Chris Duncan
We’re lucky to have films like The Substance and A Different Man—films that wear their inspirations on their sleeves and have their own unique aims. These films blend humor, darkness, and discomfort to create fantastical stories of desire, change, alienation, and vanity. Yet they’re wildly different, and their varying approaches make putting them in conversation all the more valuable.
In The Substance, Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) consumes a mysterious, well, substance, that grows another person out of her—-a “better version” of herself, as advertised. This new self (Margaret Qualley) adopts the name Sue. She is young and energetic, auditions for the part of Elizabeth’s replacement, and instantly gets the job. Sue’s scenes are often gleefully exploitative, winking and nudging at the viewer with how the camera treats Margaret Qualley’s body. This exploitation is what Elizabeth wants, though—her body, or Sue’s, is her ticket to renewed relevance and admiration.
The overlapping identities of Elizabeth and Sue make for a rather messy part of The Substance. The mysterious people behind the substance—or person, really, embodied by the mysterious voice from what could perhaps be called a customer service hotline—emphasize that Elizabeth and Sue are one, yet they seem to become increasingly separate, acting differently, desiring different things. While Sue is awake, she works, parties, and enjoys her new success and validation, while during Elizabeth’s week awake, she stays reclusive, watches TV and develops increasingly absurd eating habits. The contrast between the two escalates until they’re both basically at war, like their bodies are fighting for custody of a single mind.
This aspect of The Substance is a bit muddled in its communication. For one, the film hammers the viewer over the head with the message that Elizabeth and Sue are one, but the central crux of the film is the growing dissonance and conflict between them. The two appear more like split personalities or separate people altogether than one mind splitting its time between two bodies. The film is so aggressively telling us that they are one that it seems to forget to show that, in places, it shows something completely contradictory. They are, eventually, very definitively separate, as Elizabeth somehow manages to wake Sue without the usual process, after which Sue kills her. Sue then takes the Substance herself and becomes Monstro Elisasue, which contains two faces, including what is undoubtedly Elizabeth’s.
Regardless of whether or not Elizabeth and Sue are actually the same person, they do seem to want the same thing. Elizabeth, for her part, tries to kill Sue, but changes her mind and revives her after realizing that she needs her in order to be liked again, after spending so much time as Sue that her original body has aged beyond recognition (she ends up looking a lot like Angelica Huston in The Witches). This scene lays bare the reasons that Elizabeth took the Substance to begin with, and reveals her ultimate desire: to be “liked.”
A Different Man, with its contrasting approach, is an interesting companion to The Substance. The film centers on Edward (Sebastian Stan), a man with dramatic facial differences. Edward is a working actor, but the only role we see him play is that of a coworker in the kind of office video that a human resources department would make employees watch. He has obviously been dramatically limited in his life and career by his face. When he first meets his neighbor Ingrid (Renate Reinsve), she recoils in shock at seeing his face. Edward is timid enough that he seems to fear leaving his own apartment. Inside, meanwhile, he’s surrounded by sorrow and decay. His roof leaks uncontrollably and his neighbor commits suicide. He is interested in Ingrid while she is resistant.
Similar to Elizabeth, Edward undergoes a mysterious experimental treatment that sheds his swelled skin and turns him into a more conventional face. He assumes a whole new identity under the name Guy and pursues Ingrid, who thought Edward had died by suicide and wrote a play about her time with him.
In this sense, Guy might be the kind of foil to Edward that Sue is to Elizabeth, but A Different Man has more up its sleeve with the arrival of Oswald (Adam Pearson), an outgoing guy who not only has the same type of facial differences as Edward had, and is a splitting image of his old self (Stan plays Edward’s original form under prosthetics that are made to look like Pearson’s face while Pearson was himself born with neurofibromatosis, which makes the face swell with non-cancerous tumors). Oswald’s interior life, his rich past, and sense of self-actualization is a direct challenge to Edward’s reserved existence. Both men look (or rather, used to look) the same. Only Edward is the self-loathing wreck.
The Substance and A Different Man ultimately say similar things about self-image, identity, vanity, and self-actualization. Elizabeth Sparkle makes a bargain to become her youthful self because she craves the admiration of the people who spurned her true, aging self. The version of Edward that we see in the beginning of A Different Man wants something similar, to become a version of himself that Ingrid will accept and, perhaps, reciprocate the desire he feels for her.
They both come to realize that these irrevocable changes they made to themselves won’t bring them the validation they want, because the people they so desperately seek approval from are not interested in them for who they are, but for reasons far more self-serving. Dennis Quaid’s Harvey, the network executive from The Substance, is openly contemptuous of Elizabeth essentially because she has aged past what he arbitrarily deems acceptable. Reinsve herself called her character Ingrid in A Different Man “a mix between a girl next door and a sociopath,” who may be in love with Edward. However, Ingrid is in denial about it because of what she has been conditioned to see as acceptable. Edward’s pursuit of Ingrid, then, fails because his entire life and identity seems bent toward Ingrid—he isn’t interesting, while Oswald is, in addition to being kind and personable. He loves himself, and maybe that is enough to show Ingrid that it is okay for her to love him.
It may be easy to draw parallels between Sue and Oswald as symbols of both characters’ idealized selves, but Oswald is a real person, full and mature, while Sue is a manifestation of Elizabeth’s desires, retaining all her vanity and insecurity. The contrast begs the question of when self-actualization is, per-se, healthy or unhealthy. If Elizabeth is Sue, then her renewed youth only enables her to become increasingly selfish and vain. Such is the same for when Edward “becomes” guy, but Oswald presents a different path forward, where Edward could have—and still can—gain self-actualization from within. Both ultimately show that their counterparts brought their misery on themselves, that they might have been capable of realizing their desire and potential but lost sight of what they carried with them.
One thing that can be said about A Different Man is that it is markedly clearer and, perhaps, less ambitious than The Substance. Perhaps this clarity of purpose has helped garner it a less controversial reception, and also less attention altogether; certainly, The Substance has inspired a lot of Speaking to similar things, it is of course less explicitly gendered than The Substance. Indeed, lots of interesting discussion on the topic of the film’s gendered implications from women writers already exists which I would encourage readers to check out if they haven’t already. Such is to say that The Substance, for all its simplicity and genre trappings, has still provoked a lot of thought, discourse, and perhaps controversy; A Different Man, for all its acclaim, has not done so at the same level.
There are a few likely reasons for this. Certainly The Substance’s gendered critique of Hollywood, and how women have responded to it, is key. The scale of each film’s release is crucial here. A Different Man never played in more than 300 theaters domestically, while The Substance released in nearly 2,000 across the United States. It might also be as simple as where the films premiered. The Substance was a breakout hit from the wringer that is the Cannes Film Festival, whereas A Different Man premiered at the less intense environment of Sundance. Both films are a joy in conversation, both fun, silly, powerful, and upsetting in their own wildly different ways. Their contrasts in style, subject, and approach make for a jarring and gratifying double feature.
