They Are Going To Love You: The Substance (2024)

Staff Writer Ezekiel Sen reviews Coralie Fargeat’s sensational “splatterfest”, The Substance, which won Best Screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year.

Editorial note: This article contains film spoilers.

If you have not yet seen the gut-churning film, The Substance (2024) follows Demi Moore’s Elisabeth Sparkle, a fading starlet, who takes a mysterious substance that promises the renewal of youth to grant its user a new life. She soon realises that failure to follow the substance’s terms and conditions has extremely devastating consequences, that eventually spiral out of control. 

Critics and audiences have hyped this film up to be a delight for body horror fans, and I can’t disagree. From bone-crunching snaps to things creeping under the skin to extensions and growths of the human body that seem unimaginable, it’s definitely not just a “Tuesday night casual watch”.

Despite the appetite for such gore, The Substance has garnered criticism for turning off a fair share of viewers. Horror movies are either seen as too intimidating or not serious enough, be it by critics or general viewers. The genre of horror has been slipping through the cracks of receiving mass recognition, with the last film with Oscar nominations being 2017’s Get Out.

But The Substance really has some, well, substance and shouldn’t be written off as a film lacking depth. The film clinched Best Screenplay at this year’s Cannes Film Festival against giants like Megalopolis (2024) and The Apprentice (2024).

So, this is my attempt to show you that this film illustrates why the “body horror barrier” is worth breaking to celebrate its artistry.

Firstly, when I’m referring to audience’s deterrence from body horror, I am referring to those who are quick to write off this movie as another “gore-fest” or “Cronenberg-wannabe”. Most dictionaries will tell you gore relates more heavily to blood, while films extend to organs and violence as well. Body horror can have gore, but its essence lies in mutilation and mutation, pushing bodies beyond what is realistically possible. Some famous examples of this would be in John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982) and the 2018 adaptation of Suspiria, while the Saw franchise, for instance, captures gore.

This film left me gagging in more ways than one. Margaret Qualley, who plays Sue, and Moore’s performances are captivating, relatable and most of all, distressing. The specific choices made for composition, editing and sound design were faultless and unexpectedly, the humour too. 

But of course, the film’s entirety is designed to make you nauseous beyond its borrowed styles from the genre of body horror. Aspiring creatives trying to find inspiration for unique dread can take note of features like the absurdly articulated dialogue, the industrial pump-ing score, or camera zooms and angles that make you sink further into your seat.

In fact, the film’s thesis statement to me is a sequence devoid of body horror and gore, only facing the film's simple yet harsh moral— Patriarchal society’s tumultuous standards for women.

The sequence sees Elisabeth preparing for a date but just unable to leave for it, re-applying lipstick and viciously wiping it off. She finally concedes on seeing an enormous billboard of Sue, decked out in a neon pink bodysuit which shows off her physique, and eats her feelings until the week finishes.

This brings me to an aspect of the film that I found more disgusting than the body horror itself, which is food. Setting aside the underlying meaning and connections of food and self-image, the way food is presented in the film is just so gross, particularly a scene involving French cuisine (I shall say no more). I was never really one to be perturbed by spoil and leftovers but somehow this film made those sequences particularly hard to get through.

The film is packed with imagery of unpalatable bodily contortions and distortions. They are hard to watch but are not just there for shock. Extreme scenes, like the final transformation when Elisabeth and Sue morph into one, showcase a whole barrage of body horror tropes but comes off more grossly adorable and sympathetic than monstrous, think Labubu dolls and Fugglers.

Aside from comments critiquing the film as “too camp to be taken seriously", there are others who jeer at body horror’s complexity as a reason to avoid the film entirely. The niche of body horror is dominated by the Cronenberg family, with films like Crimes Of The Future (2022) and Infinity Pool (2023). These films tend to rub viewers the wrong way, either spending too much time explaining the science of the body horror, or being too abstract with the plot.

This film is still a wacky “arthouse” film, but the simplicity of its plot allowed Fargeat to play so much more with the elements in the film, and make viewers feel more justified by the end of the film. There are no time loops, inconclusive endings or epileptic sex scenes (there are three workout music video sequences though).

Instead, it’s as straightforward as— “Take the substance, follow the rules, benefit. Someone doesn’t follow the rules and bad things happen.”

You’re not adding on mind-bending plot twists or character arcs to this already overstimulating film, allowing all aspects of its forms to carry you through its 141-minute runtime. Not to mention, the film ends quite literally where we start.

Additionally, The Substance is too cemented in pop culture to miss. There are a plethora of memes and parodies online, some of which are by people who are just drawn to its absurdity.

This amplifies perhaps the last reason I can give, as why you must watch this picture, and that is that it is FUNNY. It never takes itself too seriously and the script has some of the most perfect comedic timing I’ve seen in a dark comedy since Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022). 

It is safe to say, this film is not for the squeamish who may faint at the sight of blood and guts spewed around, nor for the squeamish who may curl up into the ball when the film shoves dark realities in your faces.

Personally, I adored this autonomous-snow-white-death-becomes-her-the-fly tale, falling just under Strange Darling (2023) and Blink Twice (2024) for my movie of 2024. My last shot to convince you, if it means anything: I dislike Francis Ford Coppola but that doesn’t mean I won’t watch Megalopolis (2024), so #trythesubstance.