The Substance (2024)

Directed by Coralie Fargeat

10/10

The Substance is a movie about many things: ozempic, the perception of women as they age, the movie/tv industry, mother/daughter relationships, substance abuse (ha), beauty standards, plastic surgery. Fargeat does a masterful job of pulling all these themes together into a cohesive and incredible film about self image and self worth.

The film is about Elizabeth Sparkle, a tv fitness personality, struggling with her life after being told that she is too old to work in the tv industry. A stranger points her towards a mysterious company, telling her it changed his life. Elizabeth takes his advice and injects herself with a substance to give her a better version of herself. Instead of making her younger, it makes her produce a second self who is younger and more beautiful. Every week, she must switch her consciousness into the other body, spending one week as the young and beautiful Sue, and one week as old and ugly Elizabeth. But the allure of being adored again begins to tip the balance that must be carefully obeyed.

My favorite thing about this movie is the focus on both the grotesque and the perceived grotesque. Much of the movie revolves around Eliabeth’s perception of herself, both as herself and as Sue. They’re both attractive, but she sees Sue as her ideal because people love her as Sue and see her as old and worn out as Elizabeth. Because of this, most scenes featuring Elizabeth, especially after Sue, accentuate her flaws and her age. The most notable example is before and after the birthing scene, where Sue comes out of Elizabeth’s back.

Before injecting the substance, Elizabeth is shown in the nude. She examines her body in the mirror, noting the wrinkles and stretchmarks and dimples, all of which she is disgusted with. When she wakes up as Sue, she studies herself again, groping her perfect breasts and butt, running her hands over the smooth, soft skin. The film has multiple scenes filmed where Elizabeth and Sue mirror each other, with Elizabeth’s perspective filled with fear, disgust, and self-hatred, and Sue’s with people drooling over her and her body. I love the way they are mirrors of each other despite still being one person, as the voice on the phone reminds Elizabeth.

I think the way the film pummels Elizabeth is interesting. We the viewer are experiencing the film from her perspective, so it makes sense that everything we see feels like a magnified version of things that happen to her, like the fish eye lens on Harvey, her manager, who is shown to be disgusting and slimy not only in personality, but in his actions, too, like sloppily chowing down on shellfish while firing Elizabeth. She gets the rug swept out from under her, and it leaves her feeling unstable and unable to see herself as a person worth anything, so we, too, begin to see that in her, like Elizabeth binge eating and watching trash television, as she doesn’t feel like she deserves to go out and live her life with the way she looks.

I also love how gross the film becomes when she goes too far as Sue and births Monstro Elisasue. The body suit is repulsive and hard to look at. There are teeth in her chest, only the sparsest thread of hair, and who could forget the shoulder mouth that spits up a full entire breast? It’s gross and bulky, a far cry from the darling Sue she attempts to recapture while getting ready for the New Year’s Eve show. My favorite detail is Elizabeth’s full face on the back of the body, forced to watch all of this happen with a frozen horrified expression, unable to do anything. It’s so brutal!

At the end of the film, where Elisasue is beheaded and then un-armed, I adore the unrealistic amount of blood she spews over the crowd (they used around 5,500 gallons of fake blood for that!). It reminds me of the iconic scene from Carrie (1976), but in reverse, with the victim spraying her blood over a crowd of (previously) adoring fans. I’m not usually a fan of movies where the protagonist dies (I don’t think it’s bad writing, it just makes me sad), but I feel there was really no other way the story could have ended that would have been as satisfying. Even breaking away from the mess she made of herself, Elizabeth can’t help but fantasize about still being beloved by the public until she bubbles away into obscurity and is washed away.

I feel like there’s a million things I could say about this film. If I were a better study, I would love to do a video essay dissecting the visual language of it, like Elizabeth’s yellow coat compared to the egg, or the distinct visual of both Elizabeth’s poster in her living room and the billboard right outside the living room. But alas, I lack the ability to connect thoughts coherently, so I must settle for writing internet reviews.

