The Substance‘s Stale Satire Offers a Clumsy Feminist Critique

The French writer/director Coralie Fargeat could not have picked a more ironic title for her anti-feminist body horror failure than The Substance, as the film is substantial from neither a genre perspective nor a thematic one. Its satire is as fresh as a dead body rotting in a basement. An overuse of stale horror conventions in an already predictable plot—combined with decades-old, thoroughly unchallenging ideas about women’s relationships to their bodies—leads to a film that claims to support its protagonist, while treating her like the butt of the joke at every turn.

I had to triple check to make sure that The Substance was actually meant to critique our current moment, and was not in fact a period piece from last century, since the protagonist Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) is an aging actress whose distinguished career has led her to become the star of “Sparkle Your Life,” an aerobics program on television in Los Angeles. Have any Oscar-winning actresses gone on to star in aerobics television with any lasting audience impact since Jane Fonda in the 1980s? Nowadays, most Americans watch their exercise content on the internet. Unfortunately, social media and the internet do not exist at all in the world of The Substance, which is completely wrongheaded in a film meant to explore the insecurity of the modern woman.

On her 50th birthday, Elisabeth is fired from her job by her misogynist boss Harvey (Dennis Quaid), a surface-level reference to the #MeToo-inspiring rapist, because of her age. “It stops at fifty,” he tells her over the kind of expensive, messy lunch that executives love. 

“What stops at fifty?” Elisabeth asks, deadpan, in her most interesting line of dialogue and the only time during The Substance that she will resist the system which has made her hate herself for so long. Elisabeth can’t deny that she is getting older; she spends a lot of time staring at her “sagging” body in the mirror, hating herself. This is the section in which Fargeat wants us to know that Elisabeth is old and decrepit, by showing us many shots of her aging body. 

Fargeat leads us to believe that the entertainment business is exploiting Elisabeth, but she has no interest in questioning Elisabeth’s complicity in her own “exploitation,” because that would mean questioning what Elisabeth gets out of this arrangement and her entire raison d’être (adoration), and therefore the collapse of the film’s logic.

After a sudden car crash that is clumsily shoehorned into the narrative to get Elisabeth in the hospital, she meets a young male nurse with glowing blue eyes who introduces her to “The Substance,” a miracle drug that will turn her into a younger, more beautiful, more perfect version of herself. Elisabeth injects herself with the drug and subsequently gives birth through her spine to Sue (Margaret Qualley), who paradoxically embodies both the as-advertised younger, better version of Elisabeth, and Elisabeth’s self-hatred personified, an idea that would have been compelling had Fargeat not wasted so much screen time proving to us that yes, Margaret Qualley’s young, nubile body is in fact titillating. I will not deny that Margaret Qualley is great to look at, but Fargeat undermines her film’s satirical point by catering to the same male gaze that the script claims to despise so deeply. Fargeat isn’t quite sure what she wants to say about women’s relationships to their body and images of their body, so she falls back on simply showing us that Margaret Qualley is hot.

Elisabeth and Sue are one soul occupying two forms, and must switch bodies every seven days, while the other body lays unused in the bathroom, hooked up to an IV of mysterious fluid. It doesn’t take long for Sue to charm the television executives and take Elisabeth’s old job starring in an aerobics show, now renamed “Pump It Up.” Although they are supposedly one soul, Elisabeth’s and Sue’s interests are opposite; Sue soon takes over, staying sentient longer than her allotted seven days, draining Elisabeth’s life force.

I don’t need to imagine an America where a shady scientific marvel gives people the option to unsafely de-age themselves without first fully explaining the medical risks. I already live as a woman in an America where our insecurities sow major profits for the big pharma companies behind Botox, Ozempic and whatever nightmare they have in store for us next.

An actually terrifying angle on The Substance, which Fargeat can’t fathom inside her script’s narrow imagination, is that if “The Substance” were real, hundreds of thousands of Americans, male, female and everyone else, would stand in line for hours in the pouring rain to shell out for it, even once proven dangerous. Elisabeth may be an exceptionally wealthy and famous person, but she’s not alone in her insecurities about her age or her body changing. The Substance would lead you to believe that Elisabeth is alone and strange in her insecurity; she has no friends or family to confide in, no one around her at any point. Neither does she ever share her new knowledge of “The Substance” with any of the television executives to curry favor with them, who might in turn try to exploit it themselves. The Substance doesn’t take any stance on this material aside from showing us that attractive women like Sue might be cocky while they’re young, but they’ll soon turn into withered old bags like Elisabeth, and won’t they be sorry once that happens?

In the absence of character nuance or development, Elisabeth and Sue become representative of all women, old and young. The idea that only women are subjected to fearing age is as antiquated as the concept of aerobics television, and to further insinuate that our insecurities are fully our fault by making Elisabeth the ultimate punchline is insulting. It’s difficult to go into too much detail about this punchline without spoiling the whole film, but imagine if Carrie White were humiliated at the prom and then didn’t have the ability to exact any meaningful revenge. That’s how I felt leaving The Substance.

By fully buying into this dichotomy of “old equals ugly” and “young equals hot,” and “hot equals worthy of respect” without offering even the slightest patriarchal critique, The Substance’s larger message loses all feminist credibility. And, as a film whose success relies on selling you its “feminist” ideas, The Substance’s house of cards collapses fairly easily.

Director: Coralie Fargeat
Writer: Coralie Fargeat
Starring: Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, Dennis Quaid
Release Date: September 20, 2024

Brooklyn-based film writer Katarina Docalovich was raised in an independent video store and never really left. Her passions include sipping lime seltzer, trying on perfume and spending hours theorizing about Survivor. You can find her scattered thoughts as well as her writing on Twitter.