THE SUBSTANCE

“The Substance” which won the Palme d’Or for Best Screenplay at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, reunites Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley in a horror film directed by a woman, a French woman: Coralie Fargeat.

This horror film belongs to the “body horror” subgenre, which plays on the vulnerability of the human body and deliberately provokes reactions of disgust in the viewer. Unlike “gore” or “slasher” films – which are other subgenres of horror film – “body horror” features scenes of violation, distortion, or mutilation of the body that are rarely the result of human violence but are generally the outcome of a loss of control over the body through disease, contagion, or even genetic mutation.

And genetic mutation is indeed the subject of “The Substance”.

(This article is full of spoilers. Stop reading if you haven’t seen the movie. Go see it and come back ;-))

Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) was a great Hollywood actress, as evidenced by the existence of her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Just as her star, which has suffered the ravages of decades and is now cracked, Elisabeth has seen her fame wane, and she now hosts a television aerobics show. On her fiftieth birthday, she is fired by her lustful and terribly unpleasant producer, Harvey (Dennis Quaid), who wants to replace her with someone younger. Upon leaving the studio, deeply disturbed by her dismissal, she gets distracted by two technicians who are in the process of tearing her photograph off a billboard advertising a lipstick, and she has a car accident that takes her to the hospital. Miraculously, she is unharmed. However, the male nurse assisting the doctor gives her a USB drive promoting a black-market drug, the Substance, which promises a younger, more beautiful, and more perfect version of oneself through DNA modification.

Back home, alone and distraught, Elisabeth decides to place an order.

The instructions for using the Substance seem simple: after injecting an activating serum, a second, younger, more beautiful, and more perfect body, representing an “other self,” will be generated from the “matrix body,” and a transfer of consciousness will occur between the two bodies. The transfer of consciousness from one body to the other must occur every seven days without exception, while the inactive body remains unconscious and is nourished intravenously. Furthermore, the new body requires daily injections of stabilizing fluid, which is extracted from the matrix body via a lumbar puncture. And in any case, one fundamental rule must never be forgotten: the matrix body and the other self are two facets of the same person. They are one.

Elisabeth injects herself with the single-use activating serum, then suffers violent convulsions before a younger version of herself emerges from her spine.

This other self, who calls herself Sue (Margaret Qualley), decides to live life to the fullest. She decides to audition for Elisabeth’s replacement, is hired by the unpleasant and lustful Harvey, and soon hosts a revamped, hypersexualized version of Elisabeth’s defunct aerobics show.

While Sue lives a dream life during her seven waking days, Elisabeth hates herself more and more, locks herself in her apartment all week long, and becomes bulimic. The rebirth offered by the Substance is only physical, since one ignores what the other is doing during her seven active days and both begin to see each other as two different people – not two sides of the same coin.

Elisabeth can’t help comparing her mature female body to Sue’s young, sexualized, glorified, and desired body, which is omnipresent everywhere she looks – whether on television or on the billboard opposite her apartment. She refuses to honor a date with her old high school friend, Fred – feeling ugly.

Sue experiences things differently. Her ratings success soon gives her the opportunity to host the network’s prestigious upcoming New Year’s Eve show. Sue wants more. She decides to break the seven-day cycle, removing the additional stabilizer for several months by performing a lumbar puncture on Elisabeth, which causes Elisabeth’s body to age prematurely.

Three months pass and the New Year’s Eve show approaches, but Sue has no more stabilizing fluid because Elisabeth’s body is completely depleted of it.

The Substance’s supplier informs her that the only way to replenish the fluid is to resume the seven-day cycle and switch bodies – which Sue reluctantly does. Elisabeth, now awakened, has become a hunchbacked and deformed old woman and decides to stop the experiment by injecting Sue with an termination serum.

Yet, still seeking love and recognition, she cannot resist resurrecting Sue at the last minute, leaving them both fully conscious in their two functioning bodies. Realizing Elisabeth’s original intention upon seeing the fatal syringe nearly empty, Sue beats Elisabeth to death before leaving to prepare for the New Year’s Eve show, which will be filmed live in front of a real audience and a few million TV viewers.

