sue has any memory of what the other does. If anything, it seems that they are each surprised to discover what the other has done. Examples being that they are surprised to see the state the other has left their flat in and the various ways they sabotage each other.
It’s also of note that Sue doesn’t actually look like a younger version of Elizabeth and this is obviously because Demi Moore and Margeret Qualley are separate people in real life. Despite this, the film shows younger photos of Demi Moore and these aren’t shown to be photos of Margeret, and as such a famous celebrity, surely people would recognise Sue as the spitting image of Elizabeth when she was younger. This doesn’t happen because in my opinion Sue is something that grew out of Elizabeth and probably is closer to being a daughter than a clone.
The last piece of evidence I’ll give is that as you’ll have seen in the film, the two do eventually both become active and fight each other to the death. The fact that this can happen shows that they are two entities and not just one and if anything, there is probably something in the process of swapping that actually forces the other to become dormant so they aren’t always both active.
And so, there are two of the biggest questions I felt were unanswered in the movie. Or did I miss something that was obvious to you? Let me know your thoughts in the comments!
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