The Substance

Demi Moore as Elisabeth Sparkle in The Substance (2024, dir. Coralie Fargeat)

I must admit my more cynical side tends to come through when watching films that I’ve been told are great. I would not be surprised if I found a negative correlation between the number of accolades I knew a film had won and my personal scoring of the film itself. Sometimes those award nominations and wins signal to me as an audience member that I’m supposed to like the film, instead of simply recommending it. All this is to say that I have biases of my own and arthouse horror is typically not my cup of tea. Coralie Fargeat’s film The Substance is certainly an arthouse horror if there ever were one. It bears all of the subgenre’s characteristics: unorthodox cinematography, garish use of color in both set design and costume design, a subdued musical score, a noticeable shortage of dialogue, conflicting details that make it hard to pin down the time period in which the film takes place, nods to other niche subgenres (in this case Italian giallo), and moments when the metaphor gets away from the screenwriter (also Fargeat) and the plot of the film turns into utter madness.

Yet I immensely enjoyed The Substance. None of the above noted characteristics of arthouse horror are complaints about the film, not even the final point about the plot. In fact, I think The Substance excels within its genre because - and this is a rarity - it prioritized the art above the horror. Other filmmakers have attempted to do the same, yet have fallen miserably short not because their themes and metaphors were unclear, but rather because they were too clear. The films were no longer works of art about which conversations could be had regarding their true meaning. Instead those films turned into propaganda - little pieces of cinema where the message was abundantly clear, the metaphors unquestionable, and the audience hit over the head with symbolism, ultimately leaving the theater with the feeling they had all just sat through a lecture, and not a particularly interesting one at that.

As I peruse the film’s Wikipedia page, I see that most critics think the film is about female beauty standards, with one critic saying that the film turns a mirror on us as the audience and makes us think about how the themes of the film apply to us. My first thought on reading this was, “Congratulations. You just discovered thinking about a film.” I know I’m a man, so I bring a different perspective to the movie, but I found The Substance’s dwelling on female beauty standards to be completely incidental. This isn’t to say the film could have been about a man instead of a woman. The themes that I found most apparent in the film relate to motherhood - not parenthood, specifically motherhood, so the lead needed to be a woman.

The opening shot made clear that this was a central theme of the film. An egg, cracked open, poured out, and uncooked lies in center frame. I made an audible “mmmm…” as I thought of its significance. I’m sure the young lady sitting next to me thought that was weird. With the foreknowledge from promotional materials that the film was about a woman (that’s about all I knew going into this movie, I like to go in blind), the appearance of an egg as the first shot of the film was thematically crucial. The unfertilized egg represents missed female potential, such as that of an aging woman who has passed up her opportunity to have children for one reason or another and is now all alone in the world. Just a moment after we first see the egg, a hand comes in from off-screen and injects the yolk with a mysterious green liquid (The Substance). The yolk then grows and divides, creating an entirely new egg from itself, sans fertilization.

Ah, okay. So the film is about women’s attempts at single motherhood. There are other themes thrown into the film as well - female beauty standards, submission to personal vices, control over one’s own id (or lack thereof) - but the primary themes regarding motherhood I thought were made clear from the film’s opening.

Demi Moore’s character is Elisabeth Sparkle, a washed-up actress who won an Oscar and now does at-home workout television. I suppose Jane Fonda was unavailable for the role. When Elisabeth is fired from her television gig on her fiftieth birthday because she’s too old, she returns to her Hollywood apartment. The living space is enormous with a beautiful view of the hills and a billboard bearing her own image, but the kitchen is tiny. For reference, I lived in a basement in grad school and had a bigger kitchen than Elisabeth. The message of the set design is clear: Elisabeth puts on a good show, but she is alone. Not only is she alone, she’s lonely and her inner life is incredibly dull, a point underscored by her bathroom. I swear, half the movie takes place in that bathroom and this is a nitpick, but I think it was a misstep to make it so visually bland given the screen time it received. The bathroom is bizarrely large (because it takes a lot of space to film) but empty and void of any color. It’s nothing but white tiling and black grout. There isn’t even a counter, just a little sink and a tiny mirror above it.

Distraught over her crumbling career and the speed with which she is fading into obscurity, she calls a phone number to place an order for a treatment called The Substance. The advertisement she saw for it was vague, and even the instructions she receives are frighteningly scant on details. Perhaps this should have been a sign that this was a bad idea, but desperation drives us all to extremes. Continuing with the theme of motherhood, when becoming a mother is recommended to someone as a simple fix-all, a wonderful analgesic to all of life’s problems, the results are disastrous. Of course, many of those who recommend parenthood with chipper smiles and virtuous intentions in their hearts often omit details regarding the mental and emotional tolls the role takes on the mother. The Substance’s creators were as upfront and honest with Elisabeth in their instructions - activate once, stabilize every day, switch every week - as good-natured loved ones are when their advice is to just have kids because it’s great.

