Editor’s Note: The following contains spoilers for The Substance.Writer/directorCoralie Fargeat’s satirical body horrorThe Substance, which starsDemi MooreandMargaret Qualley, exploresthe terror and desperation of agingthrough the feminine lens, which is a refreshing (albeit flawed at times) take on a not-so-fresh trope. Though it may feel likeHagsploitation,also known as Psycho-Biddy,has run its course in the genre since the days ofWhatever Happened to Baby Jane?, the image of a deranged (usually naked) older woman is still being deployed for cheap scares in modern horror movies likeX,The Visit,andBarbarian.Through the male lens, the less sexually desirable a woman is, the more grotesque she is, and thus, scary. In the age of social media, cosmetic surgery, and Ozempic, it seems thatwomen have internalized the idea that their thinning hair, wrinkly skin, and sagging breasts are monstrous; a notion that is heavily explored by Fargeat. Though the film is not a perfect metaphor and has proven to be a bit divisive, the final act of the film is an exaggeratedly brutal, yet cathartic, visualrepresentation of how women are treatedonce they are no longer perceived as young, beautiful, or desirable.
What Is ‘The Substance’ About?
The Substance, which won Best Screenplay and received a 13-minute standing ovation at Cannes, is aboutthe pressures placed on women,especially women in the entertainment industry, to maintain and adhere to impossible standards of youth and beauty, no matter what it takes. Elisabeth Sparkle (Moore) is an actress turned aerobics star who has just turned 50 and has been fired from her show by an executive named Harvey (Dennis Quaid) who is searching for a “younger, hotter” replacement host. (It should be noted that Demi Moore is actually 61 and is categorically drop-dead gorgeous.) On her way home, Elisabeth is distracted by her face being ripped off a billboard and is involved in a car accident.
At the hospital, a young, uncannily beautiful male doctor slips her a USB drive with a note that reads: “It changed my life.” When she plugs the USB into her television, she learns about the titular Substance,a black market medical technology that would allow her to live every other week as a younger, “better” version of herself. Ultimately, Elisabeth gives in and decides to self-administer the Substance, activating the process and giving birth (so to speak) to her other, younger self, Sue (Qualley). The instructions of the Substance state that the user must “Remember you are one.” Sue auditions to be Elisabeth’s replacement and is given her own aerobics show, catapulting her into a life of stardom and adoration. What ultimately results from the Faustian bargain she makes isa messed-up feminineDorian Graythat spirals out of controlwhen Sue misuses the Substance by extending her time despite clear instructions to switch back every seven days, causing Elisabeth to rapidly and irreversibly age. As Sue becomes more famous, she is invited to host the network’s New Year’s Eve special. The night before the special, Sue runs out of stabilizer fluid and is forced to switch back to being Elisabeth, who emerges asa hunched-over, wrinkled, saggy old version of herself.
She tries to terminate the experiment by killing Sue but changes her mind and switches at the last minute, which causes Sue to wake up and brutally attack her. Without Elisabeth, Sue is unable to continue to stabilize herself and starts to fall apart, so she doses herself with the leftover activation fluid.She then morphs intoa grotesque, monstrous figure: Monstro Elisasue. Elisasue attends the New Year’s Eve special, where she is attacked because of her freakish appearance and all hell breaks loose. A bloodbath ensues, and in the end, a pile of bloody entrails with Elisabeth’s face crawls onto her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame anddissolves into a puddle of nothing.
‘The Substance’ Subverts the Male Gaze
Aside from the use ofextreme gore and body horror, Fargeat uses the camera as a way to draw attention to its deployment as an extension of the male gaze as well as how it is used as a tool to place value on women based on their physical appearance. Feminist theorist Laura Mulvey, in her 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,“defines the male gazeas the way women are depicted in the media as objects of sexual desire through a masculine, heterosexual lens. InThe Substance, Elisabeth and Sue are often depicted naked and shot uncomfortably close, the camera slowly panning and examining their bodies, forcing the audience to become complicit oglers. In one scene, Sue is filming her aerobics show when something protrudes from under her skin, prompting the director to call “cut” and review the footage from one of the cameras, which happens to be gratuitously fixed on Sue’s butt.The absurdity and obscenity of the camera’s gaze and the discomfort it causes the viewer is part of the satirical nature of the film’s ethos. Not to mention the fact that the studio executives are all older white men and the women in the film are referred to only as “girls,” more signposts of the fact that women and their bodies are not given the same grace as men when it comes to aging, especially in the entertainment industry.
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In one emotionally poignant scene that diverts from the pacing and tone of the rest of the movie, Elisabeth gets ready for a date with a former high school classmate but becomes more and more insecure as she stares at herself in herKubrickesquebathroom mirror. She critically examines and compares herself to Sue’s image, staring back at her through a billboard outside of her window, leaving her so dysphoric that she ends up ghosting her date. Later, Sue smashes Elisabeth’s face into that very same mirror; an extreme but effective visual metaphor oftheself-hatred and internalized misogyny that women harbor about themselves,perhaps due to the constant portrayal of aging and elderly women as horrifying, undesirable monsters. It’s worth mentioning thatmen are not immune to the pressures of maintaining youth and beauty, evidenced by the fact that the person who turned her onto the Substance was a man, though it is unclear if he was part of its conception or just another victim of society’s rigid beauty standards.
The Final Act of ‘The Substance’ Is a Brutal Metaphor For Radical Self-Acceptance
The final act ofThe Substancewill go down as one ofthe wildest,goriest, and most brutal sequences in horror history. After the activator fluid causes a mutational malfunction and Monstro Elisasue emerges with Elisabeth’s face trapped within her bubbling flesh, she gets ready for the taping of the New Year’s Eve special. She puts on a pretty blue dress that is reminiscent of Cinderella’s ball gown, adorns her misshapen and misplaced ears with beautiful dangly diamond earrings, rips the face off of the life-sized portrait of Elisabeth that once hung in her living room, and wears it like a mask, and draws over her paper lips with bright red lipstick. This sequence isa powerful exercise in radical self-acceptance; she decides not to hide and attends the taping anyway wearing her old face, finally seeing the beauty that was there all along even though it is too late to go back. There is nothing she can do to change her fate, and much likeThe Picture of Dorian Gray, her desire for eternal youth and beauty has destroyed her.
At the taping, as Elisasue stands on stage and the audience realizes what they are seeing,she is attacked and called a “monster” and a “freak.“At one point, a single breast with an umbilical cord-like piece of flesh attached to it grows out of her face and plops onto the stage. In aviolent and chaotic scene,she is decapitated, though her cells continue to mutate and regenerate. She sprays blood everywhere, completely soaking every square inch of the theater and every audience member in red, in a scene that isreminiscent of Carrie at the prom or the blood-soaked Overlook Hotel fromThe Shining.The element of horror no longer stems from her aging body, but from the monster created by the male gaze and patriarchal beauty standards.The gruesome scene is powerfully cathartic, as she is finally coming face to face with her own mortality, and she’s going out with a bang, or in this case, a splat.
In the end, and despite its divisiveness,Coralie Fargeat’sThe Substanceis a powerful, though at times extreme, example offeminist body horror. The film satirizes and comments on the societal pressures placed on women to maintain their youth and beauty to remain sexually desirable by men, especially within the entertainment industry. Fargeat turns the Hagsploitation trope in on itself byforcing the viewer to reckon with their own biases and internalized misogyny when it comes to women’s aging bodies. In the end, the inevitability of aging is a universal truth, no matter how hard we fight against it or how many substances we use to delay the process.
The Substance
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