Without Elisabeth as the matrix body, Sue’s body begins to deteriorate rapidly. With the show’s broadcast approaching, Sue rushes to the apartment and attempts to create a new version of herself with the remaining activating serum, which was only meant to be used once at the beginning of the experiment. Sue generates a deformed body that resembles both Elisabeth and Sue. The creature, named Monstro Elisasue, suits up and goes to the show’s live broadcast wearing a makeshift mask cut from an old Elisabeth poster. As Monstro Elisasue limps onto the stage and begins to speak, her mask falls off, horrifying the audience, who call her a monster. A man decapitates her, but another head grows back, and her arm sprays the audience with copious amounts of blood. What remains of Monstro Elisasue flees the studio and collapses into viscera. Elisabeth’s original face peels away from the pile of blood, then crawls onto her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. She smiles with the hallucination of being admired by everyone around her before melting into a pool of blood.

A lot of information to absorb, I know.

From a formal perspective, it’s interesting to note the references scattered throughout Coralie Fargeat’s film.

The first reference – perhaps the least known – is a 2014 science fiction short film directed by… Coralie Fargeat herself, “Reality+,” in which people dissatisfied with their physical appearance can, thanks to the Reality+ brain implant, see themselves and others with the physique of their dreams. However, Reality+ only works in 12-hour intervals, which presents a challenge for its users, who must reconcile their desires and their sex and love lives with this alternation. “Reality+” highlights the current tyranny of the world of appearances that has invaded our Western societies. I’m not sure that the use of filters on social media and dating apps is far from the theme developed by “Reality+.”

The second reference is literary: how can we not think of Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray” (1890)? Fascinated by a hedonistic worldview glorifying beauty and the blossoming of the senses, Dorian Gray sells his soul to ensure eternal youth and beauty, while his portrait – marked by Dorian’s absolute amorality – ages prematurely and monstrously. In “The Substance,” Elizabeth has fallen into the trap proposed by the world of appearances: she has placed her value solely in her physical desirability. She has no family, no friends, no hobbies. She has nothing but a job whose foundation rests solely on physical beauty calibrated to a very precise standard: that of youth. She decides, by taking the Substance, to create her own Dorian-esque character through Sue. Throughout the experiment, the altered – that is, mature – version of Elizabeth remains cloistered in the apartment, or, when unconscious, in a secret room set up by Sue behind the apartment’s bathroom. The reference to “The Picture of Dorian Gray” is also an inverted reference: Elizabeth, who is aging, is confronted every day with her immense portrait that sits in her living room – said portrait obviously presenting her younger and frozen forever.

Similarly, “The Substance” invokes Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” (1818) and Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” (1915) when it comes to the world’s inhumanity to those who are different and are invariably labeled monsters.

In “Frankenstein,” the monster created by Doctor Frankenstein is mocked and hunted by a heartless humanity – even though the creature would like nothing more than a companion resembling himself to live far from society.

In “The Metamorphosis,” it is Gregor’s own family, who have inexplicably transformed into an insect, who behave inhumanly and try to get rid of him.

In both cases, the creature is seen as a monster by a society that does not accept difference, and this is precisely what happens to Monstro Elisasue in “The Substance.”

The cinematic references in “The Substance” are also plentiful.

Some of these references signal the film’s horror genre: the TV studio hallway, its psychedelic carpet (which represents rectangles cut in half—like Elisabeth/Sue’s psyche), and the bathroom in which Elisabeth learns she’s going to be fired are almost exact replicas of the sets in Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining” (1980).

“The Substance” also makes a direct reference to David Cronenberg’s “The Fly” (1986): both films share the same theme of genetic mutation, and one of the opening scenes of “The Substance” features a fly drowning in a glass of wine – a grim omen of Elizabeth’s impending death.

“The Substance” and the “Alien” franchise share the image of a fully formed parasite violently exiting the human body.

The repeated close-ups of the showerhead or of Elizabeth’s face lying inert on the tiled bathroom floor can only recall Marion Crane’s character just after her murder by Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” (1960).

