Ugly business; About ‘The Substance’
A dissection of Coralie Fargeat’s horror sensation about the emotional violence of beauty standards and of body dysmorphia rendered nightmarishly concrete
Beauty is a dialogue between the beholder and the beheld. Today’s It girl can become yesterday’s news because of a crease on the skin. Women who conform to the patriarchal beauty ideal are valued more highly than those who don’t. For beauty as a social currency is valuable but volatile, naked to the whims of gatekeepers and the ravages of time. How we respond to it is a result of social conditioning and the media we consume that airbrushes away the imperfections, the ugly, the gross realities of the human body. The beauty industry is one ugly business. It cannot survive without pushing beauty’s goal posts. Soon as it is done milking your insecurity about one problem, it secures a chokehold on your soul with another. Not stressed over acne anymore? How about wrinkles and age spots? Everything is treatable as long as you are ready to consume. Don’t have an insecurity yet? We’ll invent one so we can exploit you. The commodification of beauty is endless in a capitalist framework. Body insecurities last a lifetime, all of it fodder for an industry that thrives on women judging each other and themselves.

Joan Rivers once joked, “Hell is living in LA with a bad body.” The joke gets a corrosive-as-cancer punchline in The Substance. Coralie Fargeat presents a hellish LA where the adverse effects of our pathological obsession with beauty and youth have been allowed to reach their fullest expression. Not far beyond the realm of Ozempic, microneedling and butt lifts lies a future with a more comprehensive remedy to the lifestyle-threatening disease of ageing. If the lecherous eyes that pervade such a world lines the epidermis of Fargeat’s body horror, the monster of self-hatred engendered by toxic beauty standards makes up its spine. Demi Moore is Elizabeth Sparkle, once a movie star, now a daytime TV aerobics instructor, who is shown the exit door the very day she turns 50. The pressure to negate age pushes Elizabeth to try a back-alley treatment that can extend the expiration date Hollywood labels on women. When she injects a brat-green substance, an idealised younger self erupts from her spine, fully-formed and all set to pump it up in the shapely frame of Margaret Qualley.
The Faustian bargain comes with strings attached. The two must swap bodies every seven days. No exception. Calling herself Sue, the skinny-me treats the seven-day limit like a gentle suggestion instead of an unbreakable rule. Intoxicated by her youth and rising star, she starts to rob more and more of Elizabeth’s time. In a world where beauty equates life force, what this means for Elizabeth is her body deteriorates quite dramatically. Elizabeth retaliates by binge-eating in an attempt to transfer the excess body fat to Sue. “Remember: you are one!” a Substance customer service rep repeats on cue. Rest assured harmonious coexistence isn’t on the cards. Not when Elisabeth/Sue have internalised the competitive hostility of a cruel industry rather than built up defences against it. Not when one version is getting a lot more out of the arrangement than the other. While Sue enjoys the highs of fame, the only joy for Elizabeth, if any, at first comes from living second-hand through her replicated self. As Sue’s recklessness causes Elisabeth to age beyond recognition, the rivalry reaches its bitter end.

