Is "The Substance" Really a Feminist Film?

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by Heather Widdows and Jessica Sutherland

The Substance has been described as a “feminist body horror”.¹ Writer, director and producer Coralie Fargeat explicitly set out to make “a feminist movie to open everyone’s eyes” to the intense pressure facing women to look a certain way.² The film intends to call out and reject unattainable beauty ideals, and to challenge the fact that women feel they have “no choice but to be perfect/sexy/smiling/thin/young/beautiful to be valued in society”.³ Fargeat speaks eloquently of the overwhelming pressure to comply, that “makes you feel badly if you don’t live up to them”.⁴ The film's star, Demi Moore, expresses similar views; she has documented her quest for perfection in her 2019 book, Inside Out.⁵ Moore recalls the pressure to be perfect which came from others—for example, being advised to lose weight—but mostly from herself, from the voice inside her.

The Substance premiered at Cannes in May 2024, earning the festival's best screenplay award. The film has gone on to earn five Academy Award nominations: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Actress and Best Makeup and Hairstyling. The film tells the story of Elizabeth Sparkle (Moore), a once-famous actress turned TV fitness-show host (think 80’s Lycra leotards, headbands and legwarmers). The film begins with Sparkle, who is turning 50, being told that she is too old to continue as host of the show and that a younger star must be found. Sparkle resolves this crisis by taking a black-market drug—"the substance"—recommended secretively by a doctor, ordered through a mysterious phone call and picked up from an anonymous locker in a dubious part of town. The substance, as the official trailer states, is a miracle drug.[6]

The trailer asks: “Have you ever dreamed of a better version of yourself, younger, more beautiful, more perfect? One single injection unlocks your DNA and will release another version of yourself. This is the substance.”

The drug induces a dramatic metamorphosis and Sue (Margaret Qualley), emerges from the chrysalis of Sparkle’s body, as a younger version of herself. Predictably Sue gets the gig, as well as a hot lover, fame, and fortune. The substance's instructions require that Sue and Sparkle swap bodies weekly, instructions which Sue ignores, leading to the irreversible dramatic aging of the original body (Sparkle's), depicted in the rare occasions when Sue swaps consciousness and "lets" Sparkle live for a period. In the mode of the horror genre, things deteriorate, until Sue kills Sparkle, although in doing so she kills the source of the "stabilizer fluid" she needs to maintain her form. Panicked, Sue injects "the substance"—ignoring the clear instructions that it can be used one time only—resulting in the creation of a grotesque mutated body, which is ultimately destroyed in scenes of blood and gore. It's a classic horror denouement.

Great Intentions, Dubious Results

Undoubtedly, Fargeat and Moore had great intentions: They want to show that the beauty ideal is impossible and encourage women to reject it and to turn off that critical inner voice. But does The Substance succeed in its aims? Yes and no.

The film does call out the pressure of lookism: that women have to have the four features of the beauty ideal—thinness, smoothness, firmness and youth—to be presentable.⁷ If you don’t have these, the message is that you should hide away, that you are not good enough to be seen, whether on TV, or, as in some memorable scenes with Moore, even in the mirror. This is the plot and message of The Substance, and the film has made people talk about the power of the beauty ideal, and given Fargeat and Moore, among others, a platform to speak about it.

But talking about the power of the ideal, sadly, does little to reduce its power. Just as knowing that images are digitally altered, and that no one looks as good as their Instagram, does nothing to stop us wanting to be perfect, so does knowing that the beauty ideal is unattainable do little to stop us feeling like failures when we are not as thin, firm, smooth and young as we think we should be.⁸ In an increasingly visual and virtual culture the image always speaks louder than the word. The message might be intended to be “beauty ideals are unrealistic” or “don’t value yourself on how you look”, but what do the film's images tell us? The images tell us that even someone as iconic as Demi Moore—as in a dramatic and heart-breaking scene when she’s dressed up and made up to go out and is absolutely beautiful, but can’t bear her older face. She violently wipes off her makeup, in a way that looks like she’s trying to wipe away—erode, make invisible—her aging face. The film might want to tell us, Don’t do this, but does it really? Or does it tell us, in its depiction of perfectly smooth, firm, young, and constantly focused-on curves of Qualley, that the perfect body does matter, and indeed might be all that matters.

The message could be read as: What Sparkle gets wrong is not the realisation that she needs to be perfect. What's she gets wrong is having the audacity to rebel, to try to cheat the system. The message might be to tell women that the decline into invisibility is inevitable, that it is the outside that matters, and they need to resign themselves to their inevitable fate. The images tell us—in contrast to the intended message—that only the young are beautiful, and only the young should expect to have work or be loved. While The Substance wants this not to be true, it does little to give us an alternative.

Professor Heather Widdows is a Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy, University of Warwick

Dr. Jessica Sutherland is a member of the Interdisciplinary Ethics Research Group, Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Warwick.