The Substance (dir. Coralie Fargeat, 2024)

We Want to Be Opposite

*This essay contains discussions of eating disorders which some readers may find triggering.

Cinema is obsessed with mirrors. In her comedy special Cinnamon in the Wind, Kate Berlant describes the “building blocks of cinema” as a cavewoman giddily “spanking the river,” watching her image grow distorted by the ripples. Name your favorite movie, and I guarantee you there’s a scene where the protagonist considers their face reflected by water or glass. French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan credits an entire developmental stage to the miroir; there comes a period in a toddler’s life when they see themselves in a mirror and develop a conception of themselves as an “I.” Lacan classifies this moment as “the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image.” At some point in our infancy, we recognize our bodies as carriers for what we previously believed, without words, was just “being alive.” Suddenly, we have a container, and that container can produce consequences. We learn from our families and dominant cultures whether or not our flesh is acceptable based on its texture, color, circumference, and so on. Consequently, we twist and ferment our personalities to compensate for our contours. Some of us get funny, some of us get mean. All of us, I would argue, get obsessive.

This obsession over acceptable and unacceptable flesh takes center stage in Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (2024). On her 50th birthday, the once-beloved Hollywood starlet Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) gets fired from her job hosting a Jane Fonda-esque aerobics program. The revolting, misogynistic, unsubtly named network executive, Harvey (Dennis Quaid), thinks Sparkle is well past her prime, and he lets her go over a glitzy lunch where he loudly sucks on massive shrimp, masticating them right into the fish-eye lens.

After Elisabeth loses her job, she survives a car crash and receives a note of mysterious recruitment from a ghoulishly smooth nurse for “The Substance,” an injection that promises to “hack” one’s DNA and produce a version of you that is “younger, more beautiful, more perfect.” Elisabeth calls the hotline and tells the gruff yet calm voice that she wishes to enroll. She receives a kit replete with needles, nutrient packets, and a series of tubes that will transfer her life force between her “old” and “new” body. The package reminds her in big, bold letters: “REMEMBER YOU ARE ONE.”

Elisabeth injects herself with the substance, promptly collapses, and births, out of her spine, Sue (Margaret Qualley). Sue tenderly sews up the now unconscious Elisabeth’s massive, yonic gash in her back and injects the week’s nutrients pack into her old self. Sue observes her body in the mirror, slowly appreciating her perkier breasts, slim waist, and the adorable gap between her front teeth. The camera both exploits and lionizes Qualley’s body, making the viewer complicit in the ogling and privileging of her smooth, firm skin.

When Sue takes over Elisabeth’s spot as the host of the workout program, the studio modernizes the production value. The letters are bigger, the floors are shinier, and the dancers are sluttier. Through swooping pans and nauseating close-ups, Fargeat smashes us into Sue’s unblighted, glistening flesh. Fargeat seems to be taunting us: “This is what you want, right?”

The Substance

The rules of The Substance are clear: you must spend one week in the old self and one week in the new. Any failure to switch between the bodies on schedule causes permanent damage to the unactivated self. When Sue runs the clock an extra day on Elisabeth’s spinal fluid, Elisabeth wakes up with a distorted crone finger. Fargeat lingers on the exaggerated, discolored, cartoonishly arthritic appendage in one of many shots that take stock of our protagonists’ bodies. In poetry and film, a blazon is a formal move in which a speaker portrays an object of desire by itemizing its parts. This commonly takes the form of panning up from a woman’s feet to her head. In The Substance, Fargeat unleashes a litany of blazons and contreblazons that treat Elisabeth and Sue’s bodies like inventories of limbs. As Sue continues to abuse the one-week turnover policy, Elisabeth deteriorates into a heinous crone, and viewers can enjoy watching Demi Moore deliver an Oscar-worthy performance in extreme witch prosthetics.

Sue and Elisabeth war over their glitzy apartment as their lives progress in opposite directions. As Sue receives notoriety and fame for her looks and pluck, Elisabeth deteriorates under Sue’s abuse. The bulging injection site on Elisabeth’s spine crusts over with pus as Sue repeatedly stabs it to extract more life force. When Sue runs out of Elisabeth’s juice, Sue’s body also begins to fail. In a desperate grab to stay alive and host the glamorous New Year’s Eve show, Sue injects herself with The Substance. The Susbtance’s packaging strictly forbids this double use, but Sue cannot accept the time limit of her perfection. After this unsanctioned second injection, a horrifying, multi-limbed, two-faced monster emerges from Sue’s spine. Named Monstro Elisasue, this debauched assemblage of SFX makeup adjusts her hair and makeup,  pathetically dons Sue’s frilly blue dress, and stomps to the theater. 

