Why this gross-out body horror about Hollywood beauty standards is 2024’s most divisive film

No one will forget this bizarre Demi Moore film about a special anti-aging treatment, but is it a feminist masterpiece or shallow, misogynistic and exploitative?

in EssenceIn French director Coralie Farge’s much-talked-about, lavishly stylized, bloody and bizarre horror film, Days of Love and Remembrance, a disembodied voice in a dystopian promotional video for a new cosmetics line asks, “Have you ever dreamed of a better version of yourself, younger, more beautiful, more perfect?” It’s a question that captures Farge’s intent, through the mediums of blood, thrills and sci-fi, to explore what happens when the desire to fit into a mold of beauty standards gets out of hand.

The film stars Elizabeth (Demi MooreWhen Elizabeth turns 50 and TV executives decide she has too many wrinkles to continue hosting, they tell her she’s being removed from her daytime show in favor of a younger, more beautiful star, enters the story of “The Substance,” a mysterious green serum for which a shady medical company is seeking test subjects. The serum promises to create a “younger, more beautiful” version of herself, and in a terrifying twist, Elizabeth’s replacement, Sue (Margaret Qualley), is born from Elizabeth’s spine.

While the premise may bring something new to the table, Fargeert’s choice of theme of the fear of aging is already well-trodden: think Margo Channing (Bette Davis) in All About Eve (1950), whose career is in danger of being usurped by her young assistant (Anne Baxter), or Veronica Ghent (Alice Krige), the vengeful aging Hollywood starlet in 2021’s She Will. The Substance has also been compared to Death Becomes Her (1992), in which an aging actress played by Meryl Streep takes a pill that grants her eternal youth.

But it’s not so much Fargé’s subject matter that has irked some critics, but the way he treats it. The Substance is Fargé’s sequel to Revenge (2017), another brazen, sleazy, bloody rape-revenge thriller, a gruesome subgenre notorious for its excessive portrayal of female suffering. One of his greatest works, I Spit on Your Grave (1978), was released at the height of the anti-rape movement in the US, when feminists began to speak out about sexual violence as a pervasive problem in society, but it is infamous for including a drawn-out, 10-minute rape scene that many consider to be nefarious and exploitative.

Farge’s take on the genre satirized the way men sexualize women by directing his camera’s gaze at the body of his protagonist, Jennifer (Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz). This objectifying gaze returns in Farge’s second film, zeroing in on Qualley’s scantily clad body. Farge’s debut aimed to subvert this gaze in its second half, in which a mud-covered Jennifer miraculously returns from the dead to exact revenge on her abuser, but Qualley’s continuous shots don’t have the same effect for some. “I thought it was overdone,” critic Hilary A. White told the BBC. “The camera really is staring right at her. I’m not sure the ironic distance is sufficiently established between the film’s message and the constant close-up body shots of its young star’s sweaty body.”

The line between subverting misogyny and concession to it is not an easy one to draw. Similar accusations have been levelled at Revenge, with Slate critic Lena Wilson arguing: Her Review It has been reviewed that “The film makes a valiant effort to subvert sexist formulas with the trappings and false female empowerment of French art cinema, but ultimately falls victim to its exploitative roots.” However, the film’s detractors did not make much of an impact on critical reception. Rotten Tomatoes At the time of publication.

Substance belongs to a group of genres known as “body horror,” featuring bodily mutations, mutilations, and copious amounts of blood, and its popularity is often credited to the Canadian king of horror. David CronenbergBut in recent years, female and non-binary filmmakers have become more and more titanium Directors like Julia Ducournau, Rose Glass, Amanda Nell Yu, and Laura Moss have pushed the genre in new directions, giving them the opportunity to explore themes of coming of age, female desire, and gender fluidity. Love bleedsreveling in patriarchal-shattering violence. Critic Katie Rife has described the movement as “a new wave of aggressive, stylized female genre directors” who play with “bold feminist tropes.”

“Substance is not a subtle film,” Rife said. “I personally find this kind of aggressive, hyper-stylization appealing, but I think some people don’t particularly like being bombarded with hyper-stylization.”

Rather than hammering home her message, this gruesome excess obscures Fargé’s intentions. One of the conditions for using the substance is that Elizabeth and Sue must switch places every seven days. As this “balance” begins to shift, the body horror kicks in. White explains: “The very real, serious issues that were so effectively satirized in the first hour are all eclipsed by the final 20 minutes of a shower of blood and guts – a monstrous body-horror artifact looming from every angle.”

Moreover, the film’s depiction of an aging woman sparked a decades-old debate about the portrayal of aging women on screen. There is a long lineage of films that are classified as “psycho-biddy”. Or “Hugsploitation.” Hollywood films often portray women deemed past their prime as grotesque, descending into madness and murder. Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950) uses the violent ex-Hollywood star Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) as an archetype, while subsequent horror films such as The Nanny (1965) and Straight Jacket (1964) demonize older women in more overtly gruesome ways. Rife believes there is irony in Substance’s hag-sploitation tropes, in which Moore’s body is dramatically altered through visual effects: “There is a great element of irony in the whole film. [Fargeat] During a Q&A at the Toronto International Film Festival, she said she told her actors that when their characters fall in love with themselves, they become monsters. And I think that’s a really important part of the point of the film.”

Perhaps the crux of the debate over The Substance is the film’s shallowness. Hannah Strong it is In her review of Little White Lies, she wrote that “By repeating old arguments about Hollywood’s obsession with beauty and fear of aging, The Substance becomes a sterile pastiche of Hollywood itself.” Rife believes the film raises a “serious and valid” point about the beauty industry and the titular substance, which is akin to mass-marketed drugs like Ozempic and Botox that are forced on women, but she doesn’t deny its shallowness. “As an expression of anger, [it’s lack of substance] “The film does absolutely no harm,” Reiff says, “and in terms of being a deeply cathartic experience, the film does absolutely no harm. And I think that’s its greatest value.”

The question many are asking is whether the film perpetuates the idea that beauty and youth are society’s most valuable assets while at the same time conceptually attacking those values. “Even though on the surface it’s glamorous and gorgeous and rich and opulent and luxurious, there’s a dark underside to it. It’s a matter of reconciliation,” White adds. “It’s a matter of finding that balance between the protagonist being seduced by it and at the same time opening up the curtain enough to reveal the monster behind it.”

The jury is still out on whether The Substance strikes this balance: viewers will have to decide for themselves whether it’s a triumph of feminist rage, pure entertainment, or simply a flop.

The Substance is now in cinemas in the US and UK