Other references point to the horror genre where the horror resides less in the monstrous character than in the society that rejects him or wants him dead – which happens to Monstro Elisasue in “The Substance”: I inevitably think of “Frankenstein” (adapted several times for the cinema), “Elephant Man” (1980) by David Lynch or “King Kong” (adapted several times for the cinema and which is also cited in “The Substance”).

Other cinematic references evoke the fate of women in a society that represses their femininity and sexuality and refuses to see them grow up or grow old. I’m thinking of Brian de Palma’s “Carrie at the Devil’s Ball” (1976), in which Carrie, a teenager repressed by her religious extremist mother and mocked by her classmates, simultaneously experiences the onset of puberty and the discovery of telekinetic powers. After a final and overwhelming humiliation, Carrie, denied the right to live her adolescence normally, unleashes her telekinetic power, which she uses against all her tormentors in a final bloodbath – which the final bloodbath of “The Substance” obviously echoes.

In a similar vein, I also think of Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan” (2010), in which Nina is denied a fulfilling sexuality by a psychotic mother and tries to conform to the unrealistic expectations of a society that wants her to be perfect. The world of classical dance in which she evolves only exacerbates these expectations – as does the world of cinema and the star system.

Speaking of the star system, I also think of Billy Wilder’s “Sunset Boulevard” (1950), which follows the fate of a forgotten former Hollywood star who descends into seclusion and madness. I also think of “Fedora” (1978) by the same director, which sees (another) former Hollywood star implement a cruel subterfuge to ensure her youth and beauty in front of the cameras.

The final cinematic and societal reference lies in Barbie – the doll and the film – which represent an idealized and completely unrealistic vision of the female body. Mattel has long been criticized for creating its Barbie according to outdated gender norms and an unrealistic body image, and the 2023 film by Greta Gerwing only exacerbates the problem with a Stereotypical Barbie (that’s her name) portrayed by the beautiful Margot Robbie. In “The Substance,” even though Sue isn’t blonde like Barbie, her wardrobe is strikingly reminiscent of the doll’s 1980s aesthetic, especially when it comes to her iridescent pink aerobics’ leotard.

And speaking of aerobics, one of the most obvious references in “The Substance” is drawn from real life, in the person of Jane Fonda. A successful actress, winner of two Oscars, and a sex symbol for several decades, she has long struggled with low self-esteem and eating disorders. In 1982, she began a second career at the age of forty-five, when her aerobics videos achieved meteoric and lasting success across the United States and beyond. In “The Substance”, Elisabeth is suspected of having followed a similar trajectory in terms of career (she received an Oscar, has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and hosts an aerobics show), degraded self-esteem, a focus on body worship, and eating disorders. But Elisabeth has not been able to develop herself in any way other than through her body and its desirability – unlike Jane Fonda, whose inner life is clearly very rich and whom I revere. Elisabeth’s raison d’être – called Lizzie like another star, Liz Taylor – is announced by her last name, Sparkle: Elisabeth was born to be seen, to be looked at, to be adored – and nothing else.

Certain other cinematic references signal the theme of the double. Particularly noteworthy is the music composed by Bernard Herrmann for Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” (1958), which accompanies the moment when Monstro Elisasue, the monster who is a disordered composite of Elisabeth and Sue, prepares before going to the New Year’s party. Also noteworthy is the repeated use of the mirror as a dissociation of the psyche, which inevitably recalls the madness that overtakes Nina in “Black Swan,” cited above, who kills herself thinking she is killing her evil double. The endings of both films are also similar – with the heroine dying in a state of hallucinated and peaceful bliss – because she believes she has fulfilled the expectations society placed on her (“I was perfect”).

Certain other references signal the horror born of addiction. The scene in which Elisabeth injects herself with the Substance obviously evokes all the cinematic scenes of intravenous heroin use (Darren Aronofsky’s “Requiem for a Dream” (2000) again), and the Substance creates a striking parallel with the addiction felt by some women towards cosmetic surgery.

