“Have you ever dreamt of a better version of yourself? Younger, more beautiful, more perfect?”

This tagline from Coralie Fargeat’s 2024 body horror film The Substance is a powerful but mostly redundant question for most women. Which woman hasn’t been (or should I say isn’t) obsessed with the quest for eternal beauty because of – if nothing else – sheer volume of social messaging that to be a woman of any value, one must be slim, young, and aesthetically pleasing, according to received cultural standards? In The Substance, ageing Hollywood superstar Elisabeth Sparkle embodies this pursuit to grotesque extremes. In the film, she engages a mysterious medicalized protocol known as “The Substance,” which allows her to produce an unidentical ‘clone’ Sue: a younger perfected version of herself that she can manifest every other week by injecting herself with an unknown fluid. The only catch is that Sue and Elisabeth must ‘respect the balance’ of the trade in time – only one alternating week per woman – a boundary that Sue soon begins to violate in favour of more, stolen time.

The Substance can be easily read as a metaphor for beauty augmentation procedures such as plastic surgery, Botox, fillers and latterly the rise of Ozempic: ‘substances’ injected into the self that promise youth and beauty. However, the deeper meanings allegorized in The Substance protocol speak to long standing ontological problems baked into the experience of all women subject to western, globalized beauty standards. These problems boil down to essential metaphysical questions – how does one cease, or reverse, the effects of time? How does one slow down natural and inevitable processes such as ageing and decay? How does one cheat death? The Substance explores these questions through comparative images of food and the female body, whereby women are either deemed fresh and ‘edible,’ or rotten and inedible, or more simply put – waste. This movie can be read as a searing examination of women and their contradictory yet simultaneous desire and hatred of an acceptable, palatable femininity and the gendered power structures that govern, produce and reproduce them.

The opening pre-credit scene of The Substance features a raw egg against a pulpy sky-blue screen. This single broken egg is injected by an unknown substance and subdivides into two. A seemingly identical, self-replicated clone egg emerges on the screen, before we are launched into the main narrative of the film. The twinned eggs that open the film indicate its thematic preoccupations – reproduction in a dual sense. The egg is the origin point for life: nascent, unborn – signalling the anticipated ‘birth’ of protagonist Elisabeth younger ‘more perfect’ alter-ego Sue. However, it also gestures toward the hyper-capitalist reproductive preoccupations of the film itself, focalized through the film’s main concern: the impossible perfection of the female body and the unceasing reproduction of this image. The egg symbolizes possibility, expiration – life, and death – within its yolky centre. The egg motif repeats itself throughout the film, intentionally deploying it’s double meaning throughout the movie, mediated through the uncanny relationship between the doubled protagonists Elisabeth Sparkle and Sue.

The life/death cycle is deconstructed through the relationship between the two women’s assigned roles within the film: Elisabeth – as ageing and death – and Sue – as youth and birth. Concurrent images of alimentary and somatic freshness and rot – again focalized through Elisabeth (decay) and Sue (nascence) and their relationship with body image and food populate the film. These binary concerns metastasize in the relationship between the two central female protagonists to destructive ends, asking the audience to critique the treatment of women’s bodies, particularly ageing ones.

In the film, Elisabeth is constructed as decaying and redundant femininity. Elisabeth becomes aware of her ejection from acceptable bounds of femininity in the early moments of the film. On her 50th birthday, she accidentally overhears Dennis Quaid’s hyperbolic rendition of a TV producer Harvey speaking on his mobile phone about her redundancy as a woman. “How the old bitch has been able to stick around for this long, that’s the fucking mystery to me.” (6:43) He plans to remove her from her network TV fitness show ‘Sparkle Your Life’ and replace her with someone “young and hot.”

