by Emily Duff and Rosie Deacon
French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat recently released her new body horror, The Substance. Starring Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley, it delivers a magnificently disgusting critique on the pursuit of beauty inevitably stripping you of yourself.
Winning best screenplay at Cannes Film Festival, the film is 120 pages of script - with uncommonly only 20 pages of dialogue. This leaves for an intense viewing experience, to say the least.
Whilst more obviously an exploration of the beauty standards placed on aging women, the focus is on the visuals and symbolism rather than the speech meaning many aspects are up for interpretation. With inspection of each detail, the discomfort of living in our bodies becomes striking.
Highlighting each element of the body, its sound design makes every pierce and crunch immersive between images of blood and ripped skin that leave you clenching your teeth.
Aside from characters' bodies visibly ripping apart, what surprisingly stands out is Dennis Quad grotesquely eating shrimp. In a very obvious nod to the #MeToo movement, Quaid plays TV executive Harvey who leaves the shrimps' half-eaten corpses on display not just across his plate but the table and his face, emphasising his treatment of bodies as a whole. He is a man who makes a living from discarding and mistreating the women of Hollywood.
The abject excess of the body in this film and the intertextual references of renowned horror classics from The Shining to Black Swan offers all the details we crave whilst staying away from tropes like ghosts, zombies and spooky castles.
References to Carrie, specifically within its purposely over the top ending, and Psycho, through shower scenes and close ups of each leading ladies faces, reminded us of the bodies of timeless female characters whose bodies have been similarly harmed.
Wendy Torrace whose trauma was so vast it inflicted on her portrayer, Shelley Duvall.
Ballerina Nina Sayers who pushes her body so far she reaches psychosis.
Carrie White whose body is never hers but rather her mother’s or classmates.
Lovesick Marion Crane who is killed simply for having a body that created both attraction and jealousy.
Despite the melding of these time-honoured movies, cult classics also play a role. In many ways, The Substance is reminiscent of Jennifer’s Body, an early 2000’s teen horror starring Megan Fox alongside Amanda Seyfried, about a girl who is raped by a group of men and consequently becoming possessed by a demon and needing to devour boys (quite literally).
At the beginning of The Substance, we are introduced to Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) who is a famous TV star, delivering 80’s style at home workouts in her Lycra neon bodysuits to at home viewers and ironically ending each episode by reminding viewers to “take care of yourself,” a statement Sue also adopts.
Unlike Jennifer’s Body, in The Substance sustenance is taken from themself instead of boys as Elizabeth’s younger body, Sue (Margaret Qualley), abuses it in order to live out her youthful dreams.
In turn Elisabeth’s body starts to get the life sucked out of her and she turns into everything she tried to avoid: she gets older.
When we first see Elisabeth after her Sue persona has drained her, she has thinning grey hair, a hunchback, and wrinkled skin. We are left with every archetype of the older female villain, not too dissimilar from the Disney villains in Rapunzel or Snow White.
The use of this particular sub-genre of psycho-biddy, also referred to as Grande Dame Guignol, in which a mentally unwell older woman becomes violent, wrinkles are used for shock value. Using normal aspects like greying hair in conjunction with actual gore seems unnoticeable, but implies that the aging body of a woman is just as terrifying as all your guts falling out.
While the disgust and hatred toward living in an older body feels commonplace in a society rigorously focused on youth, even outside of the Hollywood hills, younger bodies are uneasy. We see Sue reliant on a substance not far from the drug dependency steadily increasing among young people.
According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), around 18.3% of individuals aged 18-25 in the U.S. reported using illicit drugs in the past year in 2023. In comparison, 2018 saw just 17%.
Towards the climax of The Substance, repercussions take their toll on Sue as her body begins to fail her and fall apart. Despite being the younger and supposedly better version of Elisabeth, she is never satisfied.
Many have also likened The Substance to Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream, a harrowing exploration of drug abuse. In it, we similarly see bodies being mistreated as young Marion (Jennifer Connelly) sells herself for drugs and retired Sara (Ellen Burstyn) drastically loses weight to achieve her goal of being on TV.
Arguably the most poignant moment of the film is when Elisabeth gets ready for a date. Having already lowered her standards in a bid to remind herself she is attractive, her frustrations staring in the mirror, which ultimately lead her to stand him up, are relatable to women of all ages. Social media agrees, with posts reminding of tasteless phrases like “lipstick on a pig” which alludes to efforts of beauty being futile if you’re just too ugly.
Paired with the aforementioned character of Harvey being all-too-real and the current climate of charged sexual abusers becoming President of the United States, it’s hard for women to feel like their body is their own. A statement streamers like Nick Fuentes proudly exacerbate.
While taking the substance quickly proves itself to be harmful, Elisabeth never changes her mind. This may be understandable if she reaped the benefits, but, despite being the matrix, she can't experience Sue's life herself. Why? Because she desires to look like someone else, and be validated for it, not gain new experiences as a result.
Refreshingly, feminine rage is explored through an older protagonist, something rarely seen in film.
Elisabeth digs underneath the skin of a chicken, ripping it apart in an expression of violence. She can’t get to Sue physically, and wouldn’t want to damage her beauty anyway, so she tears apart the flesh of an already dead animal.
This split body and split personality of Elisabeth Sparkle and Sue is a representation of body dysphoria. The villainous part of yourself that is actively hurting you while detaching yourself from your actions, because you don’t want to deal with the consequences or acknowledge the core problem. Again, even when her body physically rots and she is offered a drug that will terminate Sue permanently, Elisabeth never stops.
This bares resemblance to many eating disorders in which harmful restrictions or actions continue in a plea for contentment in one’s body. The National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA) notes that approximately 9% of the global population is affected by an eating disorder at some point in their lives. That’s roughly 720 million people.
Ending with Elisabeth as barely more than a handful of what once was a human, her face is still visible and contently smiling. It begs the question; does the burden of living up to the expectations placed on our appearance outweigh not really existing at all?