Beyond these formal references, which mainly amuse film buffs like me, “The Substance” carries a profoundly tragic and, unfortunately, very timely message.

The film, beneath its deliberately unrealistic exterior (no one wears a yellow wool coat in Los Angeles, as Demi Moore pointed out upon reading the script, and no sane person would inject themselves intravenously with a fluorescent yellow substance at home, all for free) or grotesque (the third part dedicated to Monstro Elisasue), speaks of nothing other than the fate of women in Western societies. And the grotesqueness of the film only underscores the grotesqueness of a society that grants only a very specific place to women, through Elisabeth, then Sue, then Monstro Elisasue.

“The Substance” evokes the fate of a woman who has always believed that her only value lies in her beauty and sexual desirability. She has developed nothing in her intellectual or emotional life. She has no family, no friends, no hobbies. She exists only through her work and her work has only ever existed through her beauty and the desirability of her body.

At fifty, Elisabeth experiences what the vast majority of women experience daily in our societies today: invisibility. Yet she fought as hard as she could: she has long been performative and has herself become a product because she unconsciously understood what post-capitalist society expected of her. Her sexual desirability is her performativity: she has a television aerobics show that allows her to present a body that many twenty-year-old women would envy.

Yet, she becomes invisible overnight because she has crossed a societal Rubicon that sets the validity date for women at fifty and doesn’t know how to bounce back because she never learned that she has a heart and a brain that also deserve to evolve and that, once fulfilled, are also sources of personal satisfaction.

I’ve said it here before: the socialization of many women occurs from a very early age through their bodily value, as recognized by the Other. A little girl must be pretty, a teenage girl must be feminine, and a woman must be attractive. The little girl’s body is sexualized quite quickly, and this will continue at every stage of her life until the final fall of middle age, which will render her invisible.

Elisabeth no longer lives in the eyes of the Other – and therefore no longer lives in her own eyes, which explains her irresistible attraction to the Substance. The attraction turns into addiction, a thinly veiled parallel to the addiction felt by some women toward cosmetic surgery.

But without even mentioning radical procedures involving a scalpel, “The Substance” also speaks of the pursuit of youthfulness shared by almost all women, as demonstrated by the rise of a brand like Sephora or the development of 408-step skincare routines, promoted to the point of agony on social media. The attraction Elisabeth feels will last until her death hastened by Sue’s resurrection, since she sees in Sue the only part of herself lovable by the Other – that is, youth and sexual desirability.

Elisabeth may inject herself with a serum called the Substance, but she has no human substance, and the creation of Sue will – ironically – magnify this human void. When Elisabeth is awake, she doesn’t know what to do with herself and sinks into total idleness.

The fact that Elisabeth and Sue don’t truly share the same consciousness and that they see themselves as two different people makes “The Substance” more interesting. They have both, each in their own way, internalized the impossible demands of a society focused on beauty, youthfulness, and sexualization, even though they are supposed to be the same person. Elisabeth pursues a lost youth, while Sue hypersexualizes herself through a nymphet’s wardrobe (the pink color, a short pleated skirt, a pair of sunglasses and a lollipop that can only bring to mind Nabokov’s and then Kubrick’s “Lolita“), but also through a femme fatale’s wardrobe (Louboutin thigh-high boots, a snake-patterned leather jumpsuit… a snake that sheds its skin, just as Elisabeth and Sue do).

Elisabeth and Sue live, like many women, in a dissociative state between their tormented personal psyche and the smooth, happy appearance they want to present to the society in which they live.

They live, like many women, in a dissociative state when it comes to their relationship with food. In “The Substance” (as in “Black Swan,” cited above), food, presented in a completely repugnant manner, is problematic because it opposes the much-desired thinness and leads to eating disorders.

They live, like many women, in a dissociative state between their wrinkled waking reality and their fantasized appearance, supposedly enhanced by filters on social media or dating apps.

They live, like many women, in a dissociative state between the reality of the monstrosity of their cosmetic procedures – duck lips, stretched eyes, gray skin – and the dysmorphia that blinds them to the ravages born of cosmetic procedures. The Substance, like cosmetic surgery, is a drug, and the first injection heralds an addiction that persists beyond common sense.