For the record, I’m not trying to insult those good-natured loved ones. They are, in fact, good-natured. I’m only trying to explain the themes of the film from the film’s perspective.

Moments after Elisabeth injects herself with the activator, she collapses to the floor in agony as her back splits open and Sue emerges from the giant wound. I need not explain how this is a metaphor for childbirth.

Sue, a younger, prettier version of Elisabeth, goes to the casting call for the position that Elisabeth left open when she was fired, and gets the job in short order. Of course, the family friendly workout-tape style of programming that Elisabeth specialized in is replaced with Sue’s newer version - an extremely sexualized rendition of aerobics focused mostly around squats and pelvic thrusts. I lost count of the close-up shots of Sue’s rear end. The sexualization is not restrained to the television studio, however. Sue quickly turns to debauchery, giving into every impulse from which Elisabeth was forced to abstain out of fear of aging. Her only obstacle is that pesky switching. Elisabeth is unconscious for a week while Sue lives her life, then after seven days Sue becomes unconscious and Elisabeth wakes up. Only when Sue tries to push the limits and stay awake for an extra day do the consequences of The Substance become apparent. Sue’s disobedience ages one of Elisabeth’s fingers, which looked as if it should belong to the witch who tried to cook Hansel and Gretel. When Elisabeth calls the help line to complain about Sue and what she’s done, the man on the other end (who sounds like an AI voice) says that there is no “she.” Elisabeth and Sue are one. What is taken from one side cannot be returned.

Sue (Margaret Qualley) prepares to switch with Elisabeth (Demi Moore) in The Substance (2024, dir. Coralie Fargeat)

After a brutally slow week, Elisabeth goes back to sleep and Sue wakes up, however Sue’s impulsive behavior continues to take its toll on Elisabeth. She throws parties and trashes the apartment, and when Elisabeth takes over again, she is forced to clean it all up. Here we see Elisabeth turning into the role of a traditional stay-at-home mother. She vacuums, cleans up Sue’s messes, and spends all day in the kitchen. Of course, Sue’s extended period of time awake has further aged Elisabeth and she looks more like an old hag than the famous aerobics instructor of just a few months prior.

Sue has decided that she’s had enough of Elisabeth and when she’s unconscious, drains her of all of the stabilizer fluid that she can. She stays awake for three months, far longer than the seven days dictated by The Substance. When Elisabeth no longer provides stabilizer for Sue to use, Sue falls unconscious and Elisabeth wakes up, appearing to be ninety years old, without hair, horribly hunched over, and incredibly frail. She calls the help line and requests the termination fluid - a black liquid in a syringe that is to be injected directly into Sue’s heart. As Elisabeth is about to inject Sue, she hears the voice of The Substance’s operator asking her once more if she’s sure she wants to do this. I found this to be a cute inversion of the Abraham/Isaac story from Genesis. Abraham is about to kill his son for God, when God calls out to him to stop, a foreshadowing of Christ, the ultimate good, carrying His cross up Calvary Hill to be the sacrificial lamb. Here in the film, The Substance, the ultimate evil feeding directly into its customers’ narcissism and vanity warns the superego not to destroy the id. Are you sure? Think of all of the fun Sue has.

Elisabeth begins to inject Sue (she did this while wearing a black glove. I see you, subtle nod to giallo’s black-gloved killer) then ultimately stops before all of the termination serum can be administered. Overcome by her maternal instinct to protect Sue, she removes the needle and performs CPR. When she gives Sue some of her own blood, Sue wakes up and the two of them face off for the first time. Until this point, it was not clear if consciousness was transferred from Elisabeth to Sue and back during each switch or if they were two separate people. After all, “You are one,” as The Substance’s promotional material kept reminding the two women. However, when they are both conscious at the same time, they may be one, but they’re not the same person.

Sue kills Elisabeth in a rage with an unbelievable amount of blood splatter (another common staple of arthouse horror), then rushes off to the studio to get ready for the New Year’s Eve program she is scheduled to host. However, when she begins to cough, her body starts to fall apart. It starts with the prettiest parts of her body. First her teeth fall out and ruin her smile, then her perfectly manicured fingernails peel off, then her ear grotesquely falls off the side of her head with the earring still attached. Pretty youth without older guidance and care quickly disintegrates, doesn’t it?

