We Don’t Even Have the Vocabulary to Discuss “The Substance”

But we can try

For years, examinations of female self-perception through film have led audiences in circles. We got the farcical monologuing of Barbie, the malleable self-actualization metaphor of Poor Things, the preachy, controversial antics of Don’t Worry Darling, and the list goes on. While these films reach varying degrees of success in their craft and commentary, all of them exist within the well-formed boundaries of conversation of the female body — that the guidelines by which women must operate in society are infantilizing while simultaneously entirely unattainable, propagating a cesspool for absolute destructive physical and moral standards. 

The Substance not only hates these standards, but hates everything the film industry has say about them. To what extent has our “reclamation” of these harmful criteria simply positioned us as more active participants in the culture that subjugates us? If all that has changed are the parameters of the kind of female body that is commodifiable, then the only shift has been the optics of consumer-product relationships, and what real change does that shift provide? 

Coralie Fargeat’s new horror film addresses these questions with a resentful lack of subtlety, articulating the need for a revolutionary new framework through a rudimentary, contemptuous, and messy demand for change. When aging TV aerobics star Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) is fired to be replaced by a younger up-and-comer, she decides to accept a cryptic proposal to try “the Substance,” a miracle drug that creates an “other self” — a younger, more desirable physical figure for you to live within. The only catch is that one must respect the balance, alternating between the original body and the new form every seven days without exception. 

Desperate to escape to a younger self that she has grown to both worship and resent, Elisabeth uses her “other self,” Sue (Margaret Qualley), to become the replacement host of her now-revitalized televised aerobics class. But although Sue and Elisabeth live lives of contrast, the Substance reminds them “REMEMBER YOU ARE ONE”;  one consciousness is split between two bodies and every decision made by one body is also attributable to the other. 

The Substance’s cameras feel particularly leering, scrutinizing bodies with an extremely close gaze and pairing this surveillance with a viscerally exaggerated soundscape. These techniques demand the viewer feel not only the bodies on screen, but their own and to be acutely aware of each bone, each hair, each muscle. From the onset, the audience is forced to experience every shift in their seat, every swallow, and every blink as an affirmation of what they see on screen.

This intensely tactile mise-en-scene makes The Substance just as textural as it is visual, progressively rendering all of its imagery as a stimuli for nausea, from its plasticine commercial aesthetics to its abundance of pure disgustingness. The film is only concerned with the surface, in every sense of the word — the camera frames Elisabeth’s body exactly in accordance to the increasing duality of her self-perception, accentuating her newfound fame and increasing obsolescence until she is pulled to a breaking point. 

The aesthetic and ideological shallowness of The Substance is far from accidental; its permanent residence in hyperbole and logical idiosyncrasies accentuate just how low the bar is when it comes to commentary on female beauty standards. With a lethal intensity, The Substance mimics the dated, vague aesthetics often found in these types of commentaries, before driving them into the ground and rendering them useless.   

Before devolving into utter absurdity and revulsion, The Substance allows for a few moments of isolated yet gutting despair, as Elisabeth tries and fails to make peace with her body as it is without resenting the face she sees in the mirror. While these moments are devastating, they start to feel like asymmetries or defects in the film’s plastic aesthetic. Fargeat forces us to experience the most human moments as out-of-place and destabilizing, because she has programmed the audience to accept a shallowness that presents interiority as a sin against its engineered, glossy surface.

By its conclusion, The Substance establishes its utter contempt for the considered cursory metaphors that monopolize the cinema of female empowerment. The film does not seek to add to the conversation, reclaim the genre, or even find a place within it; it wants to decimate our entire vocabulary on the subject. Embodying a relentless stupidity in its assault on polite conversation, the film appropriates the imagery of acclaimed projects on female empowerment and exhausts them of their meaning so we are forced to reconsider the terms by which we demand change. An entire symphony blaring one note until the keys break and the strings are forever out of tune. 

OVERALL SCORE: 9/10

The Substance was released on September 20, 2024, and is currently showing in US theaters.