Content warning: spoilers, graphic body horror
The Substance, the visceral and stomach-churning body horror film written and directed by French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat, has been described by its star Demi Moore as “The Picture of Dorian Gray meets Death Becomes Her.” It tells the story of aging Hollywood actress Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) who gets fired on her 50h birthday for someone “newer,” and is offered a black market drug that turns her into a younger, more beautiful version of herself. In the preface to the aforementioned Oscar Wilde novel, he writes, “When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself.” And Fargeat’s no-holds-barred approach to body horror – loaded with criticism of Hollywood’s ageism and beauty standards – is exactly how she dreamed it, regardless of whether or not audiences are ready for it.
The main point of criticism viewers have for The Substance – aside from those who don’t really understand what “body horror” actually means and that it is, in fact, gross – is that the messaging is too relentless. But based on Fargeat’s meticulous script that includes “as much detail as possible,” this is exactly the point. Every single aspect of the film, overt and subtle, had something to say about ageism and beauty standards in Hollywood, from the cinematography, to the casting, to the specific ways body horror was used. In doing so, Fargeat gives Hollywood a taste of its own medicine.
Immediately after watching The Substance, my first thought about Coralie Fargeat was, “this woman knows her film theory.” Unsurprisingly, she attended La Fémis, one of the most prestigious cinema schools in France. Fargeat’s facetious filmmaking challenges the way women have historically been represented in narrative cinema. Her use of fragmentation with the character of Sue (Margaret Qualley), the “younger, hotter” version of Elizabeth, is a direct reference to ideas about representing women first theorized in the 70s by Laura Mulvey. Mulvey argues that fragmented shots of the female body (eyes, boobs, butt, feet, lips, etc.) freeze “the flow of action for erotic contemplation” and present the female body as “mere verisimilitude,” embodying the possessive desire caused by castration anxiety from the male viewer.
With Sue, Fargeat takes this history of Hollywood attempting to possess the female body by lingering on it, fragmenting it, and deconstructing it, rendering it completely absurd. In a scene where Sue is shooting an episode of her workout show, excessive zoom-ins, slow-mo, replays, and a grid of the shot showing her lips saying “Sue” a million times over garnered laughter from the audience – both genuine and uncomfortable. But it’s just a hyperbolic version of what cinema has been for over a century. The use of nudity serves a similar purpose: Qualley poses nude, lingers, and contemplates her own eroticism. Moore’s nudity is far less stylized: she is lying on the floor or leaning over the sink, unfragmented, unglamourous.
There is only one male character in the entire film: Dennis Quaid’s scummy studio executive. The rigidity he represents is made all the more real by his constant proximity to the camera. He often enters from a distance and approaches the camera as if invading it. The use of a fisheye lens makes him even more confrontational of a presence. Quaid is also shot flatly and symmetrically, emphasizing the shallowness of his character. The “in-your-faceness” of the film is made literal by the cinematography – it is not a dialogue-heavy movie. It is all completely thought-out and audiences fall right into Fargeat’s well-trained hands whether they like it or not.
Between films like Poor Things, Drive Away Dolls, and Kinds of Kindness, Margaret Qualley has enjoyed a year as the thriller genre’s new muse. Demi Moore, however, while unanimously popular in the 80s and 90s, hasn’t been in the spotlight for some time. In this way, both of these were stunt castings. Demi Moore was once the highest paid actress in the world, but her career waned immensely in the 2000s and 2010s, both because of her stepping aside to raise her three daughters and the scrutiny the media placed her under. “She’s been put through the media wringer throughout her 40-year career,” writes Richard Lyndon for Vanity Fair, “scrutinized and speculated about and cast aside.”
In the late 90s and early 2000s, the rise of tabloid culture, beauty and plastic surgery fads, and the inception of the internet, caused a phenomenon of popular actresses either being cast away from the spotlight or getting procedures to look younger. Other actresses popular during the 80s and 90s who suffered immensely because of drastically changing and increasingly harsh media reception include Courtney Cox and Meg Ryan, whose plastic surgeries were moreso the result of external pressure than autonomous decisions, and were criticized heavily.
However, actresses who have aged naturally are treated no better, Demi Moore included. Other actresses like Geena Davis and Glenn Close have struggled immensely with getting roles since hitting 50. Moore falls more into this category, as does Elizabeth: her boss fires her exactly on her 50th birthday, sending her a syntactically devastating note on a bouquet of flowers: “you WERE great!,” in contrast with Sue’s congratulatory “you ARE great!” No woman is spared from agism in Hollywood. Fargeat, therefore, does not spare patriarchal Hollywood overlords for a second in The Substance.
Messaging in The Substance is rivalled in explicitness only by the positively unhinged body horror. Many claimed The Substance to be one of the grossest movies they’ve ever seen, but there was no better genre choice in my eyes to convey Fargeat’s message. Aging, in its simplest terms, is getting nearer to death, a physical transformation that transgresses inside and outside, alive and dead. This is called abjection, a tenet of literary criticism theorized by feminist cultural philosopher Julia Kristeva, and is the subconscious recognition of one’s own mortality brought about by the transgression between the inside and outside of the body, the self and the other.
Women’s bodies are no stranger to inside-outside transgression and are far more subject to abjection. Between menstruation, childbirth, penetrative sex, birth control, menopause, and all the other daily horrors we experience, we come face to face with the limits of our corporeality on the regular – more than men will ever have to. As Sue becomes more and more abusive of the Substance, she becomes more and more abject. A nightmare sequence shows her back opening up to spill out all her organs, she has to pull a whole chicken wing out of her belly button during rehearsal for her show, and at the end, when she attempts to take full control and not switch back with Elizabeth, her teeth and ears begin to fall off.
When Sue decides to use the single-use Substance to create yet another version of herself, she turns into the horrifying conglomeration of blood and body parts “Mostro Elisasue.” The elements of her body that transgress inside and outside are extremely purposeful. At one point, an orifice from the monster (an ear? A mouth? Something else perhaps?) opens, producing a lone untethered breast. Here, Fargeat takes a part of Sue that was once for erotic contemplation and renders it a tool for disgust. Aging, despite being a privilege, can still be physically arduous. The idea of trying to counter aging is just as gruesome: the injection of the Substance, including all the needles and stitches, are the parts of real anti-aging procedures we don’t see, and that we only judge the results of.
Every detail of The Substance being considered “too in your face” by audiences isn’t just missing Fargeat not taking herself too seriously, it’s also missing the irony. The “in-your face-ness” of everything on the internet – every post on social media, every pop culture trend, the mere concept of “influencers,” is all about how to be more beautiful, how to look younger, and buy all these products. But when Fargeat uses that exact same method of saturating the screen with all this visual pathos – this time to comment on the horror of ageism and beauty standards – that’s when something being too overt is criticized.
The Substance itself is a metaphor for these trends that we see everywhere: Ozempic, trending surgeries like BBLs, buccal fat removal, eye lifts – it’s all body horror. It’s all injections, removals of flesh, the splicing off of excess, putting it elsewhere, things entering our bloodstreams. Aging, too, is bodily decay. One, however, is natural, a privilege even, and is only treated as such when it happens to men. Fargeat’s film may be outlandish, but in this case, as in many, the more impossible and hyperbolic the scenario, the clearer the picture it paints of the body horror women undergo every second, whether at the hands of time or of the world around us.