In this installment of MTC Oscar Series, Sean M. Donovan, Thomas Higgins, and Molly Keran offer their thoughts on Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, a body horror film about an aging actress who takes a mysterious drug that promises to create a younger, more perfect version of herself, starring Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley.
Sean M. Donovan: After Julia Ducournau’s Titane won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman was embraced by the Academy Awards (winning Best Original Screenplay), there was reason to believe “feminist horror,” broadly conceived, had arrived as a mainstream-friendly subgenre, part of the general notoriety of socially-conscious horror (and the similar, often overlapping designation of “prestige” or “elevated” horror). Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance comes along as a confirmation, loudly proclaiming its rage against media industry sexism and ageism in the tale of a fading star Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) who undergoes a mysterious chemical transformation to create a younger alter ego Sue (Margaret Qualley) who embodies the patriarchal standard of a perfection she’s lost. Naturally, gifts from the supernatural rarely come without strings attached, and Elisabeth and Sue’s inability to maintain the fragile balance expected of their give-and-take management of one body leads to disaster in extravagant, wonderfully bloody spectacle.
The Substance appears to play the role of the final absorption of feminist body horror critique into a system of entertainment capitalism prone to shy away from anything more than cosmetic changes to its material political structure. And in many ways, it does. Yet, watching The Substance, I am invigorated by the vitality of blood-and-guts theatricality and go-for-broke storytelling that joyfully seizes upon excess and a proud, tactical stupidity. Fargeat’s film frequently feels like a manic blur of machine learning, eating, and regurgitating a history’s worth of entertainment industry sexism—from Jane Fonda workout videos to Vertigo to millennial fashion—arranging the pieces in a gnarly haze spurred on more by momentum than logic.
The blunt obviousness of its messaging, which initially feels like a flaw, ultimately reveals itself as the film’s ultimate weapon, reflecting back the same patriarchal stupidity that created it in a mischievous sneer. Along the way, the bright playfulness of the film’s design work is a dream. I’m particularly enchanted by the film’s broadly expressionist spaces: Elisabeth’s apartment is a blue velvet tomb, with enormous windows hemmed in by wall-to-wall carpeting, Lynchian in its alienating disquiet, overlooking a view of Los Angeles as illogical and unlikely as the dreams the city thrives upon.
Unlike some other tour-de-force showcases horror has recently provided for phenomenally talented women (Toni Collette in Hereditary and Lupita Nyong’o in Us come to mind) where the films house five-alarm supernovas of acting, The Substance primarily asks Moore to underplay relative to the gonzo circus surrounding her. This she does quite well, making a vulnerable mirror scene an important sanctum of sincerity in the film’s madness. She’s a bit shakier in the highwire comedy bits, but the mix of energies weirdly works to the film’s crude, playful advantage.
Many films successfully cultivate an ambivalent relationship with the chains of commercial distribution and buzz that permit artistic-aspiring cinema to survive. Moore’s industry pragmatism versus the wild, ungovernable glee of Fargeat’s gore-feminism might be the primary site of that conflict. Watching Moore campaign for an Oscar—one she might well win—has been fascinating. Moore opines in an actress roundtable for The Los Angeles Times that what Elisabeth really needed was the support of other women to feel validated, and had she only had that, she might have achieved the perfect Hollywood dream she and the other stunning, beautifully dressed actresses around the table have. Somewhere, Monstro Elisasue is vomiting up a severed nipple in response.
Thomas Higgins: If you told me six months ago that Demi Moore was to star in a film about an aging actress who uses a mysterious drug to turn into a younger, more vivacious version of herself, and if I walked away from that conversation without bothering to ask you any questions or to look up the trailer, I probably would have chalked The Substance up to some kind of glib, Freaky Friday-esque take on the pressures of feminine beauty standards and toxic celebrity culture.
I would not, I admit, have imagined a film so vividly horrific that I would spend much of it covering my eyes or groaning in pain on my living room couch. Nor would I imagine that somehow, deep in my psyche, something about a close-up of Dennis Quaid slobbering as he devours a bowl of shrimp would be more difficult to watch than a person’s back peeling open so that a slimy, pale, ever-so-slightly smaller person could crawl out of it and live for a week on a mysterious goop while rocketing to fame as a glamorous, seductive aerobics instructor. Maybe I’m naive or haven’t seen enough Cronenbergian body horror, but at least I’m willing to admit that nothing, and I mean nothing, could have prepared me for Coralie Fargeat’s second film.
I want to focus on the aforementioned scene, in which Quaid’s character, the utterly nauseating producer Harvey, speaks to Moore’s Elisabeth Sparkle. As he talks through a mouthful of pulpy, half-chewed shrimp about her age and the vicissitudes of show business, he says: “People always ask for something new. It’s inevitable.” Although Harvey is referring to Elisabeth’s age as he remorselessly fires her to find a younger replacement to parasitize, the line resonates as a metatextual reference to the film’s groundbreaking approach to form. It could easily refer to the artist who responds to stagnation and sameness with experimentation, the need to “make it new” as the Modernists once did. Much of the film’s novelty can be found in its monstrousness, how it blends genres like satire and horror, how it glistens and sparkles with latex and glitter and gold while simultaneously oozing with blood, sweat, and pus. Perhaps the avant-garde is inherently monstrous—there should, of course, have been nothing like it before, nothing to prepare us for the shock of its emergence.
