A film about patriarchal beauty standards that are created and perpetuated by the entertainment industry. A film where plastic surgery, anti-aging creams, and SPF 100 every day are taken and pumped up to an extreme eleven. This is a film that through deliberately lecherous camera angles and intentional sexualisation of its characters seeks to make a poignant and important point—whole minutes of this film are spent with the camera focused directly on an actress' body.
The Substance, if directed by a man, would have been morally putrid and would have elicited justifiable outrage from its audience. Luckily for the viewer, The Substance is written and directed by a woman, Coralie Fargeat, a French director who started making waves with her 2017 film Revenge. Demi Moore plays Elizabeth Sparkle who, upon being axed from her job for simply turning fifty, is drawn into trying out a procedure that purports it can create “a better version of herself ”—an experimental metaphor for plastic surgery and the like.
The result of this procedure is Sue, played by Margaret Qualley. An unfortunate stipulation of the procedure is that only one version of the person can be in control at a given time. For seven days, Elizabeth Sparkle has to live with the ordeal of being fifty in beauty-obsessed LA.
Then, for the next week, Sue gets to play at being a beautiful twenty-something in beauty-obsessed Hollywood. From there, the two manage to have a tense relationship that deals with themes of intergenerational hatred, normative beauty standards, and exploitative media practices—all culminating in a gigantic, fleshy monster. It is a film that could be dissected a thousand different ways but the true villain, as it always is in Hollywood, is a man with power who forces these beauty expectations on young women.
If you want a feminist body horror film, The Substance has the stuff you need.