Rotten Women in Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (2024)
“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’…