The Substance overflows with sumptuous body horror, never shying away from fluids, flaking skin, open wounds, and protruding lumps of flesh. This gleeful embrace of gore reaches extreme heights and catapults the film into the realm of the hilarious. On some level, all body horror is camp, given that it exaggerates our natural concerns about our bodies’ fragility, but The Substance forces the scalpel back on the viewer. While the Saw franchise wants you to be terrified of what can be done to the human body by a vigilante puppet, The Substance wants you to be terrified of what the human body can do to itself. Like any genre-specific storytelling tool, gore has value in and of itself, but gore tells a more nuanced story when placed against its opposites: brightness, cleanliness, and softness. Cinematographer Benjamin Kračun describes his “texture and camera choices” in The Substance as “romantic,” and the more grueling shots—like Elisabeth giving birth to Sue through her spine—are achieved through a precise dance of multiple lenses. Kračun’s dexterous photography combined with Stanislas Reydellet’s superlative production design creates an obsessively clean container that allows the blood and viscera to sing.

Despite what its critics would argue, The Substance is not a film that uses gore for gore’s sake. Fargeat is in on her own joke, and Sue’s cruel treatment of Elisabeth’s flesh is a dark punchline the movie can’t help but tell repeatedly until you laugh out of discomfort. When Sue shrieks “CONTROL YOURSELF” into the camera, she’s not just reprimanding her less-perfect half. At that moment, Fargeat makes us swallow our culture’s grossly individualistic habit of blaming difference on the different. The prescription is always, either through surgical intervention, supplements, or pharmaceuticals, to control yourself. If you’re overweight, control yourself. If you’re balding, control yourself. If your buccal fat makes you ineligible for love, simply control yourself.

These control fantasies run deep in our consciousness; we’d like to believe that our bodies will obey our restrictions, that they won’t betray us, and that our quest for homogeneity is moral. In order to maintain the $1.8 trillion global wellness market, we have to believe that what we see in the mirror is not only “not good enough” but eminently “fixable.” Many pharmaceutical corporations, cosmetic brands, and advertising agencies depend on our self-hatred to make their bottom line. Elisabeth signs up for The Substance without any research because whatever the implicit costs are, it’s worth it.

Everyone has a different price they’d be willing to pay for perfection, and in The Substance, Elisabeth trades away the very body she would seek to perfect. Like Fargeat, Aaron Schimberg agitates our understandings of “beauty” and “ugliness” in his film A Different Man (2024), but the film’s hero sacrifices his identity—not his body—to fit into his new, “more perfect” face. A Different Man tells the story of Edward Lemuel (Sebastian Stan), a lonely, aspiring actor with neurofibromatosis, a condition in which non-cancerous tumors grow over various parts of the nervous system. In Edward’s case, these tumors appear mostly on his face, and his facial disfigurement isolates him from a public that cruelly fears his appearance. As he begins to fall for Ingrid Vold (Renate Reinsve), his eccentric playwright neighbor, Edward becomes aware of an experimental injection (sense a theme here?) that will cure him of his neurofibromatosis, giving him a new face. The injection results in the wild success of looking like movie star Sebastian Stan, and Edward renames himself “Guy.” Posing as a friend of Edward’s, Guy tells Ingrid that Edward has killed himself.

A Different Man (dir. Aaron Schimberg, 2024)

Some time later, Guy lives a charmed life as a successful realtor with finesse and confidence. He learns that Ingrid has written a play named Edward about her friendship with her disfigured neighbor who committed suicide. Guy becomes doggedly determined to play himself. He lands the titular role in Ingrid’s play, but Ingrid is unsure whether or not they should use prosthetics (a cheeky, self-aware rebuke to Schimberg’s own use of prosthetics on Stan).

