The Substance: Why this gross-out body horror about Hollywood beauty standards is 2024's most divisive film

In The Substance, the much-discussed, opulently stylised and lavishly gory gonzo horror from French director, Coralie Fargeat, a disembodied voice playing over a marketing video for a tenebrous new beauty product asks: "Have you ever dreamt of a better version of yourself – younger, more beautiful, more perfect?" It's a question which captures Fargeat's intent – to explore, through the medium of blood-spatter, thrills and a splash of sci-fi, what happens when this desire to fit the mould of beauty standards gets out of hand.

Despite its relatively straightforward mission, The Substance is proving one of the most divisive films this year. When it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May, it was touted by Indiewire's critic David Ehrlich as "an epic, audacious, and insanely gross body horror masterpiece". Other critics tipped Fargeat's film to follow in the footsteps of another classic of the genre, the turbocharged, flesh-and-metal-fusing film Titane (2021), in clinching the Palme d'Or. Then there have been the film's naysayers. Critics have variously accused The Substance of pandering to the male gaze, making the older female body appear terrifying and even lacking the very thing in its title: substance.

The film begins as celebrity aerobics instructor Elisabeth (Demi Moore) turns 50 and, deemed too wrinkled by television executives to continue presenting, is informed she will be ousted from her daytime slot in favour of a younger, prettier star. Cue the entry of "The Substance", a suspicious green serum which a shady medical company is seeking test subjects for. It promises to create a "younger, more beautiful" version of oneself. And so, Elisabeth's replacement, Sue (Margaret Qualley), is spawned, emerging from Elisabeth's spine in a gruesome twist.

While its premise may inject something new into the mix, Fargeat's chosen theme of the fear around aging is already well-trodden ground. Think Margo Channing (Bette Davis), whose career is at risk of being snatched by her younger assistant (Anne Baxter) in All About Eve (1950), or Veronica Ghent (Alice Krige) in 2021's She Will, an aging Hollywood star with a vengeful spirit. The Substance has also earned comparisons to Death Becomes Her (1992), where an aging actress played by Meryl Streep drinks a potion which bequeaths her eternal youth.

A director who goes OTT

But it's not so much Fargeat's subject matter as her treatment of it that is irking some critics. The Substance is the follow-up to Fargeat's Revenge (2017), an equally brazen, pulpy and blood-drenched rape-revenge thriller – a grisly sub-genre that has been notorious for its excessive portrayals of women suffering. One of its defining works, I Spit on Your Grave (1978), was released in the wake of the rise of the anti-rape movement in the US, when feminists began to speak out about sexual violence as an endemic social problem, but infamously contained a protracted, 10-minute-long rape scene that many have considered heinously exploitative.

Fargeat's take on the genre took an ogling camera to the body of its protagonist Jennifer (Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz) to ironise the way in which men sexualise women. This objectifying eye returns in Fargeat's second film to home in on Qualley's scantily dressed body. While Fargeat's debut aimed to subvert this gaze in the film's second half, when a muck-covered Jennifer miraculously returns from the dead to enact revenge on her abusers, for some the continuing shots of Qualley don't do the same job. "I thought they really overdid it," critic Hilary A White tells the BBC. "The camera is really leering at her. I'm not sure enough ironic distance is established between the message of the film and these constant sweaty, up-close body shots of the younger star."

The line between subversion of and concession to misogyny is not easy to demarcate. Similar accusations were levelled at Revenge – Slate critic Lena Wilson claimed in her review that "though the film makes a valiant effort to subvert a sexist formula by shrouding itself in French art film trappings and pseudo-empowering femininity, it ultimately falls prey to its exploitative roots". The film's detractors did not have too much of an overall impact on its critical reception, however: it has scored a solid 88% on Rotten Tomatoes at time of publication.

The Substance falls into a camp that is known as "body horror", defined by fleshly mutations, mutilations and copious amounts of blood. Its popularity is often attributed to the Canadian king of horror David Cronenberg, but in recent years female and non-binary filmmakers like Titane director Julia Ducournau, Rose Glass, Amanda Nell Eu and Laura Moss have pushed the genre in new directions. Body horror has offered these directors opportunities to probe topics such as coming-of-age, female desire and gender fluidity, and, in the case of Glass's Love Lies Bleeding, to revel in patriarchy-smashing violence. Critic Katie Rife describes the movement as "a nascent wave of aggressive, stylized women genre directors" who deal in "in-your-face feminist metaphor".

"The Substance is not a subtle film," Rife tells the. "I personally get a kick out of that kind of aggressive, hyper-stylisation, but I would say that there are people who don't particularly like being pummelled with excessive style."

This gruesome surplus – rather than hammering her message home – arguably obscures Fargeat's meaning. One of the terms and conditions of using the substance is that Elisabeth and Sue must swap places every seven days. When this "balance" begins to go awry is also when the body horror sets in. White explains: "I found that the very credible and very serious issues that it was so effectively satirising in the opening hour all got smothered in this shower of blood and viscera in the final 20 minutes – monstrous body horror prosthetics coming at us from all angles."

Does it demonise ageing?

Further, the film's depiction of ageing women has also stoked a decades-old debate about depictions of older women onscreen. There's a long lineage of films, categorised as "psycho-biddy" or "hagsploitation" cinema, in which women, regarded by Hollywood to be past their prime, are portrayed as grotesque and spiral into madness and murder. Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950), in which Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) is a discarded former Hollywood icon driven to violence, provided the archetype, with later horror films like The Nanny (1965) and Strait-Jacket (1964) demonising older women in more obviously lurid ways. Rife believes The Substance's use of hagsploitation tropes, dramatically transforming Moore's body with visual effects, is laced with irony. "Here's a huge tongue-in-cheek element to the whole thing. Something that [Fargeat] said in the Q&A at Toronto International Film Festival was that what she told the actors was, when the characters finally like themselves, is when they become a monster – and I think that is very key to the point of the film."

Perhaps at the crux of the debate around The Substance is the film's purported shallowness. As Hannah Strong puts it in her Little White Lies review: "in regurgitating old talking points about Hollywood's obsession with beauty and its fear of ageing, The Substance becomes a sterile facsimile of Hollywood itself". Rife believes the film has "serious and valid" points to make about the beauty industry and the titular substance's parallels to mass-marketed drugs such as Ozempic and Botox foisted on women – but she doesn't deny its superficiality. "As an expression of rage, [it's lack of substance] doesn't hurt the film at all," Rife says. "It doesn't really hurt the movie as a visceral, cathartic experience, which I think is its primary value."

The question many will ask is: does the film perpetuate the idea that beauty and youth are society's most prized assets, at the same time as notionally attacking such values? "With anything that is at face value glamorous and opulent and lush and luxurious that has a dark underbelly, it's the calibration," White adds. "It's how to find that balance between the protagonist looking at it and being seduced by it, while, at the same time, having enough of the curtain pulled back to show the monster that's lurking behind it."

On whether The Substance strikes this balance, it seems the jury's still out. Whether it's a triumph of feminist rage, a piece of pure entertainment or a facile disaster – that's something viewers will have to see for themselves.

-BBC