At Film International, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas writes about The Substance (2024): “I live a very different life from Elisabeth Sparkle and–for that matter–from Demi Moore. But despite the fantastic excesses of Coralie Fargeat’s slick cinema du look body horror, in many ways I don’t think I have ever felt more validated by a movie. If nothing else, as I have aged, so too I have become increasingly dependent on my own substances. Their results might not be as dramatic, but their hyperbolic promise also rests on hyper-clinical sounding potions like Tretinoin, glycolic acid, and hyaluronic acid, all of which for myself and many women my age have become everyday staples. Considering the lengths we go to poke, prod, and pour literal acid on ourselves towards the creation of a brighter better self, The Substance’s core premise is perhaps not as absurd as we might first think.

Taken to its astonishingly eyewatering visceral extremes, the story as Fargeat tells it might be deliberately outlandish; but as far as emotional fidelity is concerned, The Substance is a documentary. No other film I have ever seen so perfectly captures my subjective experience of the culturally enforced dissociation that happens en masse when, as a woman, your body starts to age. Like Elisabeth, you marvel almost at an abstracted, emotional remove as your body begins to morph and change in front of your eyes; you wake up, and things have appeared, disappeared, distorted, and shifted, seemingly overnight. And at times–compounded by inexplicable mood swings and sudden shifts in disposition–your body no longer even feels like you.”

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