But! I have a bonus for this review! Before developing the Substance, Fargeat produced a short film with a similar subject called Reality+ from 2014.

The story takes place in a world where people have implants that allow them to customize their real life appearance for 12 hours at a time. Our main character is a man, Vincent, who is a little shabby, carefully film ugly, but not repuslive, who is new to Reality+. He meets a beautiful girl who is also using Reality+ and they have a whirlwind romance that is stifled when his Reality+ glitches and breaks. At the end of the film, it is revealed that his next door neighbor, a quiet, but pretty artist, is the same woman he’s been romancing. The two begin seeing each other without the appearance altering technology and the film ends.

The shift from a male protagonist to a female one hammers in exactly what Fargeat wanted to represent on the big screen. She said while writing the Substance that she was beginning to feel anxious about her age and appearance and those insecurities are reflected brilliantly within the film. While men can and do experience similar self-doubts, the modern day society is hyperfocused into the appearance of women and how they should think, act, and look. Making Elizabeth a television star, someone who is always being looked at and always in the spotlight while having to stay young and beautiful, was an excellent way to accentuate this over a common, everyday man like Vincent. I feel this point is made much more clear with a female protagonist, rather than a male one.

I also think its interesting that in the Substance, you can seemingly only participate in the substance if someone already taking it tells you about it, while in Reality+, anyone can easily install it. All over the city and especially in the club, Vincent sees people who are using Reality+, even some with the same face model as him. I like the comparison between something that everyone has access to vs something that seemingly only a few can attain. It gives Elizabeth a degree of separation from the normal person, where she can’t tell another person about her secret. She can’t get help because she’s using an experimental drug that is definitely not cleared for use for people. But Vincent calls the company and is able to have his Reality+ repaired within a few days.

Vincent also merely dislikes his appearance. He feels better with his Reality+ avatar, but he doesn’t have the same deep seated neurosis that Elizabeth does. He prefers to not go out or be seen without it, but it doesn’t seem like he has engrained it into his sense of self, considering he is able to go out and have fun without the use of Reality+ at the end of the film. Instead of upending his life because his tech is glitching, he simply stays home until it is repaired. While that is still not quite ideal, its much more preferable to Sue’s breakdown and second injection of the activator and subsequent monster she births.

My favorite part of the short film is Vincent’s nightmare about unlocking his chip, where he is stuck with the wrong appearance. I’m a huge sucker for nightmare scenes and I love that Fargeat was able to include them in both the short film and full film. The visual of a long line of staples down the back is horrific and striking and very obviously parallels Elizabeth’s own back scar. I love that the scar is the nightmare scenario for Vincent, but Elizabeth barely bats an eye at it, instantly sewing it up as soon as she’s settled into her body. The only time we really see anything with her being disgusted with the back scar is during the first night she oversteps as Sue, where she dreams as Elizabeth of a boy unzipping her scar and meat and flesh spilling out of it. She feels more afraid of how other people could see her, rather than Vincent’s fear of never being able to have his Reality+ body.

Both films are about similar things: you dislike your appearance so you alter yourself into something you like. But Reality+ seems to give more of a choice. It is implanted into your body, but you can deactivate it and live your life without the use of it. The substance is painful and dangerous. It creates a whole new person and will ruin the host’s appearance if misused (which makes me wonder what would have happened if Elizabeth swapped less than Sue…would she grow older? Would she not age?). I love that Fargeat decided to up the stakes the second time around with the idea. It really builds the horror aspect of the movie and shows how changing certain aspects can easily slide an idea into a different genre.

The Substance is a stunning visual masterpiece about a woman terrified of her own age and appearance and the lengths she will go to to be adored again. I love the brutality of it, how gross it gets, and how it plays the different parts of Elizabeth against each other. I have no doubt this film will become a classic for generations to come and I’m excited to see what Fargeat will do in the future.