Moore and Qualley, in artful lockstep with Fargeat, enliven a story of a woman at war with herself. Moore was herself a star in the 1980s and 1990s until cast aside when she didn’t fit a certain mould. Hers was a career subject to all sorts of media scrutiny about her appearance and speculations about surgeries. So much of The Substance’s queasy power comes from Moore’s performance, fraught with the pressures of her own Hollywood journey. As Sue, Qualley has the rascally confidence of a woman hypnotised by her own desirability. A face that jolts, not soothes, as John Waters might say. As she dancercises in her fitness show, the camera pans over her nubile body as if hungering to suck the dewy youth out of her. Raffertie’s score makes the film throb and pulsate with electronic menace, as close-ups zero in on Sue’s butt, her lips, her smile, same as they do on Elizabeth’s wrinkles, her sagging skin and cellulite. Shots chop up their bodies into what is perceived as beautiful vs grotesque to remind us we are looking at the same woman at different stages of decay.
In fact, there is something more off-putting about the heightened montage of Sue’s seemingly flawless body than Elizabeth’s aging body. As with her debut feature Revenge, Fargeat co-opts the fetishizing gaze in order to confront it, plunging us into a precarious subjectivity to expose how it distorts how women see themselves. At the same time, she casts a warped mirror on an exploitative industry populated by slimy misogynists. Elisabeth’s network boss is a repulsive cartoon of a man winkingly named Harvey (Dennis Quaid) who is filmed through a fish-eye lens screaming sexist remarks and leering at young women. Icky close-ups of his drooling mouth slurping down shrimp put the nauseating id of the men who make up Hollywood on naked display.
In her 1970 essay It Hurts to Be Alive and Obsolete: The Aging Woman, Zoe Moss addressed a woman’s feelings of invisibility on reaching middle age as something men couldn’t begin to grasp. “What fat, forty-three and I dare to think I’m still a person?” the essay begins. “No. I am an invisible lump. I belong in a category labelled a priori without interest to anyone. I am not even expected to interest myself.” The Substance is a story about a woman fighting against her forced obsolescence through an imperfect channel. Sue’s increasing visibility comes at the cost of Elisabeth’s increasing invisibility. If the sight of Sue on billboards and TV invite self-disgust in Elisabeth, the portrait of Elisabeth in a leotard invites disgust in Sue, so much so she hides it away — like Dorian Gray — in a back room she builds in the bathroom, the same place where she also keeps the hibernating Elisabeth.
There is a scene in The Shining where Jack Nicholson finds an attractive young woman step out of the bath naked in Room 237. The two embrace and kiss before he looks in the mirror and sees the reflection of a decomposing old woman. Sickened over being duped into arousal, he steps back in horror. The Substance gives us the reverse shot. But don’t mistake its blunt-force power for Stanley Kubrick’s clinical rigour. To be fair, wielding a mallet instead of a scalpel works in Fargeat’s favour when tearing apart the cult of beauty and skewering the damaging version of self-care that can trigger paroxysms of self-hatred. Before its insistence through repetition threatens to clog its pores, a Grand Guignol climax boosts its radiance. Hours before her gig as host of the New Year’s Eve telecast, Sue finds her own body starting to change. Desperation drives her to use the substance to turn back the biological clock, only to end up birthing a monster of her own – a mangled mutation with ridges and outgrowths, a toothy breast and Elisabeth’s shell-shocked face on the backside that puts an exclamation mark at the end of a self-defeating pursuit of beauty.

Monstro Elisasue, as she is dubbed, is a manifestation of self-disgust metastasized, the culmination of a woman vampirised by her desire for perfection. When she gets dressed for the big event, it is meant to make us laugh despite ourselves. Glory and misery both seep from the pores of an outrageous climax. Fargeat opens the floodgates to arterial sprays on everyone in the audience because she makes us all complicit in the emotional and physical violence inflicted by the fetishization of youth and demonisation of ageing. Even if Sue more than Elisabeth seems divorced from her humanity, even if both seem more and more pathetic in their desire to stay young, Fargeat still leaves just enough room for sympathy to ensure we re-examine our instinct to laugh at their expense.
Physical beauty can be fickle and fleeting, same as fame. The film begins with an overhead shot charting Elizabeth’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame as it is cemented, venerated, cracked by time, dulled by the elements, stained by ketchup spilt and hurriedly wiped, slowly ignored and ultimately forgotten. Between the opening montage and the climactic bloodbath, flesh is subject to decay, mutilation and extreme distortion. But the film’s most harrowing scene is also its most grounded. Elizabeth suffers an excruciating spiral of body dysmorphia while getting ready for a date. On her way out, she ends up doubling back to the bathroom to redo her makeup because she sees Sue on the comically giant billboard outside her window and then sees her own warped reflection on a doorknob. Perceived imperfection sparks off insecurity, which leads to self-doubt, which aggravates to self-disgust, and on it goes until sinking into shame-encrusted despair. The frustration culminates in Elisabeth mangling her lipstick, pulling her hair out and manically scratching her face like she wants to tear it right off. The scene embodies the violence society inflicts on women and women on themselves to meet unattainable beauty standards. To be a woman, as far as the appearance economy is concerned, is to forever stay young, beautiful and pliable – the optimum conditions for exploitation.
Prahlad Srihari is a film and pop culture writer. He lives in Bangalore.
