Image: “The Substance” Movie Poster via IMDb
Mubi’s new body-horror parable “The Substance” (2024) combines the two most depraved places on Earth: the sickening silicone streets of Hollywood and the imagination of the French. The film is Coralie Fargeat’s second feature after her award-winning and feverishly discussed debut in 2017’s thriller “Revenge” and “The Substance” loses none of her previous work’s feminist commentary, nor its hunger for gore.
“The Substance” follows Elisabeth (Demi Moore), the star of a successful home workout show that has been running for decades, as she is fired on her 50th birthday by the lecherous network head (Dennis Quaid) for “hitting the wall.” Frustrated at being discarded like yesterday’s news, Elisabeth is contacted by a mysterious group advertising the titular Substance, which they claim can give her a “better” version of herself. Elisabeth subscribes, and undergoes a terrifying transformation into the younger, more desirable “Sue” (Margaret Qualley). But as she grows unable to live with the caveats of the Substance, Elisabeth/Sue begins to disregard the rules, leading to monstrous consequences for their shared bodies.
“Bodies” is the key word for “The Substance.” Fargeat sets her feminist parable in a surreal world where, despite the existence of iPhones and Amazon lockers, the world is stuck in the neon hellscape of the 1980s, when aerobics reigned supreme over every mother’s television set and bulimia was all the rage. This stylistic decision allows Fargeat to turn the camera into a tool of invasion and exploitation. It becomes the spotlight that fades on Elisabeth but rises on Sue, and in doing this becomes the very eyes of Dennis Quaid’s piggish network executive. The camera gets as close to Margaret Qualley’s body as possible while she performs her borderline pornographic aerobics routines, leering over her backside, up her legs and chest, and as it closes in on the most sexualized parts of a woman’s body you can almost hear the perverted executive facilitating her rise to stardom licking his lips. Later, in the climax, these shots get a bloody payoff as the consequences of the Substance’s youth restoring powers begin to backfire all over the butts and breasts of audience members and nearby showgirls, the close ups once meant to mirror erotic exploitation now replaced by vomit-inducing gore.
When explaining these shots in an interview with Letterboxd, Fargeat said, “The ass is a very strong symbol of how our bodies are not neutral in a public space,” discussing her time as a young woman on Facebook and recalling how men would post sexually aggressive comments about women’s butts on their posts without any fear of consequence or consideration. The Substance turns the female body into a symbol of freedom, both what is stolen from women and what Fargeat believes they have to seek for themselves beyond the force of male insistence. Fargeat said, “To get to this place with real [bodily] freedom without it being an injunction, without it being something that you reproduce because you feel that it’s your only way to exist… That’s what those shots represent to me.”
Fargeat makes sure to give the male body its own scrutiny and objectification beneath the spotlight, including a hilarious smash cut between the exposed backside of a character’s boyfriend and the exposed backside of a monstrous victim of the Substance. The actor who plays the boyfriend is attractive, and while the film is a generally effective satire, this moment exposes one of the issues with the film’s ideology at large. Though exploitative, the close-ups of Qualley’s butt and body as she writhes in front of the camera are always explicitly erotic. When we get the same style of shot aimed at the male body, though the subject is just as conventionally attractive by our beauty standards as Qualley is, it’s framed as comedy. It exposes a bigger issue with our culture at large, albeit unintentionally: a female body is seen as an inherently sexual object while a male body can only ever be either gross or funny. The ridiculous beauty standards the film intends to satirize are unintentionally contributed to by it – if only for a brief moment – through protecting the male butt from the sexualizing gaze it subjects the female butt to with the shield of comedy.
“The Substance” is overall a fun and inventive body-horror that will make you laugh as often as it makes you nauseous. It falls short at times, but even when it stumbles it’s a film that must be seen to be believed. Moore and Qualley manage to make their bodies horrifying and tantalizing, sometimes even at the same time, as they display expert physical acting in their painful, Substance-caused contortions. The final act will leave your jaw on the floor. Whether you love it or hate it, one thing you won’t be able to say is that you’ve ever seen anything like it. “The Substance” is currently playing in theaters everywhere.
Elijah Fischer is a third-year English and Media & Culture major.