We encounter Coralie Fargeat’s Hollywood as a sleek ultra-stylised neon world bouncing to cold hard Germanic minimal techno. In the director’s feminist body horror slasher The Substance, Demi Moore plays the fading former A-lister actress Elisabeth Sparkle, who is now reduced to animating a daytime aerobics television show. But Elisabeth’s career is about to take another hit when she overhears her manager Harvey, a grotesque Jovian character and obvious reference to a real existing producer, talk about replacing her. The audience, says Harvey, demands younger flesh. 

We see a devastated Elisabeth, after an alcohol infused meltdown, order “The Substance”. This meticulously branded word-of-mouth clandestine pharmaceutical rejuvenator — Fargeat toys with popular Hollywood “adrenochrome harvesting” conspiracy theories here — is to change her fate and renew her career. After ordering by phone from a male voice whose non-reactive brevity and dearth of niceties resemble the archetypal Parisian waiter, she receives a key card. It half-opens a scruffy door in a derelict part of town, where she picks up a package from what appears like an ominous mafia-like letterbox company.

In it, Elisabeth finds a medical kit with a set of instructions.  Upon expertly injecting the “Activator” in her ultra-minimalist and sterile-looking bathroom, we see a youthful double rapidly growing in her own body and breaking out of her back leaving a bloody gaping shaft. The hatched Sue — played by Margaret Qualley — is at the height of youthfulness and radiates sex. After stitching together Elisabeth’s comatose body and attaching it to a Substance-brand weekly food pack, Sue nevertheless simply leaves it discarded on the bathroom floor. She decides to head straight back to the Hollywood studio where she successfully applies for the position as her own successor. At the same time, using “The Substance” requires a particular kind of ongoing medical logistics: Sue must “stabilise” herself every day by withdrawing from the host body spinal fluid in a lumbar puncture-like procedure. Every 7 days, furthermore, she must alternate between the bodies to avoid the collapse of her youthful double.  Sue is reminded of this by a rapid disintegration of her body announced by onsetting vertigo and nose bleeds. 

Of course, things do not go smoothly. Elisabeth’s life drastically fades against the stellar success and vitality of youthful and enchanting Sue whose billboard portrait rapidly arrives in full view of their apartment window. Elisabeth is haunted and paralysed by the image of her younger Doppelgaenger. She reverts to spending her own seven days locked up in her apartment passively watching infomercials and overeating. Sue in return, in her immature egoism, takes this behaviour as a justification: For her to disrespect her depressive and passive host’s body which leads to Elisabeth’s rapid and irreversible ageing. It first manifests in a drastically aged finger: Sue had withdrawn just enough of the precious “stabiliser” spinal fluid to have one extra day with a guy she picked up at a night out. 

Eventually, Elisabeth becomes a grotesquely-aged hunchbacked monster, a sort of “Picture of Dorian Gray” in the flesh, hidden away in a secret part of the bathroom. In a bout of panic, the horribly aged Elisabeth botches a halfhearted attempt at terminating the routine, which leads both of them to physically compete for survival. This — as we viewers know — is completely absurd because of the interdependence of the bodies: the motto of the company, after all, is “You are One”. In time, we are invited to an inevitable grotesque aesthetically and sonically assaulting grand finale in the style of Peter Jackson’s 90s splatter horror. 

On the surface, The Substance, throughout its surprisingly short-lived 140 minutes, strikes the viewer as a balancing act between trope-overloaded arthouse, ultra-stylish aestheticism and platitude feminism. The latter is certainly what will be most divisive and vividly discussed about the film: Throughout, Elisabeth is haunted by her male interlocutors which appear to her in the form of disembodied snide comments she replays in her head. Their prominence and repetition, especially when they hover over the protagonists final (literal) implosion, suggest to the viewer that the fault for Elisabeth’s troubles lies with the “Harveys”. These abusive male monsters encountered throughout the film, are, of course, without exception portrayed as white males. Through their exclusive depiction as either pathetic simps or cruel arrogant monsters, they become a moral indictment of (white) masculinity at large. On a surface level — and The Substance is all about surfaces — this is bound to lead to a shallow interpretation of the film in line with contemporary feminist discourses from #MeToo to ageism. 

