After her debut Revenge (2017), a feminist lens on rape-revenge, Coralie Fargeat writes and directs The Substance (2024), a body horror about femininity in entertainment. Here an aging movie star, Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), resorts to an underground drug to create a “superior” (and younger) duplicate, Sue (Margaret Qualley). Her consciousness inhabits Sue for seven days at a time, with fairytale rules spelled out in an infomercial format:

“Have you ever dreamt of a better version of yourself? Younger, more beautiful, more perfect. One single injection unlocks your DNA, starting a new cellular division, that will release another version of yourself. This is the Substance. You are the matrix. Everything comes from you. Everything is you. This is simply a better version of yourself. You just have to share. One week for one and one week for the other. A perfect balance of seven days each. The one and only thing not to forget: You. Are. One. You can’t escape from yourself.”

That premise expands into a nightmare exploration of how culturally reinforced estrangement distorts and, finally, mutilates women. The Thing, Lost Highway, The Fly, The Elephant Man, 2001: A Space Odyssey are among the long list of films Fargeat engages. Both the range of references and that the film is also about an actor, signpost the meta intent. There is a great deal of self-referentiality at play in a story anxiously troubled by layers of reality and irreality.

All of the performances, but especially from Moore and Qualley, are pitch perfect. Raffertie’s evocative, strange, occasionally poppy electronic soundtrack supports the film’s emotional variety. The audience is left feeling Raffertie’s thumpy bass in their veins, unsure of their own selves. Benjamin Kračun’s cinematography augments that, whether capturing sharp colour contrasts or zooming into an infinite darkness contained by a wallspace, Kračun’s uncanny camerawork textures Fargeat’s story.

So much of the sentiment and feeling is found in flavours of overwhelm and derealization, which is also at the heart of its horror, the constant touch of the unreal. None of the events feel as if they are happening or even could; you are lost in a dreamy, eerie, even psychedelic trance-state. This is a film that deliberately makes the audience doubt their grip by every means at the medium’s disposal.

Dennis Quaid plays Harvey, Sue’s and Sparkle’s agent, and while a clear antagonist, he also subtly provides the story’s momentum. Towards the conclusion Harvey boldly claims to have “made Sue”, but the statement applies as much to Sparkle. As the representative of Hollywood’s gendered interests, he is critical to understanding Sue and Sparkle’s relationship to herself and how the form of self-hatred that moves the split-protagonist is external, namely misogyny.

Harvey simply is misogyny writ large, not the angry, directly violent kind, but the misogyny that runs through the detached structures of neoliberal capitalism and the irreal worlds it generates and sustains. No less violent, but painfully indirect. This force is the unnamed trauma around which everything spins. That is, a disorientating pseudo-reality, partly contained in the (false) idea of Sue and Sparkle as a single stable self, and the eternal, marketable feminine youth their creation and abuse conjures and justifies.

However, the separation between them is not the only way the film flirts with mirroring. There’s this constant environmental division between a clean, glossy, pretend world and a visceral, dirty, hungry, “human” substrata with the audience poised between. The way Sue accesses a pickup facility for the drug under a half-open door evokes a move from the threadbare “real” world to the Americana confection. Likewise, scenes of Harvey eating prawns or taking a piss at the start achieve the same.

At the conclusion, Sparkle (having apparently lost Sue in a botched attempt to overcome the rules that bind her transformations and splits) attempts to create artifice from artifice, from herself, and it is here that the “real” most insistently reasserts. That is when the body horror becomes most distorted but also most tragically pastiche.

Here, however, the real is again recaptured as spectacle. In the distorted world of the text, there is no overcoming the deposits of pseudo-reality. Now the spectacle, especially its cruelty, is no longer a hidden, intimate dread but takes its cues from the most voyeuristic language of cinema, the freak show. Freaks (1932) is an obvious touchstone, too, a story that also involves punishing a woman with mutilation.

Baudrillard is the philosopher who most clearly suggests himself for any reading of this film, especially the idea of creating artifice from artifice. He is famous for philosophically expanding on the notion of simulacra (a simulation of something that does not exist) and the idea that our maps of the world, of the real, have replaced a decaying reality, that the “desert of the real” (to use the phrase The Matrix film’s take from this French thinker) has decayed beneath our representations of it.

While there are no direct links made to the work of JG Ballard, the author Baudrillard himself drew on most, the thematic overlap is obvious. That is, the creative, apocalyptic drives of the rich and aspirational, the reconstructions of the world as simulacra, the emphasis on libidinal performance. The Substance is concerned with a world in which fictions reign, and we can no longer find the points these connect back to anything coherent.

A moment that stands out is the oddly celebratory undertone to when Sue prepares herself for her final performance. This is absolutely Ballard through the lens of Baudrillard, especially his readings of Ballard’s novel Crash (1973). Self-destruction is being depicted, but not as a turning inward but as a public and even liberatory act. Similarly, earlier, when Sparkle is sucking the meat from chicken bones she mirrors the body horror metamorphosis of consumption.

