The scariest thing about Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance isn’t the body horror — it’s the multi-generational transmission of trauma. This is not simply a story about an aging woman being cruelly replaced by a younger competitor in a cutthroat industry. The Substance is a story about a mother who bought into a lie to extend her own relevance, a daughter who struggles to individuate from her mother, and the internalized objectification they both carry.
First Things First: What Is The Substance About?
The Substance follows Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), a Hollywood aerobics guru who is fired on her 50th birthday. Because in this hyper-stylized version of Hollywood, women cease to be attractive (read: youthful, i.e., marketable and USEFUL) after age 50. (Not that this has changed much in real Hollywood.)
Unfortunately, her network bosses have a point. Elisabeth’s particular brand of fitness is the opposite of youthful. Between the jewel-toned leotards and neon ankle warmers to the “empowering” encouragement that’s really just toxic beauty standards, her show feels dated as hell (and is an obvious parody of Jane Fonda’s 1980s aerobics tapes).
Desperate to reclaim her spot in the limelight, Elisabeth decides to take the Substance, an experimental black-market treatment that promises to create a “younger, more beautiful, more perfect version” of herself. But really, what happens is that the Substance causes her to literally grow another person INSIDE OF HER BODY, who then bursts out of her, fully grown.
Meet Sue (Margaret Qualley), the younger, more beautiful, more perfect version of Elisabeth, who she literally birthed out of her body. Now they are supposed to equitably share a waking life. But Sue has big plans, and she wastes no time monopolizing the life Elisabeth hoped to reclaim. The Substance was marketed as if Elisabeth would simply get a new body to keep living her dream life in, so what is going on?
And of course Hollywood uses Sue to replace Elisabeth by setting Sue up with her own fitness show, only this one has been revamped for what modern, youthful audiences want — slick, dance music with heavy beats and dancers sexualized to within an inch of their lives. It’s giving the pure Y2K/early 00s flavor of objectification that every millennial woman instantly recognizes.
Of course, Sue finds immense success as the new fitness star du jour, with everyone in the backstabbing, ravenous industry wanting a piece of her. Sue loves the spotlight, just as Elisabeth did before her. But the more Sue wants to build her own identity, the more she must contend with Elisabeth and the pesky reality of the life they are supposed to be sharing. The more Sue thrives, the more Elisabeth is drained. The more Elisabeth directs her resentment at Sue, the more Sue grows to outright hate Elisabeth.
The power struggle between Elisabeth and Sue does not stop there, and what follows is a gory, psychologically devastating conflict as they fight for dominance over the one life they’re forced to share.
The Gaze: The Theoretical Framework Behind The Substance
To understand why The Substance works as well as it does, you need to understand Jean-Paul Sartre’s concept of the gaze.
In his 1943 work Being and Nothingness, Sartre argued that a person’s sense of self is unavoidably shaped by how others perceive them. When you become aware of being watched, of being gazed at, that particular experience produces specific, damaging effects: objectification, shame, and the feeling of being reduced to what someone else thinks you are. Crucially, Sartre argued that no one escapes the burdens of both receiving the gaze and inflicting the gaze on others. We are all simultaneously gazing and being gazed at.
And if we’re not careful, we can become dependent on what other people think we are. We can become dependent on their validation, whatever that looks like.
This concept was summed up succinctly in Sartre’s 1944 play, No Exit: “Hell is other people.”
This concept became foundational for feminist film criticism. Laura Mulvey’s influential 1975 essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema“, coined the term “the male gaze” to describe how cinema historically positions women as objects of visual pleasure for a presumed male viewer. In horror, especially, the tension between the male gaze and female objectification demands an ongoing, nuanced, and careful conversation.
Critically, Coralie Fargeat, the director of The Substance, is interested not only in how the male gaze and its validation can motivate her female characters. She is also interested in how that gaze, once internalized, becomes corrosive.
“No one escapes the burdens of both receiving the gaze and inflicting the gaze on others…and if we’re not careful, we can become dependent on what other people think we are.”
What Makes The Substance Different: The Internalized Gaze
I was struck by how little the male actors actually appear in The Substance. Dennis Quaid is the male lead and has a mere 7 minutes and 51 seconds of screen time, or 5.56% of the film. On the other hand, Demi Moore has 59 minutes and 17 seconds (42.02%), and Margaret Qualley has 57 minutes and 36 seconds (40.82%). As a result, the men barely move the plot, and therefore can’t rightfully even be considered the true antagonists of the film.
