I’m so far behind on my backlog, I need an excuse for a double feature. What’s that? We’ve got two movies about women communicating between their older and younger selves? Sounds great, let’s do it.
The Substance comes to us from writer/director/producer/editor Coralie Fargeat, here making her sophomore feature after the underseen critical darling Revenge in 2017. My Old Ass is also the sophomore effort of a respected female writer/director/exec producer: Megan Park, late of 2022’s direct-to-HBOMax The Fallout. And I’d be remiss not to mention producer Margot Robbie, who godmothered Park’s movie through her LuckyChap shingle.
My Old Ass tells the story of Elliott (Maisy Stella), a young lesbian who grew up on her family’s cranberry farm in a podunk town of less than 300 people. (The film was set and shot at Muskoka Lakes, by Park’s hometown of Ontario in Canada.) Elliott just turned 18 and she’s mere weeks away from leaving behind the boondocks to go attend college in Toronto. But on her 18th birthday, she goes with her best friends (played by Kerrice Brooks and Maddie Ziegler) to go get high in the woods.
This turns out to be an especially miraculous shroom trip, as Elliott inexplicably meets herself at 39 years old (aka “My Old Ass”, played by Aubrey Plaza). They trade phone numbers (like you do) and now Elliott is somehow capable of exchanging texts and phone calls between her younger and older selves. Hilarity ensues.
What’s frustrating is that My Old Ass is rather stingy about giving out advice or warnings about the next twenty years. This is supposedly about preserving some measure of surprise and excitement about Elliott’s future, but it also makes sense that they shouldn’t go mucking about with space/time causality when neither one of them really knows how this works. And their line of communication may not be completely reliable, I might add.
That said, there are two items that My Old Ass seems consistently preoccupied about: Elliott needs to spend more time with her family, and she needs to stay away from Chad. Who’s Chad? Well, he (played by Percy Hynes White) is a young man who just took a summer job working on the cranberry farm. He’s impossibly handsome, effortlessly charming, and he gets along with Elliott so perfectly well that he’s far too good to be true. Oh, and Elliott needs to sort through her romantic feelings for a guy after identifying as a lesbian her entire life, there’s that little factor on top of everything else.
The Substance will take considerably more effort to sufficiently explain. Demi Moore stars as Elisabeth Sparkle, an aging movie star in perpetual danger of being left behind in favor of the hottest young up-and-coming starlets. In desperation, she turns to The Substance, an experimental and highly addictive regimen that has to be replenished like clockwork every two weeks.
What does The Substance do? Well, through acts of gut-churning body horror (seriously, MAJOR CONTENT WARNING — if you don’t do well with hypodermic needles, you won’t make it half an hour through this picture), Elisabeth’s body quite literally splits open to create a second body. Thus we have “Sue” (Margaret Qualley), who’s basically like a younger and hotter version of Elisabeth. The catch is that our protagonist has to transfer her consciousness between the older body and the younger body once every seven days.
Put simply, imagine what “The Portrait of Dorian Grey” would be like if Dorian Grey had to literally be the painting through every other week.
Both movies are heavily occupied with the subject of youth, but from markedly different angles. After all, it makes a huge difference that My Old Ass is pretty much entirely told from the perspective of the younger woman while The Substance is primarily told from the perspective of the older woman. As a direct result, My Old Ass is more interested in exploring the process of growing up, while The Substance is a feminist showbiz satire about gender disparity and double standards of beauty.
One is a coming-of-age story that conveys its fantasy conceit in grounded terms with no spectacle whatsoever. The other is a sci-fi allegory whose nauseating body horror effects are its principal selling point. One takes place in the beautiful forest backdrop of Canada, and the other is set in a gaudy depiction of the Los Angeles industrial hellscape.
Speaking of which, The Substance shows a remarkable visual knack for metaphors. The tone is set pretty much out of the gate, with a long extended shot showing Elisabeth’s star on the Walk of Fame and the wear and tear it gets all through the years. An inspired and ingenious visual metaphor with a devastating punch, and the visuals only get more creative from there. With all due respect, there’s nothing from the relatively grounded My Old Ass that could hope to top it.
My Old Ass is populated with beautifully nuanced characters. Maisy Stella is perfectly credible and sympathetic as the teenager too naive to realize what she has until she’s in danger of losing it forever. Aubrey Plaza is working well within her comfort zone as the smartass who may or may not be full of shit. Percy Hynes White perfectly nails the “young heartthrob” balance, such that it’s impossible to tell whether he’s about to be the greatest joy or the worst mistake that Elliott could ever make.