However, the crucial question to me appears to be whether as viewers, we are actually justified in having sympathy with the main actress: Are we really supposed to feel sorry for a stunningly good-looking 60-year old Demi Moore? In the post-broadcasting, post-beauty-standard Dove Soap-age of plus-sized “beauty at all shapes and sizes” models and niche audiences? Really? If this sounds more like a victim fantasy than reality, that’s because it is.

In The Substance, the deterministic impact of the harsh externalised male voice we hear haunting the character (“I wish she had her boobs in her face instead of that nose”) really desubjectivises and degrades Elisabeth as a passive receptacle in a cold male world. At the same time, as viewers, we know that the motto of The Substance — “You are one” — really above all suggests Elisabeth to be a victim of herself: a materialistic airhead, who deludes herself about her own relevance and who has not cultivated a personality beyond a narcissistic starlet surface. 

The forced externalisation of Elisabeth’s problem as white masculinity thus provokes a deeper reading of The Substance as a film of the femcel genre. The femcel is a contemporary culture wars figure who is the counterpart to the pathetic male incel. But where male incelism is (rightfully) ill-received and almost universally condemned, the femcel fantasy world of male monsters is salonfähig as a discourse. We find its tropes courted and encouraged in polite society. By pitying Elisabeth we thereby buy into the director’s offer of accepting a shallow ageing starlet, who seeks to morally browbeat the world into accepting her continued relevance, as standing in for the female sex at large. From this point of view, The Substance encourages the viewer to join with Elisabeth in her narcissistic crusade where the world itself is at fault, where men via Elisabeth’s and the director’s cruel clinical eye are turned into quasi-demonic and disgusting figures who determine her. 

Arguably, the problem of the femcel, as of its male counterpart, is that she is at war with the way of the world and nature itself

Are we not underestimating the protagonist when depriving her of her existential agency? It would be easy, for instance, to imagine Elisabeth taking an alternative turn and just happily retiring with her Hollywood millions, a fate which today eludes millions with no prospects of ever retiring at all. Elisabeth’s and Sue’s problem, above all, appears to be that they really just want to be a vapid feminine surface. Instead of taking on her forced retirement as a higher calling to develop a personality beyond her appearance, Elisabeth pursues superficiality ever more ruthlessly, propped up by her own thin-skinned and fragile personality and a compensating pseudo-profound moral outrage.

Arguably, the problem of the femcel, as of its male counterpart, is that she is at war with the way of the world and nature itself. Both the male and female incel cannot accept that the world does not conform to their childish moral fantasies and sexual idealism. Both narcissistically demand unconditionally love for an undeveloped day-dreaming form of “who they are”. It concretely results in men thinking women can be wooed by accumulating harmless and polite niceties, occasional financial support, flowers and chocolate boxes, and women believing men can be morally extorted into “finding them sexy” and leering after them like horny teenagers beyond the age of 40. 

Today, this morally underdeveloped and gender-inclusive incelisation of culture has long developed its own discrete symbolic universe of hermetic discourses. It can fester in its filter bubbles and rears its ugly head only when it comes to the fore as an increasingly awkward culture of desexed and exhausted ressentiment between the sexes. It turns the other sex into a monstrous caricature and for this reason condemns its representatives to “not get any” in the first place. Arguably, the predicament of both the femcel and the incel is precisely that they cannot accept any real difference of the sexes and that they cannot refrain from making moral judgements about the sexual animalness of humans. At the origin of this predicament, we can imagine an ongoing wounded childish idealisation of the sexual economy, which, when confronted with its reality, becomes fundamentally overwhelmed. To cope and preserve their moralising imaginary, they fantasise the other as Houellebecqian monsters, where, in reality, there is only an all-too human sexual animality moving the bodies. 

What disturbed and even outraged me most about The Substance — I babbled some half-cooked and unkind criticism into some interviewer’s camera right after the film at Melbourne’s film festival MIFF — was precisely the lack of what we also witness the protagonist Elisabeth craving for: love.  

But where, for the protagonist, love is empty adulation by her fans, true “transcendental” love, above all, means a possibility of radical acceptance of the world and of the other sex with its flaws. Or better yet: to not discern them as flaws in the first place but as a more morally neutral and enchanting sexual duality, which does not deserve to be forced into the empty Procrustean bed of the incel.  

Yet in its depressive femcel realism, The Substance does not offer its viewers the transcendence of love. Not even a hint of it. Similar to its central locus, where Liz injects the Substance, its world resembles a surgically sterile bathroom which hides its deterministic ugliness underneath a slick surface.