Harvey – the ultimate purveyor of images of desirable femininity and mouthpiece of an unceasing and ruthless patriarchal male gaze – has deemed Elisabeth as ‘inedible’. She has aged, she is no longer relevant, consigned to an outdated 80s aesthetic and a corny Jane Fonda parody of a fitness TV show. Her image is no longer marketable or consumable. Harvey later callously delivers this information to Elisabeth over a lunch meeting. While she sits eating nothing, Harvey makes his way through a huge pile of shrimp. The camera zooms uncomfortably close into Harvey’s open, masticating mouth. The image is one of abjection and destruction. While he tells Elisabeth that “[r]enewal is inevitable” (8:28) he rips off the heads of the shrimp, their dead but innocent eyes conferring meaning onto a silent Elisabeth – she has been consumed and now digested for the last time by the exacting standards of the male gaze – she has now become useless, waste. “At 50…it stops” says Harvey. Elisabeth finally speaks up: “what stops?” (8:31) Harvey does not reply and diverts his attention to another aged white male executive he spots in the restaurant, leaving Elisabeth with nothing but the scene of his alimentary destruction and its connotations for her femininity – the table is messily strewn with the aftermath of his meal, the husks of shrimp shells are discarded ready to be thrown away.

In stark contrast, Elisabeth’s progenitor Sue is all youth, beauty and power. The camera ogles her impossibly perfect body with a near-violent appetite, particularly evident in scenes where Sue is dancing as the replacement lead to Elisabeth’s now defunct exercise show, rebranded as ‘Pump It Up With Sue.’ Sue’s body is not so much showcased as it is deployed like a lethal weapon – the camera pans up and around her body in slow motion, as though it were a vast edifice of a building or a sculpture, rather than a human being. The camera doubles as an insatiable male gaze. Close ups of her breasts, ass, legs and mouth fragment her body, carving it up as delectable dishes for audience consumption, both for ‘Pump It Up with Sue’s’ fictional audience and our own as we watch the film. This double awareness produces discomfort and pleasure simultaneously. We are forced to reckon with our own hunger for this kind of feminine perfection, however harmful it may be.

Sue’s image proliferates throughout the Hollywood location of the film in the form of billboards, tv spots, and other advertising media. In her, Harvey recognizes a highly lucrative cash cow. When Sue asks for every other week off from filming ‘Pump it Up’ in order to care for an ailing mother (which is actually a cover story for the necessary switching back into Elisabeth’s body) Harvey replies by saying “[g]orgeous with a pure heart…people are going to love that” (40:01). In pairing Sue’s desirability with acceptable forms of femininity expressed through caring responsibilities, Harvey shores up the standard for female social value – be young, beautiful and caring – against its market value. To be loveable (and edible) women must be all things at once. This is made painfully clear to Elisabeth when it is her ‘turn’ to be conscious. She is haunted by the ubiquitous billboards and other images of perfect Sue. Although she is desperate to keep Sue alive and sacrifices her body, time and ‘matrix’ (a spinal infusion from Elisabeth that ‘feeds’ Sue) to give her life, she also deeply resents her – both for what Sue has, and Elisabeth can no longer access and for the life span Sue is vampirically starving Elisabeth of in order to exist.

As the relationship between the two women becomes increasingly, and surrealistically, antagonistic, Elisabeth begins to question her choice of engaging with The Substance protocol at all. “You wouldn’t exist without me” cries Elisabeth, rage-watching Sue on a generic late night talk show as she claims that Elisabeth’s version of the current ‘Pump it Up with Sue’ show was “Jurassic fitness really” (1:31:04). Although the accusation is literal – Sue wouldn’t exist without Elisabeth’s engagement with The Substance protocol – the deeper meaning is ahistorical, that is to say, women have always given birth to other women. Elisabeth brings Sue into being with her own genetic material, a kind of literal mother. No women exist without woman existing prior to them.

 Further still, the statement belies an uncomfortable truth:  women are forced to participate in an uncompromising patriarchy in order to be loved, and they collude with one another do so, as Elisabeth colludes with Sue by engaging with The Substance. Women both receive and reproduce the demands of patriarchy:  be forever young, thin, tight and reproductively able, and despite being strangled by these impossible parameters, both women do not resist it – they actively endanger their health and wellbeing to meet them. The existence, circulation, and propagation of these impossible modes of femininity are articulated though the alimentary. There is a natural death-life cycle of food – food is fresh until it is not, it then becomes abject and dead. This deterioration is acceptable due to the object-nature of food. It is meant to follow this cycle naturally – to be viable but then not. Through the dynamic set up between Sue and Elisabeth, the film explores the consequences when women are also rendered as edible objects rather than human beings, and not permitted to follow the inevitable natural cycle of birth, life, decay and eventual death with accession and dignity. This produces an unnatural, monstrous system that both women, and women in general, cannot seem to ever escape.