Blunt object body horror The Substance is bloody, feminist catharsis in action

The Substance is not a subtle movie. The filmmaking is aggressive. The metaphor is a blunt object. The music is loud and thumping, and the color palette is bright enough to peel the film off of your eyeballs. It’s animated by a white-hot rage that escalates throughout its epic 140-minute run time, building to a jaw-droppingly audacious climax that sprays a firehose of blood at the audience. It’s demented and absurd in the best way possible. 

Writer-director Coralie Fargeat brought a similar go-for-broke mentality to her 2018 debut Revenge, a film that would never even consider a tasteful medium shot when an extreme fish-eye close-up was available. Fargeat directs the hell out of The Substance as well, using dramatic camera angles to imbue even throwaway moments with a sense of hyper-stylized delirium. A character throws something in a trash can? She puts the camera at the bottom of it. That same character walks down a hallway? She places her lens low to the ground, distorting the perspective and rendering an ordinary location bewildering and strange. 

Then the body horror comes in. Stars Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley both spent hours in the makeup chair preparing for scenes in this film, and the practical latex prosthetics are perverse and surreal in the style of Screaming Mad George, the effects artist behind Society and Freaked. These combine with an aesthetic of syringes and latex gloves best described as “medspa chic,” evoking “miracle cures” like Ozempic and Botox that encourage people (mostly women, let’s be real) to pump themselves full of barely regulated substances whose side effects won’t be clear for a few more decades so they can make themselves more palatable to patriarchal beauty standards. 

None of this will prevent the shitty, lumpy men who rule the world from throwing you away when you don’t give them a boner anymore, as Elisabeth Sparkle (Moore) rudely discovers early on in the film. Elisabeth is extremely famous—billboard famous; Walk of Fame famous—and has been for decades. You’d think this would give her the slightest bit of leverage when it comes to renegotiating her contract as the host of the aerobics program that broadcasts her tight body and sparkling smile into millions of American homes every week. You’d be wrong. 

In a scene that merely hints at the revulsion to come, leering network executive Harvey (Dennis Quad) has a mouth full of shrimp when he informs Elisabeth that she’s being put out to pasture. The themes in The Substance are mostly expressed visually, and the casting of the film’s male characters is a vicious comment in itself: This movie is populated by mediocre-looking men passing judgment on women who are, frankly, way out of their league. Quaid is very much in on this joke, and plays Harvey like a cartoon wolf; late in the film, he brings a gaggle of white-haired white guys in suits to ogle Elisabeth’s eventual replacement, and they prance around like Elmer Fudd hunting wabbits.

What they don’t realize is that Elisabeth’s replacement is also Elisabeth, reborn as a younger, smoother version of herself who calls herself Sue (Qualley). She accomplishes this with the help of the titular Substance, which she injects into her veins without question after getting a tip from a suspiciously smooth-faced medical assistant. The Substance comes with a set of rules: One, you must only activate the process once. Two, you must stabilize your “other self” every day. And three, once your ideal self has spawned from your current body, you must give each of your selves equal time—seven days each. No exceptions. 

Sue gets so much positive attention that it feels too good to go back into her old body for a whole week at a time, however. And so she starts pushing the boundaries of the arrangement, and it’s Elisabeth who will suffer for it. These side effects are what pushes The Substance into the realm of “hagsploitation,” a horror subgenre that treats the aging female body as an object of fear and disgust. The difference here is that these feelings are not imposed on the characters, but originate within them: Elisabeth is projecting her own self-hatred outwards when she freaks out after waking up with loose skin or varicose veins. (These changes quickly progress way beyond anything you might call “normal aging,” but again, this is not a subtle film.) 

The complexities of making a living based on one’s looks, and the emptiness that is left when that life is no longer possible, provides a rich text for Moore, whose “it girl” days in the mid-’80s also led to a long career as a famous movie star. But Moore is 62, and is surely aware of her changing status within the industry. Fargeat gives her the opportunity to go through the stages of grieving her old self on screen—anger in particular—as well as play with cultural stereotypes of older women. One can only hope it was cathartic for her to perform. It’s certainly cathartic to watch. 

Sue, meanwhile, loves every second of surface admiration underlaid with resentment she gets in her young, sexy form. Pretty girls smile, and Sue’s cheeks hurt from exposing her pert, pink gums. As a character, she’s an empty vessel, both textually and in practice: Fargeat frequently films Qualley’s body in close-up, breaking her down into a collection of perfectly symmetrical parts. But although both stars perform a significant amount of nudity in The Substance, the camera’s gaze isn’t sexual; instead, we are invited to judge and scrutinize their waistlines, buttocks, and upper arms with the impartial eye of a mathematician (or a butcher). 

Here, the metaphor can get a bit muddled, as The Substance indulges in objectification in the name of critiquing it. But there’s no mistaking the film’s feminist intentions. In Fargeat’s eyes, performing femininity is a grotesque, masochistic act. It’s a game that can’t be won, no matter how much you excel at it. And the only way out is to lean in, to become the monster society already thinks you are. It’s easy: All you have to do is stop shaving your legs, or wearing makeup, or punishing yourself for enjoying your food.  And from the looks of it, being a monster is way more fun. 

Director: Coralie Fargeat
Writer: Coralie Fargeat
Starring: Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, Dennis Quaid
Release Date: September 20, 2024