The Substance isn’t aiming for lukewarm reactions. French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat’s batshit new horror tale of a middle-aged actress’ ill-fated quest to remain visible in an industry that prioritizes increasingly absurd, out-of-reach beauty standards has been polarizing ever since it premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Depending on which reviews you read, it was either hailed as the next great prestige horror film, chock-full of groundbreaking feminist bloodshed, or it was excoriated as a shallow, redundant exercise that punches down at its female characters. But I left my showing feeling catharsis. This is a movie that effectively uses gonzo horror to underline how — contrary to what many right-wing pundits would have you believe — our hegemonic cultural standards of femininity have become violently ridiculous and utterly artificial.
From its opening moments, The Substance lets you know that it has all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. In the first 30 seconds alone, we’re taken through the span of protagonist Elizabeth Sparkle’s (a career-best Demi Moore) Hollywood rise and fall. A static shot holds on her Walk of Fame plaque as it’s overwhelmed by ardent fans and hungry paparazzo, only to be met with increasing apathy as the years go on, until the most attention it gets is a passerby smearing it with ketchup while scrambling to pick up the remnants of an accidentally dropped hot dog.
In case that visual cue didn’t clue you in, Elizabeth is no longer the A-lister she once was. An award-winning starlet in her youth à la Moore herself, she’s now primarily known for her TV series, a heavily ’80s-inspired aerobics show so clearly indebted to Jane Fonda’s Workout that the star might as well have received a story credit. The Substance opens on Elizabeth’s 50th birthday, which takes a sour turn when she overhears her lecherous boss Harvey (Dennis Quaid) — and yes, you’re meant to read into his name — screaming at his fellow executives to replace her with someone young.
His tantrum succeeds, and Elizabeth suddenly finds herself cut off from the glitzy Hollywood life source that she has fed on for decades. It’s no wonder, then, that when a shadowy company offers her a mysterious “substance” that promises to unlock a better version of herself, she quickly opts in. Rather than simply enhancing her own appearance, one injection of the sickly yellow-green fluid spawns a new version of Elizabeth altogether, who quite literally emerges from her creator’s ripped-open back: twentysomething Sue (Margaret Qualley), who I can best describe as Eve Harrington meets the living manifestation of glamor-filter-laden pornbots who litter X replies with the now-famous refrain “ pussy in bio.”
With her sex kitten lilt and impossibly well-coifed appearance, Sue is the embodiment of contemporary societal beauty standards at their most heightened. She almost immediately nabs a gig as Elizabeth’s on-air replacement, imbuing her own show with far more pink latex and titillating thrusts. Cinematographer Benjamin Kracun’s camera clings to Qualley leeringly in these moments, capturing so many exaggerated close-ups that I’d wager even the perviest moviegoer will find themselves desensitized to boobs and butt shots by The Substance’s midpoint.
But here’s the catch: As an anonymous liaison representing the Substance repeatedly tells both Elizabeth and Sue over the phone, they are one. In order for the process to work, the women must change places every seven days, leaving their unconscious counterpart hooked up to nutrient packs and injecting themselves with stabilizers until it’s time to switch again. Unsurprisingly, Sue soon attempts to push her luck and expand her waking hours, leaving Elizabeth to deal with some increasingly gnarly Dorian Gray-style rapid aging effects upon waking. As Sue and Elizabeth’s hatred for one other intensifies, so too does their own self-sabotage. Fargeat is clearly having a blast creating unexpected new gory side effects, which climax in spectacularly Cronenbergian fashion.
And it is this focus on body horror that gives the film a deeper resonance, allowing it to grapple with questions of bodily autonomy and explore how physical transformations can make us feel disconnected from our own flesh. Plenty of monumental horror movies hinge on the purported terrors of cis female characters’ everyday body transformations, from the on-set of puberty in Carrie and Ginger Snaps to the gnarly childbirth at the center of The Brood and this year’s The First Omen. Old women’s disfigured “hag” bodies are another horror staple, whether it be the infamous shower lady in The Shining or more modern examples in films like X or Barbarian.
However, the genre can also be a means through which many trans and nonbinary viewers have processed gender dysphoria, externalizing the fear of a body changing out from under you, wrenching your sense of self in the process. While many high-profile body horror films weren’t explicitly made with the intent of capturing common trans experiences, trans readings abound in film criticism, from The Fly to Possessor to Titane and beyond.
And indeed, The Substance may ultimately belong more in that lineage than it does in a genealogy that can be traced back to fare like Rosemary’s Baby. Unlike other body horror movies that use genre to capture the “female experience,” this film has little interest in mining the aforementioned bodily processes heavily associated with cis women in order to do so, like pregnancy, menstruation, or breastfeeding. The grotesque, ever-present boogeyman here is instead the garish lengths to which women and femmes are trained to go in order to make their appearance palatable to “the culture” at large.
That’s not to say the film is groundbreaking, or that it treads into entirely new territory, but it doesn’t have to. Your enjoyment of the movie will chiefly depend on willing you are to buy into its absurdist heightened reality, which has very little interest in anything resembling real-life 2024. After all, this is a world where America’s new It Girl has a retro aerobics show! Outside of the odd high-school classmate that Elizabeth texts from the shadows of her lavish penthouse or the cartoonish horndog guys who constantly drool at Sue’s feet, the two women are remarkably isolated, with no larger beauty or entertainment industries to blame and no external friends or family to speak of. Our central characters fall neatly into easy tropes: insecure aging starlet, conniving sexpot, and misogynistic bigwig pig. Even the film’s handful of repeat locations feel like out-of-time fun houses, from the cold sterility of Elizabeth’s featureless black-and-white tiled bathroom to the garish hallway of the aerobics show’s studio, whose orange walls and loud carpets invoke The Shining (although, let’s be clear, The Substance has way more blood).
Yet under Fargeat’s direction, I found the movie’s unsubtle, stylized nastiness to be a feature, not a bug. The ridiculous, claustrophobic spiral that Elizabeth and Sue find themselves locked in feels like a fever dream mirror of the anger I feel when I catch my own nagging insecurities and creeping premature fears about fading into obscurity someday. Bigots can crow about the importance of “protecting real women” and spread all the fearmongering misinformation they like about the supposed dangers of trans people receiving gender-affirming care. That doesn’t change the reality that the impossibly narrow heteropatriarchal expectations of how women and femininity should appear and behave continue to wreak vicious harm on people of all genders.
Sure, some beauty standards have changed since the ’80s and ’90s eras that anachronistically inform The Substance’s world. But that doesn’t mean that the body positivity movement and choice feminism have saved us from the rise of Ozempic discourse; or the prevalent TikTok trend of people — largely women — asking viewers how old they look, as if visibly aging is the worst thing that could possibly happen to you; or transphobes accusing trans women who present in more traditionally feminine ways of somehow parodying womanhood.
The cynic in me dreads the ways in which nascent technology will only exacerbate many of these problems, feeding us an endless supply of AI tradwives with huge breasts, no waist, and an inaccurate number of fingers on each hand. It can be easy to feel like we’re stuck in a nightmarish loop when it comes to how we discuss appearance, and I can’t help but admire The Substance’s refusal to pull its punches at a time when we badly need more media with actual things to say. I won’t begrudge anyone who would’ve preferred the movie deliver some meaty character studies or topical references. Clocking in at 2 hours and 20 minutes, The Substance’s final act can start to feel tedious, no matter how go-for-broke it gets. But during a time when our culture’s heightened gender anxiety feels increasingly inescapable, I’ll happily take a prolonged primal scream.
The Substance is in theaters now.
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