The Substance: full-throttle feminism, excess and violence

We’ve all dreamt, at one time or another, of being better versions of ourselves. Of being more disciplined about going to the gym, quicker at texting your mates back, not picking up a new book before finishing the old one.

But the notion of relentless self-improvement is something filmmaker Coralie Fargeat (who also made the award-winning 2017 thriller Revenge) pushes to the extreme in her new film, The Substance. A bone-chilling body horror that’ll make even Cronenberg disciples squirm, it stars Demi Moore as Elisabeth Sparkle, a Jane Fonda-esque, ex-Hollywood starlet who’s made to believe that she’s aged out of the industry by a slimy executive, pointedly named Harvey (played by Dennis Quaid).

Shaken by her careless discardment and more self-conscious than ever, Elisabeth is drawn in by a mysterious advert for The Substance, a fluoro-green fluid that, if taken correctly, will produce ​“a better you”. That is, a younger, more beautiful you who doesn’t get fired for being over 50. Enter: Sue, played by Margaret Qualley, a younger doppelganger who promptly replaces Elisabeth as the face of the hugely popular televised exercise class she once taught and embodies every facet of her life – with only the halo of youth as her shield.

But nothing shields women from society’s misogynistic scrutiny of our bodies – not for long, at least. In the film, Fargeat makes the horror of insecurity tangible, blowing it up into a living, breathing monster. Because injecting The Substance comes at a cost: Sue and Elisabeth can only swap roles for two weeks at a time. Increasingly, Elisabeth and Sue are at odds, battling for dominance. They start to hate one another. And although the faceless suits at Substance HQ repeatedly instruct Elisabeth to work with Sue rather than against her, that’s easier said than done when you’re literally being ripped apart from the inside out.

Violence, ultimately, sits at the very heart of The Substance. But Fargeat has brought to life a bitingly satirical, absurdly funny, nauseatingly gory (really, we can’t emphasise that last one enough) version of what women are faced with everyday: the inescapability of judgement based on what we look like.

Hi, Coralie! When, where and how was the seed for The Substance sown?

Basically my whole life. Since I was a kid, I grew up with the pressure of presenting myself in a certain way as a girl, especially in public spaces. It can really fuck up your mind. I developed a kind of internal violence as a result; you feel like you’re never good enough if you don’t conform to beauty standards. That you won’t be appreciated or have a place in the world.

This has been with me at each step of my life, and happened all over again when I got to my forties and fifties. The violence of those thoughts became even more powerful. I was thinking, it’s over for me. I won’t be interesting, I won’t have value anymore. I took a step back: this is so violent, but it’s living inside of me. I took a moment to address this in a way that hopefully is liberating and empowering. I’m not allowed to have all this excess in my real life, so I put it in my movies. I wanted to make The Substance as excessive and violent and over the top as possible. I needed that level of intensity to truly represent the violence I have experienced my whole life.

It can feel as though people are increasingly prudish about nudity, sex and gore on screen. What do you make of that, given you use both of those elements in the film?

This is a movie about women’s bodies. That’s the centre of the film. Our bodies are the centre of our lives, after all. They define us in society. I hope that one day our bodies can be our own and we can feel at ease in them the way we want. I hope we feel empowered to feel sexy or not sexy, that we don’t feel judged, that we feel free.

In the film, I really wanted to represent all the different things we face in terms of the relationship we have with our bodies. The use of nudity is twofold: one, it’s used to describe the relationship that Elisabeth has with herself, being naked in her bathroom, alone. Here, we can see how violently she judges herself, how harsh she is, the level of despair she’s experiencing. This is the reality many of us live with. At the other end of the spectrum, the relationship Sue has with her body is very external. The only way she can inhabit the public space is to be hyper sexy, to be perfect, to feel like you have to draw everyone’s gaze towards you. It’s complex, and there are many different layers to the way we live with ourselves.

What do you think a younger version of yourself would’ve thought if she’d known you’d one day make The Substance?

I often tell myself that it’s too bad I didn’t realise all this when I was younger. I limited myself, I was so hard on myself. But then I say stop. I think it’s a process. Of course, if a few things had been different, I wouldn’t have had such a bad time. But the privilege of age is to finally access other levels of reality and things you can enjoy that aren’t related to how young you are or what you look like. It’s a process, and I don’t want to feel guilty about not realising certain things sooner.

Finally, can you share a list of films that FACE readers might want to watch after The Substance? If they can handle it…

One that comes to mind is Requiem for a Dream – that character who wanted her moment on TV, starving herself, taking pills. That captured the addiction and the violence, this kind of obsessive relationship with how you’re going to be seen. Then there is David Cronenberg’s The Fly, which plays with the idea of body mutation and transformation, that fear that your body will be invaded. As a woman, you’re in constant vigilance about your body. That’s why I think body horror has a specific resonance to women. Every day we live with this genre in our lives! I love genre films that allow you to dive into an alternate reality that’s so far from the real world, where the rules can be whatever you want them to be. There’s also Robocop by [Paul] Verhoeven or [Stanley] Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. I’m interested in societal violence and how that gives way to horror. The first Night of the Living Dead. That’s what generates real horror – society. The fear of invasion. That’s what I relate to most strongly.