Instead, Elisabeth and Sue serve as the antagonist in the other’s story, driven by the internalization of the heavy, judgmental masculine gaze of their Hollywood environment so completely that the external source almost doesn’t matter anymore.
The Substance‘s use of body horror, as a storytelling mechanism, is perhaps one of the most evocative and poignant uses of the subgenre that I have seen. The physical depiction of resentment, rage, and revulsion really drives home the visceral tragedy of the whole story. And this tragedy is underscored even more in the moments of disarming vulnerability in which both Elisabeth and Sue study themselves in the horribly clinical bathroom of Elisabeth’s apartment, when they contend with how they see themselves, how they believe others must see them.
Is Sue EliSabeth’s Clone or Her Daughter? The TRAGIC Mother-Daughter Reading
I’ve seen way too many people say differently, but let me set the record straight: Sue is not Elisabeth’s clone. She’s her daughter.
Yes, I know they have to “share” a life. But the Substance doesn’t make a copy — it makes a child. The evidence is pretty clear throughout the film, despite the slick video marketing from the shady entity that makes the Substance:
—Sue does not look like young Elisabeth: there’s literally a huge portrait of Elisabeth in her prime looming over her living room, and it looks absolutely nothing like Sue.
—Fertilization imagery: The opening sequence mirrors fertilization imagery almost exactly — an egg, a sperm, in vitro fertilization. It does not mimic binary fission, which would suggest asexual reproduction.
—Birth/maternal imagery: The way Elisabeth’s body splits when Sue emerges is…deeply reminiscent of birth, specifically a C-section, as are the stitches she sports afterwards. Furthermore, the exact location of the “Stabilizer” fluid Sue extracts from Elisabeth to feed herself is removed from a spot very close to where a woman would receive an epidural (ask me how I know!). Hell, the word “matrix” (from the iconic quote “This is the Substance. You are the matrix. Everything comes from you. Everything is you.”) comes from an old French word meaning “womb” or “uterus”.
—The generational coding: Elisabeth is not merely cast as an “older model”; she’s specifically coded as a boomer, which is carefully depicted with her Jane Fonda-esque aerobics empire, which is so reminiscent of an era long past. Sue, on the other hand, is not just the “younger model”; she’s unmistakably millennial — the dance moves, the hip hop influences, the aggressively sexualized energy perfectly calibrated for the male gaze. It’s giving video vixen. It’s giving a generation raised on music videos that were increasingly pushing the female objectification envelope. Specifically, it’s giving Benny Benassi’s 2002 song Satisfaction (the songs sound very familiar). It’s giving Carmen Electra’s Aerobic Striptease Collection, a real thing many millennial teen girls owned, myself included.
—Lack of a shared mind: Elisabeth and Sue do not have access to each other’s thoughts or memories. Furthermore, Sue acts completely independently, much to Elisabeth’s frustration. In turn, Elisabeth refuses to be quietly managed while Sue tries to soak up the limelight as much as possible.
Elisabeth and Sue’s conflict maps precisely onto a specific, painful intergenerational struggle. There’s that old-school, toxic saying: daughters steal their mother’s beauty—that is the actual pharmacodynamics of the Substance in the film. This is the fear — that motherhood is a scam you consented to somewhat blindly, and it will not be the rejuvenating, purposeful experience that transforms you into a fertility goddess that everyone told you it was. Rather, you will have the life sucked out of you by the newer, better, improved version of you, and everyone will forget about you.
The Takeaway:
At the end of the day, The Substance is about an aging mother who resents her youthful daughter for thriving and receiving the male validation the mother no longer receives. The daughter, in turn, resents her mother for trying to control and undermine her newfound ability to attract male validation and everything that comes with it. They’re playing the same patriarchal game, selling the same product, only Elisabeth has aged out, and Sue is running a far more aggressively sexualized playbook.
Tragically, Elisabeth didn’t fully understand what she was signing up for. While it is hard to sympathize with someone who agreed to a black-market procedure, I can’t help but remember all the times my insecurities have gotten the better of me. I can’t imagine what being in as harsh an industry as Hollywood would do to my insecurities. Can we really blame Elisabeth for not anticipating that the Substance would cause a FULLY GROWN YOUNG WOMAN to emerge from her body??? I don’t think anyone would have thought pursuing “a shady chemical to revive my youth and career” would actually translate to “a direct competitor who is actively siphoning what remains of my vitality and trashing my immaculate home like a spoiled teenager (because she is one). I should have done more research.”
