“The Substance,” French director Coralie Fargeat’s second film after her breakout “Revenge” in 2017, refuses to give the viewer a break. It is truly merciless, in the way a horror film should be. Jarringly quick cuts present unsettling juxtapositions. Frequent uncomfortably intimate closeups, impactful and uniquely intense sound design, and a heavy and harsh soundtrack, all add to the movie’s nightmarish brutality. Where most movies would pull back, cut away, imply, “The Substance” shows all, in disgusting detail, to great effect. In a work about the extreme extent people will go to adhere towards impossible standards of beauty, to censor the true gore and horror of those efforts would do a disservice to the subject matter. 

The basic plot device of “The Substance” is simple. Inject yourself with The Substance, and your back splits open, allowing a young and flawless version of yourself to emerge out. As emphasized again and again by the shadowy voice representing whoever is selling the substance, you and this younger self are one human, one consciousness. Every seven days, through a blood transfusion, you must switch bodies, leaving the unused body lying unconscious, feeding through an IV tube. Each day you must “stabilize” by drawing fluid with a large syringe from the unconscious body and injecting it into your conscious body, or else you start bleeding and struggling to move. 

One-half of the movie’s protagonist, former Hollywood star Elizabeth Sparkle, has just been unceremoniously fired for the crime of growing older as a woman, so, at rock bottom, she calls a mysterious number and has injected herself with the substance in no time. As her younger self, she rebrands as Sue, and quickly rises to stardom, filling Elizabeth Sparkle’s place as the star of an incredibly sexual guided dance show. As she continues to revel in the pleasures and privileges of youth and beauty in Hollywood, however, seven days in her young body starts to feel all too short.  

As Elizabeth pushes the substance beyond its instructed usage, she enters a horrific death spiral, as its effects on the body intensify drastically, and her younger self and older self develop a relationship of mutual hatred, far from any sense of shared personhood. As previously mentioned, The Substance shows it all. We watch her back split open as her younger body crawls out, and we get up close and personal as she sews her other body back shut. We watch her pull her own teeth out and catch her ear as it falls off into her dress. We watch her organs spill out of her back, and we watch her slam her other body’s face against a mirror until she is unrecognizable. 

This movie is not for the squeamish. Some of the gore crosses the line into over-the-top as opposed to genuinely disgusting, although I think the movie pulls off both. Its final act drives it home as a modern body horror classic, as The Substance creates a physical form warped beyond recognition. The movie’s final hour is almost hilarious in its own twisted, imaginative absurdity. 

If not already clear, the movie is making a statement on our culture’s worship of youth and beauty, especially in women. As the younger and more beautiful version of herself, Elizabeth is showered with disingenuous but nonetheless addictive praise from fans, and from powerful men in Hollywood. Elizabeth has already experienced being thrown out and left behind like a piece of trash by the culture and her studio as soon as she is deemed beyond an acceptable age, yet she destroys herself desperately, unable to escape the toxic values she has fully internalized. 

Towards the movie’s end, the studio head who originally fired Elizabeth (saying “At 50, it just stops,” and unable to explain what “it” is when asked), is coated in what’s left of Elizabeth’s blood. Her blood, her pain, and her nightmarish existence after the substance, is on him and every other higher-up misogynist who perpetuates the culture she is trapped within and acts to remain beautiful for. 

A popular critique of the film is that despite its attempted vicious takedown of beauty standards around age, it still portrays a lot of horror and ugliness around imagery related to the physical effects of aging, and it still does make being young and hot look pretty fun. I would argue that because it juxtaposes the benefits of youth with enough brutal gore, the audience never forgets about the price being paid by Elizabeth to live as the youthful Sue, even as Sue reaps rewards from her age and appearance. In addition, a lot of the physical horror, although connected to imagery of physical aging, does not portray a process of natural aging, but something much more extreme. I can understand however, why some feel that the movie undermines its own critique. 

I loved The Substance outside of any messaging simply for its boldness, for the fact that I left the theater in a silent haze. I’m just glad there are studios who let directors make something this insane and graphic, because where is great art found but at the edges of what is acceptable?