The Substance is a Cautionary Tale of the future of AI Slop

The Substance cinematic trailer, YouTube

Although released in 2024, I just managed to watch The Substance, starring Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley. It tells the story of a fading celebrity who takes a black-market drug—a cell-replicating substance—that helps her create a younger, ‘better’ version of herself.

The premise, introduced in the first act of the film, is not only interesting and intriguing but unexpectedly insightful as it unfolds in the second act. Sadly, whatever themes of beauty, vanity, narcissism, aging, and societal pressures related to appearance introduced are never fully explored nor given any kind of cathartic resolution. Rather, they are undercut and completely trivialized as the film devolves into B-movie territory: over-the-top shock violence and body horror in the third act.

If the criminal squandering of an intriguing premise bursting with narrative potential wasn’t enough, the movie does something even worse. At first the film appeared to be a thoughtful omage to (and modern reinterpretation of) such horror classics as Frankenstein, Phantom of the Opera, and The Fly, with an ingenious contemporary cultural mash-up thrown into the mix. Imagine the trainwreck of beauty standards and in-home genetics-based products colliding with the dark web and DIY Botox kits on steroids. But by the time the beautiful doppelganger confronts her ragged and degenerated ‘mother,’ instead of an homage to Smeagol and Gollum engaging in a battle of wits for what is most ‘precious’ to them, we get the equivalent of an AI-generated ultraviolent regurgitation of Jack’s encounter with Meg the swamp hag in Ridley Scott’s Legend, or Snow White’s encounter with the Evil Queen in old hag form. But without the aforementioned test of wits, seduction, or temptation. No. It’s an all-out ultraviolent cat-fight. Soon thereafter the beautiful young doppelganger has a seen stolen right out Fight Club, in which she pulls out a tooth and drops it into the sink. Shortly thereafter she injects herself with the ‘single use’ substance and gives birth to a grotesque that is clearly drawing on the look of The Elephant Man. Before the whole thing devolves into a montage of scenes stolen from Carrie, The Shining, and no-doubt countless other classics from the horror genre—a genre I am not even a big fan of.

In doing so, The Substance shows us its hand: the earlier homages were just stolen sight-gags (like when Demi Moore breaks a nail, taken straight from David Cronenberg’s The Fly). And even that over-the-top third act seemed like some kind of attempt at a Tarnantinoesque shock violent ending.

In other words, the creatives behind The Substance, without using AI directly, have effectively given us a glimpse into an AI-slop-fueled future of entertainment. Instead of interesting modern explorations of timeless and universal themes paired with loving homages to classics of the past, we get clumsy, obvious, oversimplified, superficial montages of images and sight-gags pulled directly from said classics. No real depth. Nothing really new to add, and in the end, nothing of any profundity to say, let alone question or explore.

Even the one or two truly insightful glimmers of inspiration to be found in The Substance (related to the false self versus the True Self and the consequences endured by the latter as a result of the actions of the former) are glossed over and so overshadowed by ultraviolence and gore that they will be utterly lost on most audiences. Just like degenerative AI, the mechanical intellects interpreting and interpolating their sources of inspiration clearly had NO REAL KNOWLEDGE of what they were doing, or why. Only that they could exploit superior material and supernal concepts to churn out infernal slop.