As far as Sue is concerned, yes, she becomes more of a selfish, chaotic nightmare as the film progresses, but TO BE FAIR, Elisabeth was selfishly naive by AGREEING TO THIS WHOLE THING SIGHT UNSEEN in the first place. Because Sue did not agree to SHIT. Sue was “born” into a twisted power dynamic she had fuck-all to do with negotiating. And Elisabeth isn’t even there to teach Sue anything about the world she was born into! There is no one to help Sue navigate the lasciviousness of the network executives. Elisabeth isn’t an absent parent intentionally — she is structurally locked out of “raising” Sue — but the impact is the same. Sue has no one to guide her except the toxic environment in which she immediately finds herself.
As a millennial, I felt both seen and attacked by The Substance.
Dennis Quaid’s Casting: A Brief Note on Psychological Warfare
Dennis Quaid is very good (read: traumatizing) in this film as Harvey. That characterization is genuinely effective. And disgusting. I’ll never look at shrimp the same way again. The same can be said for Dennis Quaid.
I need you to understand the exact nature of the visceral violation, the egregious moral injury, Coralie Fargeat has committed against me personally by casting him in this role.
Dennis Quaid played Nick Parker in The Parent Trap in 1998. Which…oh my lord. Ten-year-old me felt many things while watching this movie. In a very true millennial moment, I enshrined Nick Parker/Dennis Quaid into my mental pantheon of ideal men — ruggedly handsome, rich, funny, a good dad (by late ’90s standards). He was masculine but steady, firm but fair, intent on pursuing Natasha Richardson but safe. For almost thirty years, I held Nick Parker and his perfectly slouchy jeans in very high esteem.
And in less than 8 minutes of screen time, Fargeat defaced Nick Parker with misogynistic, creepy Harvey and those nasty shrimp rolling around in his gaping maw. Watching him gorge on shrimp, smacking his orange lips, reducing human beings to objectified meat — Fargeat personified the male gaze as an open mouth. She weaponized my gaze against me, the same gaze that had put Dennis Quaid onto a certain pedestal, and subverted how I had imposed meaning onto him.
I have lost this essential component of my “perfect man” equation. It is now replaced by this image:
Stanley Kubrick can cry in his tea; he never managed to make an audience feel this profoundly, physically sickened by the mechanics of consumption. Kubrick could never, did never, achieve inflicting this level of psychological terrorism on female members of his audience. On his cast, potentially. But never his audience.
I will NEVER forgive Coralie Fargeat for this.
What Questions Does The Substance Ask Its Audience?
The film’s real horror is in the questions it refuses to let you avoid:
- How do you see yourself — and who told you to see that?
- Who told you how to feel about yourself when you look in the mirror?
- Have you actually thought about any of this?
The Substance is a tragedy because underneath all the body horror, it’s simply about wanting to feel wanted. Chosen. Worth something to someone.
The most devastating moment — the one that hasn’t left me — is when Sue finally accepts who she is and presents herself to the world unapologetically. She is punished for it. Immediately and completely.
The death at the end is very sad and delusional, but there is something almost merciful in that. Almost.
Because while they may be distinct, separate individuals, the industry doesn’t care. It doesn’t see them as anything other than the latest upgrade of the same woman.
As a millennial woman, I felt this whole complex dynamic in my bones.
Final Verdict: Is The Substance Worth Watching?
In my opinion, The Substance is one of the most formally accomplished and thematically rich horror films of recent years. It is also genuinely difficult to watch — the body horror is extreme and intentional. But Fargeat earns every moment of discomfort in service of an argument about what selfhood is like for women, intergenerational trauma, and the violence of internalizing the burden of others’ expectations that no other recent film has made so viscerally.
Demi Moore is fearless. Margaret Qualley holds her own completely. The Kubrickian visual language — the color theory, the costume work, the compositions — is extraordinary. Honestly, lots of other people have already written extensively about those topics, and better than I ever could. It’s best to see it for yourself.
It’s bleak. It’s dark. It declared psychological warfare on my millennial soul.
I cannot stop thinking about it.