Food is often used by Fargeat, and here conjures an aspect of the relationship between the matrix and the simulation, which is purpose—the layer of alienation apparent when Sparkle leaves the industry, departs from her life’s work and attempts to replace that meaning (or numb the need for it) with the most base consumption. We witness the grief, anger and unmoorednes of having been ousted and that loss of power and ownership expressing itself in appetite. Harvey’s leaving gift to Sparkle underscores this, a cookbook.

The film also plays with the motif of the egg in the operations of the substance, with whiteness against yellow often making appearances. Sue and Sparkle are situated as food, as a consumptive enjoyment for others, explicitly men. Indeed, when Sue becomes a consumer, it is always gorging, and again expressly filthy. It is also always self-directed. Men consume women, women consume themselves. The idea of Sue as someone who eats is also connected to her eventual, horrific fate.

As mentioned, throughout the film there is a building dissociation, derealization, unreality—in essence, alienation. The language of the film curling around those ideas, and the sleek, wet, gross pupil-splitting close-up needles and stitches that conclude the moments of the characters splitting, with bodies giving way to puking breasts and fountains of blood.

Ultimately, echoing Baudrillard’s idea of the real withering, the idealised copy destroys the matrix, and when its lack of substance in turn leads to its destruction, its own simulacra is a parodic multiform which places its only attachment to the matrix on its back, trapped and screaming. Moreover, when the simulacra collapses the final remaining elements of the matrix outlive it.

The subtext of that, if we frame the matrix and simulation in closer parallel—if they are the same person at work and home, rather than before and after retirement—is then about the experience of not having control of your image where your image is the product of your labour, contrasting the power of destroying that image through consumption rather than having it taken from you by the simulation.

This is the drive to self-destruction in alienation, the inciting action of the film in that moment is Sue smashing her portrait (evoking another great work about corruption and artifice, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray) after walking into her apartment.

The final image leaves no doubt to the film’s message. Its ideas are not subtle, any more than are the fictions and myths from which Fargeat is critically borrowing. We go back to the beginning, to the Walk of Fame on Hollywood Boulevard where we witnessed one of the iconic five-pointed terrazzo-and-brass stars being embedded on the pavement with Sparkle’s name emblazoned there in supposed immortality. Only in the meantime it has become aged and cracked. It has also diminished.

The simulacra star represents her celebrity. So it is here, gazing at the “real” heavenly stars, having broken the rules and rendered herself a “grotesque” with all of the body-fascism that word has come to imply, where Sue dissolves and is literally cleaned away. The raw surrealism of the final performance is a particular accomplishment.

We watch the fairytale dressing up, the flat-faced pretence, the hallucinated praise creating the juxtaposition for the raw noise of the audience’s hate and disgust and how that taps into the overwhelm and shock of rejection that then provides the contrast and catharsis for a satisfying resolution, the full circle and the letting go and the shot-to-shot of the star and the stars.

From a transfeminine perspective, it is hard not to relate to how the film plays with constructions of femininity, especially to be consumed by men, as something supposed to be eternally young and sexually available. The film is not expressly about transgender experiences, but it perhaps speaks as much or more to transfeminine themes as the more expressly trans films of 2024 (both The People’s Joker or I Saw the TV Glow).

In The People’s Joker metatextuality is contained in making a trans allegory out of the DC Batman mythos, playing on the online, hyper-ironic detachment of so much trans culture. I Saw the TV Glow also examines the way often parasocial, substitutional relationships to media are used to navigate queer time, grief and transition. There are echoes of these ideas in The Substance, too, if from a broader point of view.

Time, the fear of it, the sense of time as commodity, time as loss, plays into all three (especially TV Glows and The Substance). Cultural mediations, and how these are related in points of tension and conversation between audiences, artists and performers are again commonalities. Femininity, trans and cis, is always intruded upon by the cultural spheres from which it also takes. Agency and domination are dialectically bound up.

The Substance engages the horrors inflicted on women universally. It insists on sharing this horror, demands on conveying it in all of its familiar strangeness, all of its weirdness, the felt violences that tear and reconfigure flesh to meet disabelist, cisnormative, impossibly idealised confections of a womanhood that has no content beneath the image.

But for those of us whose bodies are more routinely violated by imposed expectations of femininity (a group that extends beyond the transfeminine), it potentially speaks also to more specific fears and traumas, too. That The Substance has both this great and particular a scope places it among the best film’s of last year. Fargeat has made a movie that invites a great many readings, and it deserves attention.

Art Book Review Books Capitalism China Climate Emergency Conservative Government EcoSocialism Elections Fascism Film Film Review France Gaza Imperialism Israel Keir Starmer Labour Party Marxism Palestine pandemic Protest Russia Solidarity Trade Unionism Ukraine United States of America War