The Substance (2024): Self-alienation and Complicity

Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (2024) takes the messy sandwich approach to filmmaking: it heaps discrete theme atop theme without regard for overall inner logic. Even by the standards of its overstuffed length of 2.5 hours, the body horror film covers a huge swath of ideas without smoothing over stray threads. There are the obvious ones, misogyny and aging, but also addiction, monstrosity, mind-body dualism, fame, and more. Yet, as is often the case with the best of messy sandwich art, The Substance’s multivalent ambiguities are more fertile than infuriating, particularly regarding identity and self-alienation.

The Substance finds Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore in a daring performance) on the eve of her fiftieth birthday. At the start, we see Elizabeth lose her job as a television aerobics instructor due to shrinking ratings, which surreally hideous producer Harvey (Dennis Quaid) attributes to her age and declining sex appeal. On her way home from being fired, she gets in an accident when distracted by a billboard of herself being taken down. At the hospital, a nurse introduces Elizabeth to The Substance, a street drug that offers to make you a “younger, more perfect, more beautiful” version of yourself.

After injecting The Substance, Elizabeth has a gorgeous twenty-something, Sue (Margaret Qualley), emerge from her back (literally). Sue is the “better” version of Elizabeth that The Substance promised; the tradeoff is that she must alternate between being the “better” version of herself (Sue) and the “authentic” version of herself (Elizabeth) every seven days. As the movie progresses, Sue returns to Harvey, becoming his new star, leaving Sue and Elizabeth to work out the complexities of their unique, troubling relationship.

It’s a provocative film, though not an especially subtle or coherent one. That’s fine--its aim is to confront and not dissertate. In that sense, it’s interesting that the film repeats verbatim, sometimes through neon intertitles, sometimes through dialogue, that the two separate women are “one.”

On a first pass, this is classic doppelganger thematic stuff, though Elizabeth and Sue aren’t doppelgangers. They’re different versions of the same person that look different and have separate consciousnesses but occupy the same body. Or something. The film doesn’t give thirty seconds of attention to what that might mean, which, to be sure, was a wise move on Fargeat’s part. It’s to The Substance’s credit that it doesn’t get bogged down in tedious metaphysics.

It might be too mind-numbingly obvious to point out that the film’s presentation of Sue as the “better” version of Elizabeth is a satire of the male gaze: Sue is younger, perkier, and more eager to please (the “perfect” woman, right?). Still, even with that in mind, it’s striking just how much of a cypher Sue makes of herself. She swallows a lot of bullshit, particularly while taking Elizabeth’s spot as a new hyper-sexualized aerobics host. The film is nicely restrained in subtly signaling Sue’s awareness of the hypocrisy and sleaziness at the heart of it all. Yet, she never drops the act, remaining eager to please even when dealing with obvious douchebags like her pushy neighbor who stupidly hassles her for a date.

The only time Sue shows signs of hostility, or even the slightest hint of a personality, is when scorning Elizabeth (i.e., herself). Indeed, both Sue and Elizabeth collude in her (their?) objectification. They’re not just victims. What Elizabeth gets out of it is clear: as she says after having second thoughts about killing Sue, Elizabeth sees Sue as the only lovable part of herself. But there’s more to it. In one of the film’s most powerful scenes, Elizabeth finds herself unable to stomach a date with a corny but seemingly nice enough high school classmate, ghosting him when she’s too defeated by disappointment with her appearance to meet him.

Part of this is about Elizabeth’s feeling that the older version of her isn’t enough; by that point in the story, she’s already experienced what it’s like to be Sue. But it’s also about not wanting to settle for less. Her classmate seems like a nice guy, but he’s not much of a match for the motorcycle-riding, GQ models Sue dates. Life in the fast lane feels good.

While the fast lane is a rush, alienation is a slow, corrosive burn. Sue and Elizabeth just keep going back, unable to stop themselves from swallowing trash in exchange for excitement and validation. Some commentators have framed this in terms of addiction, and certainly The Substance, with all of its syringes and Requiem for a Dream allusions, gives support for that reading if that’s where you want to go with it. 

Needless to say, the film’s point is that this compulsive behavior and search for validation doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it is at least in part a reflection of a setting that leaves women pressured to swallow BS to feel validated as people. But it’s a multivalent film. It’s worth noting that it’s a male nurse who introduces Elizabeth to The Substance. He briefly resurfaces later in the film in his aged form, he’s also a Substance user, acknowledging that he’d followed Elizabeth to see if The Substance had affected her similarly. Did she, too, struggle with retaining a sense of self-worth in light of a younger version of herself taking center stage? I guess the celebration of youth fails us all, which isn’t to say such pressures aren’t experienced more routinely or profoundly by women.

To put it differently, there’s inherent horror in aging and the inevitable breakdown of one’s body. While we are (literally) the body, that part of us can feel like the enemy. That might be residue of an inherited Western metaphysics that bequeaths us that famous Cartesian mind-body split, or maybe it hits on something more universal about what it is to be an embodied being. Who knows, but the body often fails us and can feel like an external impediment, even though we are, in the film’s parlance, “one” with it. You can sell yourself out in a lot of ways, some based in the specificity of gender relations, some based in the veneration of youth, and perhaps some based in how we relate to the aging body.

Regardless, colluding in your own oppression, whether you feel pressured to or not, twists and disfigures the psyche. It leads to bizarre mental health issues. This might be doubly true because you’re getting something out of it. It turns us back on ourselves, making us into monsters.

In that way, the film’s use of monstrosity in its finale is apt and actually quite cathartic, albeit disgusting. In a nod to Brian Yuzna’s Society (1989), the final scene has Sue and Elizabeth fuse into a grotesque monster that continues to beg for validation and recognition while spewing bodily fluids on the horrified audience of an awards ceremony.

We can be such good sports when our social context makes us needy monsters. And we can be such bad sports when we are on the other side of things and face those monsters. As often as not, the monstruous by-products of our alienated relations are painful to recognize as such, so we strip them of context, deny culpability, and blame the monsters we’ve turned ourselves and everyone else into. That’s the pain of peaking behind the curtain of ideology. It’s the discomfort of facing the frozen moment of seeing what’s on the end of every fork—or, what’s inside the messy sandwich, as the case may be.