This article appeared in the September 20, 2024 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

The Substance (Coralie Fargeat, 2024)

Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance is the latest in a string of recent films directed by women—Julia Ducournau’s Titane (2021), Amanda Nell Eu’s Tiger Stripes (2023), and Rose Glass’s Love Lies Bleeding (2024) among them—that experiment with the conventions of body horror to push back against decades of normalized on-screen violence against women and nonbinary characters. In the best of these films, the deviance of bodies that don’t fit a patriarchal norm—bodies that are older, gender-fluid, fat, brazenly desiring, and usually punished for being so in cinema—is gleefully exaggerated, with the threat they represent reframed as a source of empowerment. The Substance has the stylistic trappings of this genre—turning a story of an aging television star’s desperate pursuit of eternal youth into an excessively gory, entrails-filled spectacle of tragicomic bodily degradation—but it never quite manages to go beyond mere appearances and say anything of actual substance.

The film follows the downfall of celebrity aerobics instructor Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore, in a canny bit of casting)—a former media darling with a long-running exercise show on television that evokes, with its luridly colored leotards and leg warmers, the age of Jane Fonda workout videos. Though Elisabeth has just been honored with a shiny new star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, she is also about to hit the end of the line: on her 50th birthday, she overhears that she is being replaced by a younger, more desirable host. Everywhere we look, we see specters of Elisabeth at her most desirable: the corridors of the network’s studios are lined with posters of her in a figure-hugging blue leotard, a waist-cinching belt, and shiny, tan-colored tights; a larger-than-life portrait of her smiling face looms on the wall of her high-rise apartment. But Fargeat’s use of fish-eye lenses distorts these picture-perfect representations, creating a dizzying atmosphere of claustrophobia. On the rare occasions when the film ventures out onto the streets of L.A., the camera is trained on Moore’s chiseled face: her life is bounded by the stifling confines of her own carefully manicured self-image.

Now dethroned from her daytime-TV gig, Elisabeth is put in contact with a shady company shilling a buzzy but secretive new product dubbed “The Substance,” which promises to unlock an alternative, improved, and unblemished version of its taker. Of course, there’s a snag: the old and new bodies must swap places every week without fail. And so, with impulsive desperation, Elisabeth shoots up, and in a flesh-melting sequence, the sparklingly young, svelte, and bright Sue (played with self-obsessed girliness by Margaret Qualley) pries her way out of Elisabeth’s spine and is soon hired as the latter’s replacement on the television show.

Fargeat’s first feature, Revenge (2017), a bloody slasher about a woman seeking vengeance for her rape, established a full-throttle style with a few signature visual flourishes: crystalline close-ups of insects writhing in foodstuffs, scenes of men gorging themselves revoltingly (coupled with sickening sound effects), and an uncomfortably leering camera that ironizes the male gaze. For much of The Substance, too, the camera seems to channel a lecherous voyeur, fixating on Qualley’s body as she squats and swivels in pink tights, with frequent close-ups—cut to the bass-heavy soundtrack—homing in on her shiny lip gloss, her winged eyeliner, and, most frequently, her ass. But the film never really coheres into a critique of that gaze—where Revenge gives in to this hyper-sexualization only to challenge it later, The Substance seems inescapably in thrall to the seductive, glossy surfaces of Hollywood beauty standards that it is supposedly skewering.

Most of the film’s “horror” comes from Elisabeth’s aging body, which begins to shrivel as Sue takes up more and more time in violation of the one-week-per-body rule. When the balance between them begins to go askew, a series of fever-dream sequences foreshadow the terror soon to come: Sue, clad in a full-body snakeskin suit, is about to embark on a one-night stand when she unzips her outfit and her organs tumble out. Later, while Sue is recording in the TV studio—with the broadcasting cameras again focused on her rear end—playback reveals a mysterious bump pushing its way up through her skin: a chicken drumstick, consumed by Elisabeth the night before. The grotesquerie culminates in a display of Elisabeth’s naked, worn body, absurdly enhanced with prosthetics and visual effects, in a retrograde nod to hagsploitation tropes. (In spite of all this, it should be noted, Moore is a shimmering, anchoring presence throughout the film.)

The message is not hard to read and is a parochially simple one: the world is sexist and pushes women to extremes to preserve their desirability—which in turn, ironically, costs them their health and sanity. It’s an exaggerated satire of ageism in Hollywood and media, and the nasty opportunism of companies trying to make a quick, unprincipled buck from women’s insecurities. Yet neither the two-hour-plus runtime nor the intestine-spilling exercise in gross-out horror seem necessary to drive home this straightforward point, which the film makes within its first 30 minutes and never deepens or complicates. Instead, it tangles itself in its own messy entrails, muddling various metaphors for self-hatred, addiction, and the chasms between generations. By the movie’s ludicrous end, as Elisabeth has been reduced to a mangled bag of innards, The Substance seems content with delivering shock and awe—at Sue’s beautiful figure, at Elisabeth’s horrific physical devolution, at the misogyny of media men—that rely on, rather than challenge, deep-set prejudices toward women’s bodies. There may be plenty to wince and recoil at in the film, but ultimately it leaves you with nothing more than a few incoherent, hollow images.

Miriam Balanescu is a freelance critic who writes for The Guardian, Sight and Sound, BBC Culture, and other publications.