In the film’s final scene, as Margaret Qualley’s character, the once lovely Sue, now morphed into a misshapen mutant, attempts to perform her aerobics routine for a live audience, there’s something tender and beautiful about her eagerness to continue as though nothing had happened to her. You can almost believe that this New Year’s Eve broadcast will usher in something totally new, that the audience will cast off their preconceptions of feminine beauty to accept her for who she’s become. But Fargeat knows to give her audience something more difficult to stomach. It is, after all, what we asked for.
Molly Keran: When Coralie Fargeat’s delightfully gross body horror film The Substance was nominated in the “Best Picture (Comedy or Musical)” category at the Golden Globes, scores of outraged viewers took to the internet to register their displeasure, all echoing the same refrain: “The Substance is not a comedy!” Although I hadn’t, at that point, seen the movie yet myself, it was a complaint I nevertheless felt sympathetic toward. Award shows have a long history of not taking horror seriously as a genre, and the world in general has a long history of not taking women, or their stories, seriously.
Except, as I learned when I finally sat down to watch it, The Substance is definitely a comedy—no matter how many well-meaning Bluesky users might try to claim otherwise.
I won’t pretend that there’s no darkness in The Substance’s satire of beauty and aging, but what makes the movie so good is that it knowingly, winkingly, embraces its own “B movie” DNA. It’s a Creature Feature, full of practical effects and prosthetics, and scenes designed to turn your stomach and make you laugh at the same time. At first, the humor might not be entirely obvious, though the fact that Demi Moore plays a fifty-year-old woman named Elisabeth Sparkle ought to be a clue to the film’s tone. But by the time we get a disorienting, grotesque close-up of the aptly-named exec Harvey (Dennis Quaid) chomping down on a pile of shrimp while telling a conventionally gorgeous woman that she’s no longer fuckable, you should be laughing at the absurdity at least a little.
One of the funniest scenes comes when Elisabeth—now aged and gnarled, looking like a storybook hag in her filthy robe and messy hair—watches her younger, hotter alter ego Sue (Margaret Qualley) charm a talk show host. When Sue is asked about her beauty secret, Elisabeth’s reaction is to pull her robe open and shake her breasts at the TV screen, snarling, “Tell them who your little beauty secret is!” Moore’s performance is earnest but thrillingly unhinged, so that we recognize both the humor and the sadness in the fact that despite Elisabeth’s bitterness, she is ultimately ready to destroy herself to preserve Sue: the part of herself that she loathes and adores.
Of course, in the end, Sue too feels she must destroy herself to become even more perfect, and decides to use THE SUBSTANCE (by the way: the vague names of the components, including ACTIVATOR and STABILIZER, in all caps and sans serif font get funnier every time I see them, looking more and more like minimalist text art sold at Ikea). What results is a tragicomic final act, a gory, excessive, unforgettable sequence in which Monstro Elisasue—at last, the Featured Creature!—stands onstage as the star of the New Year’s Eve show, surrounded by half-naked showgirls, while various audience members leap to their feet, scream, point, and shout: “A monster!” When Monstro Elisasue is wounded, geysers of blood erupt from her body, drenching the audience members, the dancers, and the generic old white men who comprise the board. It’s deranged, it’s disgusting, it’s incredibly fun to watch.
In the last moments, Elisabeth’s face—all that remains of her—oozes away to collapse atop her Hollywood Walk of Fame Star, smiling as she dissolves into, well, goo. And you’re telling me I’m not supposed to laugh?.
Sean M. Donovan is a critic and scholar of LGBTQ media cultures with a PhD in Film, Television, & Media Studies from the University of Michigan. He is currently at work on a book on queer media and nostalgia.
Thomas Higgins is a poet and critic pursuing an MFA in creative writing at The New School whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Magpie Zine, The Inquisitive Eater, The Adroit Journal, Hoxie Gorge Review, the minnesota review, and elsewhere. He has two cats named Manny and Louie and talks to them more than he’d care to admit.
Molly Keran recently earned her PhD in English Language and Literature from the University of Michigan, where she wrote a dissertation about the intersections of popular culture, genre, and gender. When she’s not at her day job, you can usually find her reading a romance novel with her cat Willow snoring on her lap.
In the month of February, MTC is featuring writing on this awards season’s contenders. We asked writers, scholars, and cinephiles for their takes on award hopefuls. By placing multiple short reviews in conversation, we hope to open up critical conversation on these films, as each writer highlights what they think is interesting (or excellent, or horrible) about the film.