By comparison, every single character in The Substance is shrill and two-dimensional at best. Elisabeth/Sue is obsessed with youth and beauty, to the point where she literally cannot leave her home unless she looks utterly flawless. Every single male character in this movie — without exception — is a vile and sleazy over-the-top horndog, with a cartoonish Dennis Quaid leading the pack.
(Side note: Reportedly, the late Ray Liotta was cast in the role, but Quaid had to step in after Liotta passed. With all due respect, I’d say it’s an upgrade. It’s good to see Quaid lean into his status as a cultural punching bag, it’s a good look for him.)
Of course, the central relationships are another huge factor. With My Old Ass — aside from Elliott’s attempts to reconnect with her family, most of which go nowhere interesting — the plot is primarily concerned with the (potentially doomed) romance between Elliott and Chad. The will-they-won’t-they interplay between them essentially boils down to whether Elliott will choose what feels right in the present, even if it means paying a terrible cost in the future. This is also a dilemma for My Old Ass as well, because it’s an open question as to how or whether she’ll find the brass to come clean and talk about what was so painful between her and Chad.
The big revelation is ultimately a bit of an anticlimax, but it serves the narrative and themes and central development arcs so beautifully well, I can’t possibly hold it against the filmmakers. Because in the end, regardless of whether or not this relationship is a mistake, some mistakes need to be made. And there’s no better time to make mistakes than when we’re young and too stupid to know better. To paraphrase a popular reference from a wildly different movie, Elliott’s time with Chad could be the “canon event” that defines who she is, for good or ill. We’re just as much the product of our traumas as our victories, after all.
By comparison, the central relationship of The Substance is between Elisabeth and Sue. Despite repeated warnings that the both of them are one and the same, the two sides force each other into escalating conflict with increasingly horrific consequences on the way to inevitably disastrous outcomes. Sue is resentful because Elisabeth gets to sit around the house and do nothing and eat whatever she wants, while Elisabeth is resentful because Sue gets to be young and beautiful and successful. Sue has a harmful chemical dependency on Elisabeth — by nature of The Substance itself — while Elisabeth has a harmful addiction to Sue’s raw star power.
In summary, My Old Ass is an uplifting and life-affirming story about a woman who comes to accept her younger and older selves as two necessary and co-dependent parts of the same beautiful whole. The Substance is a catastrophic tragedy about a woman unable and/or unwilling to make that acceptance.
That said, The Substance is repeatedly and emphatically clear in showing Elisabeth/Sue as the victims of a greater system. Time and time again, the film shows how our lead characters are offered up as a sacrifice to the Male Gaze. It’s the rich old white men who are shown happy and comfortable and sexually fulfilled while young beautiful women get chewed up and shit out with no remorse. And if the film is so exorbitantly heightened, it only serves to further show how monstrous the systemic sexism truly is.
Both movies are so much stronger because each one is the singular vision of a talented female filmmaker. In Megan Park’s case, it makes for a more sincere, more authentic, more detailed and heartfelt coming-of-age tale that will speak to teens and adults alike. In Coralie Fargeat’s case, it’s all about how she portrays nudity and the female form. Her portrayal of natural flaws and aging is done with sympathy and vulnerability. Her portrayal of nudity and showbiz glamor is done in a crass and predatory manner. It all serves the plot and themes brilliantly well.
On a miscellaneous note, I’m honestly relieved that we’ve got such a harrowing body horror movie — with a female lead — and pregnancy has nothing to do with it. I don’t think we’ve seen one of those in a while.
What we’ve got here are two wildly different movies that are both of must-see caliber. My Old Ass is an endearing, heartfelt, humorous, and insightful in a way that only the best coming-of-age movies are. Even with the film’s more heightened concepts and moments (an especially gratuitous musical number comes to mind), it all feeds into the nuanced characters and the life-affirming themes.
By contrast, while The Substance is outrageously over-the-top, there’s no other setting for a Hollywood satire worth a damn, and there’s no going halfway in body horror. The effects are unspeakably grotesque and the characters are all impossibly heightened, but that’s only because the characters were all so perfectly built to burn in effigy. It’s sexy and disturbing in equal measure, and quite often at the same time. A devastating and visually masterful gut-punch of cinema.
These both get strong recommendations.