Age Against the Machine: Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance

At once a deliriously entertaining midnight movie and a groundbreaking cri de coeur against restrictive beauty standards, Coralie Fargeat’s gloriously gory sophomore feature combines style and substance into a cinematic experience that engages both body and soul. By the end, everyone is drenched in blood. But it all begins in a seemingly innocuous place, with a woman turning 50.

The name of Fargeat’s body-horror provocation doesn’t just refer to the fluorescent green goo that Demi Moore’s desperate heroine pushes into her veins in a bid to reclaim her youth—it is also a synecdoche for the entire project. Capturing the film’s intelligent feminist perspective, the title speaks with trenchant irony to qualities that are routinely ignored in women. In a society that privileges looks and youthfulness above all else, Fargeat’s uncompromising film asks: what is the substance of a woman?

Born in France, Fargeat brings an outsider’s perspective to American culture, her surgically precise diagnostics recalling those of satirical bedfellow Paul Verhoeven. Her 2014 short Reality+ may be set in France, but the film’s Paris is a city in thrall to American values and standards of beauty. The futuristic technology that gives the short its title allows users to hide behind an attractive avatar, but only until the battery in the subcutaneous microchip runs out, when they must once again assume their original appearance. The concept sets in motion a modern Cinderella story—but the consequences of a similar technology are far more dire for the protagonist in The Substance. As a woman embedded in the beauty and entertainment industries, she cannot afford to be ordinary at all.

Fargeat first focused on the fraught experiences of women in a beauty-obsessed culture in her ferocious debut feature Revenge (2017). Brutally attacked and left for dead in a sunstruck desert by her lover and his goons, the film’s unlikely heroine learns the hard way that being conventionally attractive offers only illusory privilege and protection. Here, Fargeat lets her escape her golden cage. In a maximalist frenzy of action and gore, this scopophilic object transforms into a determined avenger, returning in kind all the violence that has been done to her.   

This commanding and cathartically violent film about the silencing of women premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival just as women began using the #MeToo hashtag on social media to speak out against sexual violence. That the studio boss who so unceremoniously fires Moore’s Elisabeth Sparkle early on in The Substance should be called Harvey, then, is no coincidence. But while Revenge indulges in a purgative fantasy of retribution, offering a momentary, thrilling reprieve from knotty questions about guilt and appropriate punishment, The Substance faces those issues head-on. Now, Fargeat’s vendetta against systemic misogyny runs deeper. 

Through the film’s high-concept gambits, the director puts noxious ideas of beauty culture under a magnifying glass, exaggerating its mechanisms to bring absurdity to the surface. Would a studio executive actually be as blunt as Dennis Quaid’s Harvey about a star’s sell-by date, and to her face? Maybe not. But enough Hollywood actresses have opened up about losing jobs once they enter middle age for us to know that Harvey’s thought process is far from exceptional. Elisabeth’s reaction to her firing is similarly shocking. Despite decades of success under her belt and the trophies that line the walls of her apartment, she lets the words of this grotesque, barely coherent man get to her without protest.

The Substance uses brute force in its characterizations to reveal, unvarnished, the violence that mainstream culture inflicts upon women—and makes them inflict upon themselves. After Elisabeth injects herself with the Substance, she proceeds to writhe on her bathroom floor in agony. In these excruciating moments, Fargeat takes a sledgehammer to the notion that invasive procedures, when undergone for reasons as toxic as Elisabeth’s, could ever be empowering.

In Fargeat’s eyes, however, pursuit of youthfulness doesn’t only damage the body. It is also a waste of that most precious resource: time. Updating the concept of Reality+ to give it even greater allegorical resonance, The Substance sees Elisabeth forced to split her time with her double, Margaret Qualley’s Sue, on a weekly cycle. Rather than enjoying this new arrangement, Elisabeth soon finds that resentment consumes her every waking moment. Sue, meanwhile, is so intent on making the most of her time that she risks jeopardizing it altogether. At any age, Fargeat warns, holding on to youth isn’t just a losing game—it is a tragic misuse of the time we do have. 

Beauty culture thrives, then, on a state of perpetual dissatisfaction. Sue might be young, and Elisabeth older, but both are motivated by disgust with what is not shiny and new. Sue's refusal to make the switch back to Elisabeth is sparked by the same disappointment that makes Elisabeth aggressively remove her makeup in the film's most devastating scene. Foundation, lipstick, mascara—none of it is enough, and she claws at her face until it is raw.

Demi Moore’s own experiences in Hollywood make her a perfect fit for Elisabeth Sparkle. Tabloids and respectable film press alike showed little restraint when it came to scrutinizing the bodies of Hollywood actresses in the 1980s and 1990s. But few saw their stardom so closely tied to their appearance as Moore. Her physique was a focus for critics and audiences long before she appeared topless in Striptease (1996), and long after: the Rolling Stone review of Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle (2003) notes that “Moore, 40, looks great in a bikini and doesn't even try to act.” Despite being the subject of so much snark and backhanded praise, Moore wasn’t afraid to push buttons. Coming out a year after Striptease, Ridley Scott’s G.I. Jane starred Moore as the fictional first woman to undergo US Navy SEAL training. Her head shaved and her muscles chiseled to the extreme, the star displayed a masculinized version of her body that was widely mocked for jarring with classical notions of femininity. The August 1991 cover of Vanity Fair, which showed a pregnant Moore naked with one arm covering her breasts, provoked similarly intense public reactions. No one could agree on whether Annie Leibovitz’s photograph was an empowering vision of womanhood and motherhood, or a vulgar and inappropriate example of sexual objectification.

In the heat of the moment, it seemed that no matter what Moore did, she couldn’t win. All kinds of expectations were put upon her body, but she couldn’t please everyone. Three decades on, however, Moore is still here, and this persistence may be her biggest victory. As popular culture continues to reduce women’s value to youthful appearances, Moore’s longevity points to a happier vision of success: one that is not fixated on winding back the clock or submitting to other people's standards. Like a funhouse reflection of her career, The Substance warns us about the alternative. Taking the nefarious ideas of contemporary beauty culture to their logical, explosive conclusion, Fargeat’s blood-and-guts symphony is the kind of cinematic primal scream that comes but once in a generation. Heed her call.