In the film, the harmful and vicious cycle has no chance of stopping. In one of the first scenes, Elisabeth motivates her viewers, not by talking to them about health but by reducing them to their desirability, telling them “Think about those bikini bods, you want to look like a giant jellyfish on the beach?“. Sue perpetuates the harmful cycle by conforming to the hypersexualization that society expects of her – whether through her wardrobe as we saw above – or through somewhat silly attitudes in society that actually hide a strong agency.

Elisabeth and Sue’s perpetuation of the cycle makes sense: even though they are one, their relationship quickly resembles a toxic mother/daughter relationship, where the daughter merely replicates the mother’s actions. In this regard, Sue leaves Elisabeth’s body lying naked on the floor without even a blanket or a pillow because such attitude probably symbolizes the level of abuse Elisabeth inflicts on her own body.

Elisabeth and Sue’s relationship clearly lacks kindness and serves as a reminder of the absence of sisterhood between human beings accustomed to struggling in a society that scarcely allows them the right to fully exist.

The lens through which women are allowed to exist in society is reduced to the male gaze, the infamous male gaze directed at women, which is sexualized. In “The Substance”, Coralie Fargeat uses and abuses the male gaze to demonstrate its absurdity and inequity.

And it’s true that the men who gravitate around Elisabeth and Sue are particularly appalling.

Harvey is a lustful and repulsive producer who resembles another one in real life. He has no better idea than to give Elisabeth a cookbook as a parting gift – because women belong in the kitchen, right. He pays no real attention to women, who are there only for his own pleasure and comfort: pretty women must always smile, and if his assistant’s first name is too long to pronounce (Isabella), he changes it to a shorter one (Cindy).

The doctor treating Elisabeth in the hospital following her car accident runs away dismisses her tears and offers no comforting words.

Fred, Elisabeth’s high school friend, gives her his phone number on a piece of paper that has just fallen into the mud, instead of rewriting it on a clean piece of paper – which shows a poor sense of respect and effort.

Oliver, Sue’s next-door neighbor, doesn’t even bother to hide his lustful intentions when he first meets her.

The television network is run by a gang of equally lustful old men whose sole purpose is to offer fresh meat to the viewers.

In this universe, women, denied all humanity, have only a functional role serving male pleasure and comfort.

The most harmful of all these men, however, remains the nurse who offers Elisabeth the Substance. This character embodies to me all the men who, through their male gaze, reduce women to their sexualization by pushing them toward youthfulness.

Some viewers regretted that the role fell to Demi Moore, believing that no woman so beautiful would risk injecting herself with the Substance. On the contrary, I find this choice brilliant and reinforces Coralie Fargeat’s point. Even a very beautiful mature woman can feel invisible in society’s eyes – precisely because of the prevailing youth bias.

Furthermore, the meta effect of choosing Demi Moore is dizzying: the actress, who was sixty-two years old when “The Substance” was released, enjoyed immense success in the 1990s, both for her physical transformations and her status as a sex symbol. After a few years of appearing less on screen, she made a strong comeback in 2003 thanks to a bikini scene in “Charlie’s Angels.” She was only thirty-eight at the time, but film critics and viewers praised her figure as if she were a hundred years old and had achieved the feat of being nonetheless beautiful and desirable. Still at the center of media attention for the wrong reasons, her romantic relationship with a man fifteen years her junior, Ashton Kutcher, was highly publicized. Still at the center of attention for the wrong reasons, she walked the runway for Fendi in 2021 and faced criticism from media who considered her the victim of botched plastic surgery. Demi Moore has never hidden her surgical procedures, nor has she ever shied away from revealing her nudity.

At sixty-two, she probably bares a lot more than in her previous films, both physically and emotionally (that scene in front of the mirror when she furiously removes her makeup!), but this time, it’s to denounce the male gaze she endured and played with when she was younger.

Ironically, she was nominated for the Oscar for Best Actress, but lost to Mikey Madison, who is… twenty-five years old.