Even the harshest critics of Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance“ acknowledge the scene where Demi Moore’s Elisabeth Sparkle falls into a self-conscious frenzy before a date is eerily relatable. Watching herself in the mirror, she goes through an anxious fashion show of trying different looks and outfits before she has to leave, her increasingly panicked spiral leaving her exhausted and dejected before she finally smears makeup off her face in defeat. It’s a scene that leaves most viewers with the same reaction: we’ve all been there. But there’s another sequence, one that’s equally humanizing in capturing the feeling of being betrayed from your own body, that spoke to me with even more specificity.
It comes ten minutes later when Elizabeth Sparkle, thanks to a series of events caused by her kinda-sorta clone Sue (Margerate Qualey), now inhabits the disfigured body of an old crone. She’s watching TV, and she wants to get up. Again and again, she tries, and her bones pop like broken gaskets, and in the excruciating pain, she lets out a guttural scream. She tries again, and this time, she pounds her bulbous playdough-and-gears kneecap into a new shape, finally escaping the cushions of her seat. As a sequence of body horror, watching Fargeat turn the simple act of standing up into a visceral set piece is thrilling. Still, on a deeper level, “The Substance“ captures something seldom seen on-screen: the marrow-deep rage at feeling as though your body has turned against you.
I intensely related to this sequence because when I was 18, I lived through my own body horror. I was driving northbound on Pulaski towards Chicago when a drunk driver crossed the median and nearly ended my life. My femur shattered upon impact, and I had hairline fractures in both knees, with an ice storm of glass sinking into my hands, arms, and face, much of which still exists in my body. I recovered well, and although I stay pretty fit and enjoy long walks around my beautiful city, I will experience chronic pain in my legs for the rest of my life. I have good days and bad days, but on the very worst, getting off my sofa after watching TV can feel like a Herculean effort, pivoting my body into jester silhouettes to pitch my balance just right for my body to get off my charcoal-colored sectional.
Before “The Substance,” I’d never seen that experience so persuasively brought to life. Sitting in a hospital bed for months after the accident, it was pernicious how quickly my resentment shifted from the driver who hit me inward; I was hoping for my legs to heal, praying I could walk normally, needing the pain to subside. And when none of those things happened on my ideal timeline, like Elizabeth Sparkle in her LA condo of gauche pastels, I became angry and bitter, self-consciously aware that my relationship between myself and my body had shifted. Rather than feeling as though we were “one“ entity, there was me inside my head, and then there was my disobedient flesh. Later, as an adult, those feelings were only amplified, both from the natural process of aging and underlying chronic health issues, leaving me frustrated, confused, and livid at my body, wishing it was different.
Beneath its beautiful goth-pop surface, “The Substance“ is about all these things, defying what some critics have pointed to as the film’s possible one-noteness, or how like a lot of horror, it risks becoming what it criticizes. Instead, it is about the reification of self-hatred, a movie about what it’s like to compulsively obsess over other, better, younger imagined versions of yourself, and how the more you fetishize their fantasy, the more of you is given away. It is an unequal trade, brokered with an unfair exchange, pounds of flesh sold at a loss. “The Substance“ captures the hollow rage of that experience, a confession of what it feels like to resent a corporal form that starts to feel like a prison of rejected anatomy.
That kind of bodily self-loathing can mean different things to different people. Whether it’s a desire for pop-star beauty, staving off the crow’s feet of aging, or fighting against injury or disease, these infirmities all originate from our bodies. It is becoming an increasingly common experience where the “you“ of your body and the body itself enter into radical disharmony. With nearly 80% of Americans admitting they sometimes don’t like how they look, this fleshly dissonance is essentially understood, but less understood is how easily that friction can dovetail into internalized contempt removed from how happy you “should“ be with however your body actually is. Social media pumps glamorized, filtered, and often artificially modified bodies into our feeds daily, a quick recipe for internalized shame about your face and body shape, regardless of what you envy.
These ideas are hit on again and again in “The Substance,“ ingrained in the plot and the chain of consequences it follows. Only someone already on the brink of a self-esteem breakdown would purchase the ominous yellow potion that creates a younger version of yourself, particularly when the only thing to “gain“ is the pathetic contact high of living vicariously through your copy’s flesh and fame. This is most succinctly expressed when Elizabeth meets the feeble old man whose younger self handed her the “substance“ marketing card in the first place, pleading, “It’s long, isn’t it…seven days? … It’s getting harder each time to remember that you still deserve to exist,“ the danger of an existence contingent on your appearance.
All of this is brought to a head in the extended climax when we’re greeted with an elephantine monster with protruding limbs, faces, eyes, and a few delicate rasps of hair. This is the “Monstro Elisasu,“ the offspring of Sue, a copy of a copy that reunites Elizabeth and Sue into a new, beastly form. She is the result of Sue abusing the rules of the substance for months, leaving Elizabeth Sparkle locked in a chamber as she ages in unholy acceleration. In the rare moments Elizabeth wakes, her shattered self-esteem is so enmeshed in needing Sue’s beauty to thrive at her expense, addicted to the illusory fantasy of a perfect other-self, that she ultimately can’t bring herself to reverse the experiment. Sue will live on at any cost.
Yet, while the Monstro Elisasu is classically grotesque, this creature is not meant to be the subject of our scorn, hate, or disgust, even to be laughed at; she is the inevitable, coldly logical result of how you will feel if you are a slave to your most self-annihilating impulses. We watch as she, wearing a cut-out mask of Elizabeth Sparkle, walks onto a New Year’s Eve televised event and, soon after being greeted in horror, lets loose torrents of blood on the crowd, earning her revenge on the society that imprinted these toxic values in the first place. This scene is the literalized version of Elizabeth’s earlier date freak-out, as though she left her apartment and chewed through her dinner, feeling like an abomination.
“The Substance“ is a bitter, wide-angled deconstruction of the male gaze and its consequences, but it also captures what it feels like to have others see you when you feel at your least desirable when you see yourself as a beast, where your anger with your broken or diseased or simply aged body is at its lowest, and when you start to hate those that make you feel this way. It captures those days when I wish it were easier for me to run or when I would like fewer doctor appointments. Like Elizabeth at the start of the film, the irony is that I’m actually fine. Blessed, even. Last October, I hiked 25 miles of challenging mountain terrain in the Smokies, enough to make anyone proud. And yet. Elizabeth and Sue are the personification of our bodily anxieties and somatic despair, exposing with naked clarity what’s lost, what you give, when you resist the difficult harmony of self-acceptance.
Have you seen “The Substance” yet? If so, what did you think of it and its themes? Do you think the body horror film will become a substantial Oscar contender? Please let us know in the comments below or on Next Best Picture’s X account and be sure to check out Next Best Picture’s latest Oscar predictions here.