Film International

By Alexandra Heller-Nicholas.

As far as emotional fidelity is concerned, The Substance is a documentary. No other film I have ever seen so perfectly captures my subjective experience of the culturally enforced dissociation that happens en masse when, as a woman, your body starts to age.”

I recently turned 50. Unlike Demi Moore’s character Elisabeth Sparkle in Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, it was a comparatively happy experience. In somewhat of a surprise, I felt the weight of my younger years lift almost magically overnight. But around this same time, I also had an unanticipated flashback to a conversation I once had with an ex-boyfriend’s mother half my lifetime ago. I admired her enormously, and I remember in vivid detail her saying that as a woman, once you start getting close to 50, you largely become invisible. But, she added – staring at me intensely in the eyes – it’s up to you how you use this newfound cloak of invisibility, for better or for worse.

Over the last few years, for myself this invisibility has been a blessing. A short, plump middle aged woman with glasses and a penchant for floral dresses and fluffy cardigans, I simply don’t look like the kind of person who does what I do – which is to write and talk about horror movies. Living in Australia, it is rare that I meet my professional colleagues, the bulk of whom live in the northern hemisphere. But in recent years when I have, I can vouch for a fact that there has been more than one barely disguised double take. Outside of these increasingly rare encounters, on an everyday level people largely leave me alone to do my own, slightly weird thing.

For Elisabeth Sparkle, things were a little different. A one-time starlet hosting an aerobic workout TV show, The Substance begins on her fiftieth birthday, a milestone that leads to almost instantaneous unemployment. Without a job and having it been made clear that her glory days are now firmly behind her, a distraught Elisabeth crashes her car and lands, weeping, in a hospital emergency room. Here, a chance encounter leads to a mysterious invitation: try the eponymous substance, and you can turn the clock back. A new, younger you is literally reborn, and – now split into two different bodies – you get to live life as both older and younger versions of yourself. But one rule must be obeyed: neither version can spend more than one week as the active persona.

I live a very different life from Elisabeth Sparkle and – for that matter – from Demi Moore. But despite the fantastic excesses of Coralie Fargeat’s slick cinema du look body horror, in many ways I don’t think I have ever felt more validated by a movie. If nothing else, as I have aged, so too I have become increasingly dependent on my own substances. Their results might not be as dramatic, but their hyperbolic promise also rests on hyper-clinical sounding potions like Tretinoin, glycolic acid, and hyaluronic acid, all of which for myself and many women my age have become everyday staples. Considering the lengths we go to poke, prod, and pour literal acid on ourselves towards the creation of a brighter better self, The Substance’s core premise is perhaps not as absurd as we might first think.

Taken to its astonishingly eyewatering visceral extremes, the story as Fargeat tells it might be deliberately outlandish; but as far as emotional fidelity is concerned, The Substance is a documentary. No other film I have ever seen so perfectly captures my subjective experience of the culturally enforced dissociation that happens en masse when, as a woman, your body starts to age. Like Elisabeth, you marvel almost at an abstracted, emotional remove as your body begins to morph and change in front of your eyes; you wake up, and things have appeared, disappeared, distorted, and shifted, seemingly overnight. And at times – compounded by inexplicable mood swings and sudden shifts in disposition – your body no longer even feels like you.

From Rachel Talalay’s The Dorm (2014) to Ana Lily Amirpour’s ‘The Outside’ in Guillermo del Toro’s Netflix horror anthology series Cabinet of Curiosities (2022), the pressures of maintaining an idealized vision of femininity and the lengths that women will go to maintain it have long been of interest to women horror filmmakers.”

I like to consider myself a person of at least reasonable intelligence, and yet I had literally never heard of perimenopause until I was firmly in its grip. Why is all my body hair falling out? Why am I fat in places I never used to be? Why am I objectively batshit fucking crazy? Oh. Oh, I see. The Substance captures precisely this vaguely undefined yet somehow inescapable feeling of being betrayed by your own body’s susceptibility to the forces of time. You watch on almost as a vaguely mortified third person spectator as your body shifts and morphs into something you struggle to recognize as the “you” you have lived with for so long in relative, comparative harmony.

From Rachel Talalay’s The Dorm (2014) to Ana Lily Amirpour’s “The Outside” in Guillermo del Toro’s Netflix horror anthology series Cabinet of Curiosities (2022), the pressures of maintaining an idealized vision of femininity and the lengths that women will go to maintain it have long been of interest to women horror filmmakers. Movies like Mika Ninagawa’s Helter Skelter (2012) and Yoon Jae-yeon’s Yoga Hakwon (2009) are especially note when it comes to The Substance in particular. There are, most immediately, a number of key images that echo across these films; less perhaps as a conscious homage on Fargeat’s part as it is a recursive drumbeat of thematic fascinations and associated visual motifs:

Narrative parallels between The Substance and Yoga Hakwon are not hard to identify, the latter following the plight of a TV shopping hostess who finds herself replaced by a younger, more attractive colleague. And while Helter Skelter follows the rise and fall of a plastic surgery addicted supermodel (played to perfection by Erika Sawajiri in a career highlight), that Ninagawa herself came to directing from a background in fashion photography comes as little surprise. Like The Substance, Helter Skelter too looks like every frame has been ripped from a page of a glossy fashion magazine.

