Demi Moore plays her own worst enemy in the recent body horror flick that aptly has audiences squirming beneath their skin. The Substance, written and directed by Coralie Fargeat, follows Elisabeth Sparkle, the aging star of a Hollywood jazzercise show who is being ushered out of the limelight to make room for a “younger, more beautiful, more perfect” leading lady. Just as she senses her fame and allure slipping away, Elisabeth learns about a mysterious substance that promises to change her life
“One single injection unlocks your DNA and will release another version of yourself. A perfect balance of seven days each. The one and only thing not to forget: you are one. You can’t escape from yourself.”
Confronted with her looming irrelevance and desperate to remain desirable, Elisabeth impulsively takes the substance, which results in her body splitting open to hatch an idealized second self out of her spinal column. This uncanny other, played by Margaret Qualley, adopts the name Sue and is promptly hired to replace Elisabeth at the network. Needless to say, it isn’t long before Elisabeth/Sue struggles to negotiate between her two halves, forgetting ‘the one and only thing not to forget,’ and this is when things start to get really freaky.
The Substance is fundamentally critical of Hollywood’s obsession with youth and beauty, yet it revels in punishing the female body to no narrative avail. This tension between the film’s feminist pretence and its treatment of female characters left me grappling with the unsettling possibility that The Substance exploits the very bodies it claims to defend. The film employs maximalist, stomach-churning gore to deliver a relatively simple message: Hollywood’s relentless ideals drive women to extreme and often harmful lengths to remain ‘beautiful’ by patriarchal standards. While this may not be a groundbreaking revelation in the age of Ozempic and BBLs, Fargeat makes this epidemic difficult to ignore.
However much The Substance purports to hate ‘the man,’ I couldn’t shake the feeling that it harbors an even deeper disdain for the women it represents.
As a scathing critique of the curse of aging in Hollywood, there is certainly a feminist reading to be made of The Substance, as it skillfully employs horror to represent both the anxieties and fantasies of womanhood. This reading is furthered by the film’s male characters, who embody the worst of the patriarchy. Elisabeth’s revolting boss, Harvey (Dennis Quaid), most glaringly epitomizes the smarmy insincerity, hypocrisy, and misogyny of Hollywood’s ruling class. Despite looking significantly older than Elisabeth, Harvey fires her solely because she’s turning fifty and has grown unattractive to him. In this sense, Harvey—and by extension, the industry he personifies—acts as a catalyst for the horror and mutilation that follows. Still, however much The Substance purports to hate ‘the man,’ I couldn’t shake the feeling that it harbors an even deeper disdain for the women it represents.
As my roommate and I were walking home from the theater, we were trying to pinpoint exactly what it was about The Substance that wasn’t sitting right with us (something, of course, aside from the grisly, blood-soaked visuals that were quite literally not sitting right in our stomachs). Although the film felt like it was trying to appeal to our feminist sensibilities, we found that we were both left wondering if its relationship to the female body was one of love or hate. We came to agree that the film’s attempted feminist angle—compelling as it may be—is ultimately undermined by the fact that it doesn’t seem to like women very much. For everything it gives its imagined feminist audience, it incessantly chips away at the female characters we are supposed to see ourselves in.
The film’s relentless butchering of the female body lacks a satisfying narrative.
Although The Substance retains an ostensibly female gaze, Elisabeth is practically impossible to identify with. All we ever learn about her is that her sense of self lies exclusively in external validation, her vapidity is an illness she’s willing to die for, and these factors have seemingly rendered her completely alone in the world. Though her obsession with retaining her youth is clear, her reasons for taking the substance are never fully fleshed out, nor are a myriad of could-be-fascinating questions raised by the film. For instance, how much is Elisabeth paying for the substance? Why doesn’t she have any friends or family? And why did she know how to do that insane bathroom renovation job and suture a giant gaping wound? Despite the potential to develop her character, Elisabeth remains reduced to her industry’s perception of her. Even as she endures outrageous self-inflicted torture, she learns absolutely nothing and fails to develop as a character in any way. As a result, the film’s relentless butchering of the female body lacks a satisfying narrative. Instead, it gruesomely forces the same tedious observations down its viewers’ throats with no thematic payoff.
For its meticulously crafted and highly stylized visual world, The Substance is narratively lazy, leaning heavily on shock value and extreme gore to feign depth. Beneath the spectacle, it demonstrates a striking lack of curiosity, ironically offering little substance as it grotesquely slices, dices, and mutilates female bodies under the guise of thoughtful cultural critique. In the end, the film’s treatment of women feels less like a pointed denouncement of Hollywood’s ruthless standards and more like a reflection of its own blind spots. Though Fargeat seems intent on exposing the perverse expectations of the film industry, The Substance ultimately replicates the very brutality it aims to condemn. Flashy, grotesque, and uninterested in the inner lives of the women it depicts, the film successfully captures both Hollywood’s aesthetic and affect, but only by taking a page out of its playbook and reducing women to mere objects of spectacle.