With Reinsve’s magnetic and tilted performance of Ingrid, Schimberg skillfully flips the manic-pixie-dream girl on her head. Ingrid begins the film as a mere object of Edward’s desire; in a lesser film, she would deliver him from his destitution with her kindness and munificence. But in Schimberg’s razor-sharp screenplay, Ingrid too transforms. Once she believes that Edward has killed himself, Ingrid reveals herself to be a self-serving playwright with a deep streak of narcissism and lofty career aspirations. As Guy and Ingrid begin hooking up, her self-serving cruelty corrodes at Guy’s newfound confidence, but he cannot separate himself from her, the woman he so desperately wanted when he was Edward. Achieving this romance with Ingrid goes from being Edward’s greatest wish to Guy’s deepest torture, and as a fellow playwright, I couldn’t help but feel reflected—accurately if unkindly—by Ingrid’s insistence that Edward’s story was hers to tell simply because she was proximal to it.

A Different Man

As they’re rehearsing the play, Ingrid and Guy meet Oswald, a man with a facial disfigurement played by Adam Pearson, an actor who has neurofibromatosis. Oswald is charming, affable, and in love with life. Oswald becomes a consultant on Ingrid’s play, and his happy-go-lucky approach to the world enrages Guy, who previously believed that his facial disfigurement was the main hurdle keeping him from success and happiness. Oswald becomes a mirror of Guy, reminding him of his relational shortcomings and shitty attitude. Alexandra Schwartz and Naomi Fry fairly criticize the movie for disregarding the role that discrimination plays in the creation of Guy’s negative outlook. Still, Schimberg is an adept satirist who spends much of the movie nodding at the impossibility of making perfect art about imperfect bodies.

Where A Different Man succeeds in subtlety, The Substance succeeds in the opposite. Both films are willing to get nasty, but they do so in opposite ways. The main moment of gore in A Different Man shows Sebastian Stan peeling off his prosthetics; while in The Substance, the exaggerated monster in the final act is an orgy of prosthesis. The peeling away of artificiality in A Different Man and the full-on reverie of monster cosmetics in The Substance are mirror images of each other, both asking us to confront the consequences of our desire to be perfect, to be anything other than what we are. It’s not just that we want a better version of what we already have—we want a whole new face, a whole new body. The Substance and A Different Man tilt the mirror towards us, askew and fractured, and mock our desire to be opposite.

Both films, savoring their use of mirror shots and body horror, draw on one of film and literature’s favorite tropes: the doppelganger. Coming from German, doppelgänger translates directly to “double walker,” implying that the terror of the doppelganger comes not only from the doppelganger’s uncanny similarity to the original but also from its agency and ability to move. A mere image of our opposite is not as scary (or enticing) as a living, breathing opposite self with an agenda. Dr. Jekyll has his Mr. Hyde, Elisabeth has her Sue, and Guy has his Oswald.

In her landmark memoir-meets-essay collection, Doppelganger, Naomi Klein elucidates her own experience of having an unwanted sibling from the mirror world. Klein, an anti-capitalist literary superstar, begins to be frequently mistaken for right-wing, conspiracy-pushing looney toon Naomi Wolf. As the COVID-19 pandemic sends the world into disarray, Klein begins receiving harsh, unending criticism online for things she never said, simply because the good people of the internet confuse the two Naomi’s. This inspires Klein to go down a rabbit hole of Wolf’s attacks on vaccines, proliferation of conspiracy theories, and other unsubstantiated dribble touted on Steve Bannon’s podcast. Klein stares her doppelganger conundrum in the eyes and uses it as a springboard to discuss the disintegration of our Western democracies into madcap fascism, anti-science huckster-dom, and conspiracy-addled foolery.

Klein proposes that these deleterious forces spring from “the mirror world,” a place where vaccines hurt instead of heal, where fascists rescue instead of destroy, and where empiricism is fiction instead of fact. “Each side,” writes Klein, is guilty of “defining itself against the other.” Put differently, a doppelganger problem is inherently hostile. It’s not enough that Sue and Elisabeth both exist; one must emerge victorious. For Edward to become Guy, Guy must fictionalize Edward’s suicide. Even though  Klein’s doppelganger—the frazzled, furious Wolf—is not an enviable, desirous double (like Sue or Guy), Klein cannot look away from Other Naomi. Her doppelganger both terrifies and enraptures her, and it is from this obsession that she can tease out the terrifying way our collective psyche is splitting into warring opposites. Klein makes a strong case for why this polarization should concern us: “When reality starts doubling, refracting off itself, it often means that something important is being ignored or denied—a part of ourselves and our world that we do not want to see—and that further danger awaits if the warning is not heeded.”

