Toxic Femininity Sparkles in The Substance
Coralie Fargeat's original and grotesque feminist fantasy.
Coralie Fargeat. Remember the name. She takes the concept of toxic femininity to a whole new level in her audacious new film, The Substance, which won Best Screenplay at Cannes earlier in the year.
Irrespective of its genre, its satirical facade or some of its prominent wrinkles, this is a serious film that needs to be taken seriously. It’s not just a resurgent anti-vanity project for Demi Moore, who - yes it’s true - deserves all the praise she’s getting. Nor is it an ascendant vanity project for Margaret Qualley, who is - true again - equally excellent.
The Substance fits the mould of genre horror film quite perfectly, but what makes it so special is how it subverts and breaks free from the confines of its genre and actually has something to say. This is shock value with a valuable message.
The Plot in a Nutshell
Elisabeth Sparkle (Moore) is a famous TV star whose star is fading, quickly. With no family and seemingly no friends, her life is completely empty and devoid of meaning after she is forced into early retirement because she has reached the “undesirable” age of 50. Desperate and alone, she decides to take a mysterious black market drug that promises her a whole new, more youthful, version of herself. The drug comes with strict instructions, and once her younger self Sue (Qualley) is ‘activated’, horrors escalate.
Healthline defines toxic femininity as ‘a form of internalised misogyny which involves restricting yourself to stereotypically “feminine” behaviours in order to appeal to men.’ Led by a shrimp-chewing, scene-stealing Dennis Quaid, the men in Fargeat’s fantasy are all grotesque versions of the very worst kind. Disgusting misogynists, pathetic losers, meatheads etc. You’re either recoiling away from them, laughing at them, or feeling sorry for them, all the while wondering why anybody would want their attention.
Nevertheless, just like in other recent ultra-feminist films like Promising Young Woman (2020) and Barbie (2023), the heroine’s quest is mainly influenced by the terrible men who rule the world. This is particularly punctuated in The Substance when Elisabeth’s old boss Harvey (Quaid) introduces the TV Network’s all-old-white-male shareholders. Just as diverse as the Mattel board of directors in Barbie. Obviously this doesn’t represent real life in the 2020s, where shareholders and executives are far more diverse in race and gender. But where the Mattel board exists in the “real world” and not in “Barbieland”, The Substance, to its glorious credit, doesn’t pretend to be based in any kind of reality.
A big reason why The Substance works so well is precisely because it’s suspended from contemporary time and space. The film’s design has a wonderfully retro feel to it - from the wardrobes and the furniture, to the corridors, carpet patterns and bathroom tiles. It most strikingly echoes The Shining visually, with its many one-point perspective shots emphasising symmetrical claustrophobia and isolated depth, while its twerky, twitchy and neurotic editing recalls the adrenaline-fuelled Requiem for a Dream. An unlikely congruence of influence that feels fresh and alive.
The story takes place in some disfigured version of Los Angeles, where the palm trees look like decrepit spectres of death and fame drains your soul one botox injection at a time. Technology hasn’t advanced in this LA, billboards are the the most impactful advertising channels and phone numbers with the 70s Hollywood ‘555’ prefixes are exchanged not on social media or through text, but on torn up scraps of dirty paper. It’s all very Mulholland Drive.
Then there’s the body horror of it all. Once the third act kicks in, Elisabeth’s physical transformation is shocking, horrifying and, somehow, hilarious. It is the aesthetic grotesque in its purest form, the kind that James Naremore analyses in Stanley Kubrick's cinema:
At his best, like many other practitioners of the grotesque, [Kubrick] aims to show a paradoxical and potentially disturbing truth: at the farthest reaches of our experience, extremes meet and transform themselves. The coldest temperatures burn like fire. Especially where the human body is concerned, there is always something potentially comic about horror and horrible about comedy.
Without giving too much away, the climax in The Substance features one of the most ridiculous and disturbing human chimeras I’ve ever seen on screen. Besides the obvious nods to iconic body horrors like The Fly and Scanners, the closest cinematic cousins to this abomination are Ripley’s clones and the xenomorph-human hybrid alien baby in Alien Resurrection.
All of these filmic homages - Kubrick, Aronofsky, Lynch, Cronenberg, Jeunet - serve to polish the film in considerably masculine veneer. After all, the art of the grotesque in film history and the sub-genre of the body horror is an arena almost exclusively dominated by men, as one would reasonably expect.1 This makes what Fargeat has achieved all the more remarkable. She has wrestled her own brilliant, feminist version of body horror all while tipping her hat to the masters of the genre.
Drawing so much inspiration from a male-dominated genre and surrounding her heroine with a vortex of male caricatures, Fargeat tells a tale of toxic femininity whose crux is an insightful truth that resonates universally, for both men and women:
The deepest wounds are the ones we inflict upon ourselves.
Elisabeth’s internalised misogyny is reinforced by all of the monstrous men around her, yes, but the most grotesque monster of all is the one created from the self-hatred that festers within. As a man, I’m not going to sit here and pretend like I understand what it’s like for women in a world filled with stereotypes about the female body and age. But I can appreciate how remarkably refreshing it is to have a feminist film with so much introspection. Even though the external misogyny is exaggerated, it’s done to such great dramatic (and comic and horrific) effect that it only makes Elisabeth’s internal struggle all the more moving.
The Substance is distributed by MUBI, and is playing in cinemas right now. I highly recommend it if you have the stomach for this kind of stuff. It will be available to stream sometime in November.
Julia Ducournau (Raw (2016) and Titane (2021)) and Claire Denis (Trouble Every Day) are exceptions, but not even their films come close to the grotesque territory Fargeat ventures into.
What a great review! Agree entirely that the film is a very interesting and enjoyable (and at times beautiful) watch that stays with you for a while. Have no stomach for gore myself, but felt too that here is was so grotesque and theatrical that it only added to the freshness and impact. Very bold and not trite overall.