Divalicious Review! The Substance: Beauty Industry is Body Horror
By Caroline Cao | December 2, 2024 | Beauty
Director Coralie Fargeat makes a grotesquerie meal out of her film, The Substance.
Former movie star and aerobics celebrity Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) is turning 50. Reaching your fifties as a woman is the “F-word” in the beauty industry, to quote the Death Becomes Her Broadway musical. The aerobics show executive (an appropriately abhorrent Dennis Quaid) is demanding younger and fresher meat in the industry, kicking Sparkle out of her job.
Desperate, Elisabeth contacts a drug supplier—a shadowy voice only heard on the phone—of the eponymous Substance drug that can grant her the “best version of herself” as advertised. Elisabeth must follow several steps (the film does a good job of visually indicating what would be laborious steps). The process takes meticulous injections.
Upon taking the Substance, emerging from Moore’s body spine like a bug from a cocoon, is Sue (Margaret Qualley), Elisabeth’s autonomous alter-ego, much younger and the “best version of herself.” The rules of the Substance are that Sue must harvest stabilizer fluid from Elisabeth’s unconscious body and then switch back to Elisabeth’s body in a week, trading skins, and Elisabeth must do so for Sue’s body. The switch-a-week balance is necessary for them to have a stable experience.
But this is a tragedy, so the rules are meant to be broken. Sue spends her first week lavishly, flaunting her youthful sex appeal to usurp Elisabeth Sparkle’s position with aerobics stardom and achieve meteoric ascension. Sue overstays her required timeframe, overharvesting Elisabeth’s fluid to steal more time. This imbalance elicits its body horror consequences: stealing Elisabeth’s life essence and accelerating her bodily aging.
But despite the hatred, there are key moments where Elisabeth (Moore capturing the sheer desperation in heartbreaking fashion) decides to keep Sue, her saboteur, around. “She’s the lovable part of me,” she affirms. Although these two women’s loathing drives their brawls, we see their insecurities mirrored in the other. Their fates become entwined nightmarishly (to the beats of composer Raffertie’s electrifying music) in painstaking special effects.
If there’s a downside to The Substance as a satire, it does fall into a more skin-deep commentary—or surface-level—indictment of the pressures of aging and the beauty industry imposed on women. The disgust at the center of The Substance is not the climatic eldritch abomination. It’s what caused said appearance: The beauty institution, run by the men, seen as monsters through the fish-eye lenses. Hugh Diego Garcia also stars.
The Substance is streaming on Mubi.