Fargeat and Schimberg take our doppelganger enigma and refract it through the fleshy corpus of the human body. This pair of films begs the question: in a market that profits from our desire to be anything other than what we are, what happens when we meet our more perfect double? Who do we become when our imperfections are not only fixed, but entirely inverted? Is the desire to be opposite anything other than a cruel repudiation of what we already are?

In a time when 28.8 million Americans will have a diagnosable eating disorder in their lifetime, it’s no surprise that the menu for body modifications and the roads to achieve them seem endless. In a way, there is a “Sue” and “Guy” within us all: a skinnier, handsomer, more glistening version of ourselves that can be “unlocked” in myriad ways and for the right price. While there are many life-affirming possibilities of body modification, it is still worth being skeptical of pharmaceutical corporations who make billions of dollars selling injectable weight-loss interventions. (Notably, the popularity of these medications makes it harder for people with diabetes to access products with the same active ingredient.) It is worth being skeptical of compounding pharmacies selling GLP-1 agonists without FDA approval as a response to the mass shortage of Ozempic and its siblings. It is worth being skeptical of brands that implicitly claim to solve medical discrimination against fat people simply by making them less fat. It is worth being skeptical of any marketing effort that speaks louder than the calls to change our medical system that consistently endangers fat people by engaging in fatphobic gaslighting.

Moreover, our doppelganger problem extends beyond our bodies. Recent studies show that online misinformation and performed outrage amplify each other in a maelstrom of bullshit, creating an online landscape where the least accurate statements become the ones we’re incentivized to spread. The truth has a doppelganger, and her name is fiction. A friend recently told me that he knows a shop owner in his hometown who proudly proliferates the idea that Obama is a “secret Jew” who makes gold. I would say, “You can’t make this stuff up,” but someone did. Worse than that, someone believed them.

At the same time, we use these very same apps and websites to project digital doppelgangers of ourselves. “All of us who maintain a persona or avatar online create our own doppelgangers,” writes Klein: “virtual versions of ourselves that represent us to others.” We are all guilty of paying tithes to the church of attention, molding ourselves into “personal brands,” and gobbling up content made by people whose job it is to be looked at.  

In other words, we are surrounded by Sues of our own making. We are using filters and airbrush tools to peel away our faces and reveal the Sebastian Stans underneath. “I learned nothing from The Substance,” chuckled Nikki Glaser at this year’s Golden Globes after ribbing the room of famous people for their noticeable injections, tucks, and snips. According to The American Society of Plastic Surgeons’s 2023 report, over 1.5 million plastic surgery operations were performed in 2023 alone. In a digital landscape where disordered eating is branded as “prioritizing yourself,” we are all only a few steps away from mainlining a yellow liquid from a warehouse and birthing Margaret Qualley out of our spines.

The Substance

The most devastating scene in The Substance is not a gore-fest. After developing her crone finger, Elisabeth calls up a classmate from high school, one who has clearly harbored a crush on her for all these years. Elisabeth initially found his average, middle-aged manness revolting, but with her new humility, she might consider him sweet. She might understand that he could give her the love and validation she seems to receive so easily when she’s Sue. He giddily agrees to a date, but as Elisabeth gets ready to leave the house, she can’t bring herself to accept that her body or face are acceptable for the outside world. She slaps her face angrily, smudges her makeup, and sends herself into a fit. She never makes it out of the house. Elisabeth succumbs to her doppelganger, resigned to the idea that her “more perfect self” is the only one worth seeing.

Once, my friend Maria described a doppelganger experience she had while attempting to eat only greens for lunch: “I ate a salad trying to be Her, and then I realized… Her is hungry.” If The Substance were to be boiled down into one sentence, it might be “Her is hungry.” We are all made up of hunger: the hunger to be valued, the hunger to be in control, and in many cases, the hunger to be less hungry. We believe in the perfect face is living under the one we already have, ready to be revealed under peeling flesh. We are all obsessed with our opposites, the reflections of us who crave less but are somehow eminent. We see these perfect selves as separate from us, but we would do well to listen to The Substance. “REMEMBER,” it warns us, “YOU ARE ONE.”