The Substance (UK/France: Coralie Fargeat, 2024)

An immensely, unstoppably, ecstatically demented fairy tale about female self-hatred, Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance” will stop at nothing — and I mean nothing — to explode the ruthless beauty standards that society has inflicted upon women for thousands of years, a burden this camp-adjacent instant classic aspires to cast off with some of the most spectacularly disgusting body horror this side of “The Fly.”

If the “Revenge” director’s immaculately crafted debut tried to dismantle male toxicity with a shotgun blast square to the balls, Fargeat’s riotous follow-up turns that same attention inwards, allowing her to take aim at both the pointlessness she’s been conditioned to feel as a forty-something woman, and also at the resentment she’s been conditioned to feel toward her younger self. Squelching with fury at how a woman’s “fuckability’”is used as the ultimate measure of her worth, the result of Fargeat’s mad experiment is equal parts “Freaky Friday,” “All About Eve,” and Andrzej Żuławski’s “Possession” — simple enough for a child to understand, but gross enough to make squeamish adults spew out their lunch. Those with the stomach to stick it out were rewarded with the most sickly entertaining theatrical experience of the year, one carried by the kind of go-for-broke performance that Hollywood stars only tend to give after they reach a certain age and start running out of options.” —David Ehrlich

The Substance (UK/France: Coralie Fargeat, 2024: 141 mins)

Cunningham, Vinson, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz. "The Substance and the New Horror of the Modified Body." Critics at Large (October 3, 2024) ["In “The Substance,” a darkly satirical horror movie directed by Coralie Fargeat, Demi Moore plays an aging Hollywood actress who strikes a tech-infused Faustian bargain to unleash a younger, “more perfect” version of herself. Gruesome side effects ensue. Fargeat’s film plays on the fact that female aging is often seen as its own brand of horror—and that we’ve devised increasingly extreme methods of combating it. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss “The Substance” and “A Different Man,” another new release that questions our culture’s obsession with perfecting our physical forms. In recent years, the smorgasbord of products and procedures promising to enhance our bodies and preserve our youth has only grown; social media has us looking at ourselves more than ever before. No wonder, then, that horror as a genre has been increasingly preoccupied with our uneasy relationship to our own exteriors. “We are embodied. It is a struggle. It is beautiful. It’s something to wrestle with forever. Just as you think that you’ve caught up to your current embodiment, something changes,” Schwartz says. “And so how do we make our peace with it?”"]

Elkin, Lauren. Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art. Macmillan, 2023. ["What kind of art does a monster make? And what if monster is a verb? Noun or a verb, the idea is a dare: to overwhelm limits, to invent our own definitions of beauty. In this dazzlingly original reassessment of women’s stories, bodies, and art, Lauren Elkin—the celebrated author of Flâneuse—explores the ways in which feminist artists have taken up the challenge of their work and how they not only react against the patriarchy but redefine their own aesthetic aims. How do we tell the truth about our experiences as bodies? What is the language, what are the materials, that we need to transcribe them? And what are the unique questions facing those engaged with female bodies, queer bodies, sick bodies, racialized bodies? Encompassing with a rich genealogy of work across the literary and artistic landscape, Elkin makes daring links between disparate points of reference— among them Julia Margaret Cameron’s photography, Kara Walker’s silhouettes, Vanessa Bell’s portraits, Eva Hesse’s rope sculptures, Carolee Schneemann’s body art, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s trilingual masterpiece DICTEE—and steps into the tradition of cultural criticism established by Susan Sontag, Hélène Cixous, and Maggie Nelson. An erudite, potent examination of beauty and excess, sentiment and touch, the personal and the political, the ambiguous and the opaque, Art Monsters is a radical intervention that forces us to consider how the idea of the art monster might transform the way we imagine—and enact—our lives."]

Fargeat, Coralie. "6 Films That Inspired The Substance." IndieWire's Filmmaker Toolkit (February 14, 2025) ["Director Coralie Fargeat tells IndieWire how the films of David Lynch, Stanley Kubrick, the Coen Brothers, David Cronenberg, John Carpenter and Darren Aronofsky inspired her Oscar nominated body horror classic."]

---. "The Substance: Rips Beauty Standards to Gory Shreds." MUBI Podcast (September 19, 2024) ["Writer/Director Coralie Fargeat's Cannes-winning body-horror blitz THE SUBSTANCE features Demi Moore as an aging star who turns to a mystery drug in hopes of becoming a better, younger version of herself. Fargeat tells host Rico Gagliano about casting Moore, why blood and guts are great metaphors, and the pain of makeup removal."]

Gandhi, Utsav, Do Own Kim, and Gabrielle Roitman. "The Substance: Youth, Body, Women, Success (Part One)." Pop Junctions (February 28, 2025)

---. "The Substance: Youth, Body, Women, Success (Part Two)." Pop Junctions (March 1, 2025)

Heller-Nicholas, Alexandra. "The Substance is a Documentary." Film International (September 3, 2024) ["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."]

Subissati, Andrea and Alexandra West. "Pump It Up: The Substance (2024) Live from Salem Horror Fest."  The Faculty of Horror (May 21, 2025) ["Join Andrea and Alex live from Salem Horror Fest for feats of strength (!) and a discussion of the horrors of beauty standards, the weight of celebrity culture, and the algorithms that are out to get us."]

Yeoh, Michelle. "Demi Moore’s Gory Glory." Interview (August 27, 2024)