It is this essential instability of bodies and the unpredictability of the corporeal self that grants Fargeat’s consciously feminist vision in The Substance such extraordinary power.”

While together these films provide a compelling informal subgenre of women-directed horror films that examine and critique the pressures placed on women to uphold unsustainable ideals of physical beauty, it is unquestioningly The Substance which stands the strongest. With an unflinching emphasis on glamorized, plasticated hard-bodies – Elisabeth’s at first and then, increasingly, that of her immaculately formed younger self Sue (Margaret Qualley) – The Substance feels in these moments almost like a direct feminist reclamation of Benny Benassi’s “Satisfaction” music video. Where the latter showed scantily clad, highly oiled nubile 20-somethings in various states of sexual excitement while comically using power tools in slow motion, Fargeat’s spandex-leotarded gym bunnies too stretch, pout, and jiggle. But here – crucially – bodies (even the most perfect of them) are fundamentally volatile things, intrinsically defined by their vulnerability to change.

Indeed, it is this essential instability of bodies and the unpredictability of the corporeal self that grants Fargeat’s consciously feminist vision in The Substance such extraordinary power. Time and time again, acts of self-assessment that run the gamut from adoring to demoralizing fill the screen as Elisabeth/Sue look at themselves/herself in the mirror. In one particularly devastating sequence, Elisabeth prepares for an evening out – looking objectively stunning in a low-cut, dramatic red dress and elbow length black evening gloves. While initially seemingly happy with her appearance, the more she looks the less confident she becomes, adjusting her hair, makeup and outfit in an attempt to improve what she sees in the mirror, but growing increasingly distressed as feelings of self-loathing escalate. It’s a simple yet shocking scene, and one of Moore’s strongest performances in the entire film. If you doubt my claim that The Substance is a documentary, I guarantee you that it’s highly likely that most women you know – yes, even the really beautiful ones! – have had moments where they have felt something similar.

The power of The Substance is just how Fargeat, Moore, Qualley, and their myriad collaborators actively defamiliarize the image of femininity itself through extremes of excessive perfection and excessive monstrosity. And significantly, it is somewhere between those two points that we are offered the invitation to find ourselves. There’s a scene in Elisabeth’s white tiled bathroom early in the film where she and Sue appear post-substance, both women shown naked as they adapt to their strange new reality. Of all the shocking, powerful images in the film as a whole, these comparatively simple, low-key moments are the ones I return to simply because I struggle to think of a film this overtly glamorous that regardless shows women’s naked bodies with such honesty. As the film itself makes abundantly clear, both Moore and Qualley are unambiguously beautiful women, and yet when they bend and move, their bodies have creases and bumps in places that movies don’t usually show women having creases and bumps – bodies just like mine! OK, I’ll be the first to admit mine might be a little lumpier and bumpier and clunker, but for myself at least it felt enormously liberating to see that which is so often hidden and airbrushed away here instead on full, proud display. Importantly, these small, quiet and intimate moments do not change or diminish the representation of these women as beautiful at this stage of the film. This is just how women’s bodies look.

With its intense and unwavering interrogation of women’s bodies both at their idealized best and monstrous worst, The Substance is ultimately as emotionally intimate as it is physically so. It is a movie that emphatically states that the kind of feminine perfection we have seen normalized and championed across film history is just as unreal, just as fantastic, just as absurd and just as much a construct as the more extreme, monstrous visions that the film also has on display. These images of femininity both at their best and worst are, most of all, rendered in The Substance as fundamentally volatile, mutable and changing – an acknowledgement of the dynamic forces that render our own (non-cinematic, and very real) bodies themselves unstable and inconstant.

In this way, The Substance is not just a documentary, but a vision of hope, a statement of vindication, and an acknowledgement that the fleshy meat of our human selves – whatever shape it takes – is in a constant state of ever-moving, ever-changing flux. The glittering prize The Substance offers is as a celebration of our corporeal, gendered and always-changing selves at both our best – and our worst.

Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, a contributing editor to Film International, is a film critic from Melbourne, Australia, who frequently contributes to Fangoria and has published widely on cult, horror and exploitation film including The Giallo Canvas: Art, Excess and Horror Cinema (McFarland, 2021), Rape-Revenge Films: A Critical Study (McFarland, 2011) and the 2021 updated second edition of the same name, Found Footage Horror Films: Fear and the Appearance of Reality (McFarland, 2015), the single-film focused monographs Suspiria (Auteur, 2016), Ms. 45 (Columbia University Press, 2017) and The Hitcher (Arrow Books, 2018), and two Bram Stoker Award nominated books, Masks in Horror Cinema: Eyes Without Faces (University of Wales Press, 2019) and 1000 Women in Horror (BearManor Media, 2020). She is also the co-editor, with Dean Brandum, of ReFocus: The Films of Elaine May (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), Wonderland (Thames & Hudson, 2018) on Alice in Wonderland in film, co-edited with Emma McRae, and Strickland: The Analogues of Peter Strickland (2020) and Cattet & Forzani: The Strange Films of Cattet & Forzani (2018), both co-edited with John Edmond and published by the Queensland Film Festival. Alexandra is on the advisory board of the Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies, and a member of the Alliance of Women Film Journalists.