With her own beauty quickly fading (melting, really), Sue rushes home and injects herself with The Substance activator. Just one problem - it’s expired. Declaring that she wants a better version of herself before she passes out, what wakes up later is a horrendous monster. A fusion of Sue and Elisabeth in a nonsensical and disgusting mutation, reminiscent of Seth Brundle’s final form in David Cronenberg’s The Fly.

The monster (as the film calls it), returns to the studio for the New Year’s Eve show and - here’s where the film’s metaphor gets away from the writer - begins to fall apart while showering the audience with copious and unreal amounts of blood (this scene was a gory twist on giallo’s characteristic red neon light). Had the film not had comedic moments before this, it would have been a complete failure on the part of the filmmaker. However, those jokes and moments of decompression sprinkled throughout the film allow room for some humor. Many arthouse filmmakers forget this and, especially in arthouse horror, when something absurd happens, the audience doesn’t know how to react. They want to laugh, but they haven’t had the opportunity for the past two hours. Can I laugh at this? Is this supposed to be funny? Is it okay if I find it funny? The Substance’s answer is yes. The audience chuckled in my theater. It felt like the right response.

Finally the monster escapes the studio, collapses, and bursts into a hideous mess, and the bit of flesh with Elisabeth’s face on it detaches itself, then squirms to her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. There it dies, decomposes, and is swept up by a street cleaner in the morning without so much as a second thought.

The theme of female beauty standards are present in the film, this much is true. Elisabeth’s star on the Walk of Fame being featured in the beginning and ending of the movie indicate to us that the beauty standards to which she is held is a function of her fame, of her profession. The stronger, more central theme centers on motherhood - about becoming a mother for the wrong reasons, out of pressure, and without an inner life beforehand. The emptiness from which Elisabeth suffers carries itself onto Sue, who is at least young enough to find distractions from the void within her. Elisabeth gets no such luxury, but her story would suggest that Sue would find herself in Elisabeth’s very shoes in thirty years’ time. Of course, she found herself in Elisabeth’s shoes much faster than that, but there were some complications along the way. Perhaps Sue’s shortsightedness could have been prevented if Elisabeth had some insights worth sharing, of course then the movie wouldn’t exist.

The motherhood theme isn’t alone, however, and this is why The Substance stands out in its genre. Perhaps the film is instead a warning about making room to give in to one’s vices. What is taken on one side cannot be returned. Indulging in debauchery and mortal sin necessarily creates a greater distance between us and the divine, between us and beauty, goodness. Elisabeth gives in to her vanity at first to get her old job back, but we saw how quickly Sue prioritized her activities outside of the television studio, and the consequences that had on Elisabeth.

Another read of the film is as a warning against derivative creation. This might be a bit in the weeds and reading too into the message of the movie, but how much entertainment today is simply a bastardization of previously beloved and acclaimed works? Elisabeth was not only a home workout icon, she had an Oscar to her name and a star on the Walk of Fame. Her replacement was younger but overly sexual, vain, vapid, and sought a larger audience than Elisabeth. She was trying to be a sex symbol for everyone instead of a television trainer to a niche demographic. Were her workouts any better than Elisabeth’s? From what little we saw, I would say no. There appeared to be some science to Elisabeth’s regiment regarding range of motion, the muscles exercised, and how they were targeted. Sue seemed more concerned about simulating sex for her audience and passing it off as a workout. How emblematic is this of recognizable intellectual properties that have been rebooted in recent years? Those new versions of older franchises are flashy and stylish, but are always marred by an unsettling lack of…substance.

Perhaps that’s the message of the film: if all you have is looks and nothing inside, substance cannot be simply injected into your life, not without disastrous results. I’m somewhat confident that this is the true message of the film - regardless of what the filmmaker was trying to tell us, it’s ironically not that important - because of the confusing set design that refuses to indicate when exactly the film takes place. The characters use smartphones and are filmed with digital cameras, suggesting it takes place in the modern day, but The Substance is certainly a futuristic, sci-fi medical treatment, and when was the last time home workout routines were broadcast in the mornings on television? How many young people even watch normal television anymore? Yet this is Sue’s fanbase. And of course Harvey’s office is decorated with ancient cathode ray tube television sets instead of the modern flat panel displays. Elements that point to the future, the present, and the past tells us that The Substance is warning us about not just a problem faced by women today, but faced by women (and men as well, remember the physician’s assistant who was also on The Substance) as a fundamental part of the human condition. That’s the scariest kind of horror - the kind you can never escape. Body morphing and grotesque gore aside, The Substance speaks to a deeper fear faced by every generation. It’s only a matter of time before it comes for you.