The most grounded and emotionally realistic scene in The Substance is a body horror masterpiece that uses a fictional beauty-enhancing drug as a satirical stand-in for all the dangerous cosmetic procedures that people undergo to cling to their youth. As she starts losing work past the age of 50, fading celebrity Elisabeth Sparkle begins taking this drug to improve her appearance (and it quickly gets way out of hand).
For the most part, The Substance takes place in a heightened reality. This is established early on, when a thick layer of snow falls on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. It’s set in a world where aerobics videos are still as popular as they were in the ‘80s, where an FDA-approved drug leaves its comatose for weeks at a time, and where a grotesque monster can walk down the street and no one will bat an eye. But there’s one scene in The Substance that’s grounded in a deeply relatable emotional realism — and it’s symbolic of the whole movie.
Elisabeth Getting Ready For A Date Is The Substance's Most Emotionally Grounded Scene
It's Painfully Relatable For Middle-Aged Women In The Dating Pool
Midway through The Substance, as Elisabeth is starting to get overshadowed by Sue, she desperately wants to feel attractive again. So, she calls Fred, the old classmate who gushed over her at the beginning of the movie, to arrange a date for eight o’clock. As she’s getting ready for the date, Elisabeth puts on a striking red dress and matches it with an equally striking red lipstick. But the longer she looks at herself in the bathroom mirror, the less sure she is that she looks good.
The Substance's 11 Biggest Unanswered Questions
The Substance has an explosively ambitious ending, but there are some questions that the film leaves surprisingly open-ended when the credits roll.
Every time she’s about to leave the apartment, she ends up going back to the mirror and reapplying her makeup. As the sequence goes on — and the clock gets closer and closer to eight — she starts comparing herself to Sue’s comatose body in the newly constructed bathroom closet. Sue’s pink lip gloss looks great, so Elisabeth applies pink lip gloss over her red lipstick. She ends up rethinking her appearance so much that she never leaves the apartment. This is the most grounded and emotionally realistic scene in the film. It’s painfully relatable for middle-aged women in the dating pool.
Elisabeth Second-Guessing Her Makeup & Warping Her Appearance Is A Microcosm Of The Whole Movie
She Keeps Trying To Improve Her Appearance And Actually Looks Worse And Worse Each Time
Not only is this sequence the most heartbreaking scene in the movie; it’s also a microcosm of the whole film. Elisabeth keeps trying to improve her appearance throughout the montage, but she actually looks worse and worse each time she goes back to the bathroom mirror. This is symbolic of the entire plot with the “Substance” serum. The longer Sue enjoys the limelight, the faster Elisabeth ages. And Sue’s good looks don’t last, either, as her body eventually starts falling apart. When she goes back to the Substance, she turns herself into a horrifying monster.
One of the movie’s key messages is that cosmetic enhancements ultimately do more harm than good.
One of the movie’s key messages is that cosmetic enhancements ultimately do more harm than good. They’re supposed to make people look and feel better, but they’re destructive; aging naturally always looks better than trying to unnaturally slow down the aging process. Elisabeth looked great with her original makeup, but the more she changed it — and the younger she tried to look — the worse it got. The rest of the movie takes two-and-a-half hours (and a lot of prosthetics) to make that same point.
The Substance Is A Perfect Horror Metaphor For Hollywood's Unrealistic Beauty Standards
The Substance Uses Cronenbergian Body Horror To Capture Societal Horrors
All the best horror movies use their horror tropes and imagery as a metaphor for social commentary. Get Out is a horror metaphor for racism, Talk to Me is a horror metaphor for drug addiction, and The Substance is a horror metaphor for Hollywood’s unrealistic standards of beauty. The airbrushed images in movies and magazines make anyone who doesn’t look like Sue feel completely worthless, and that’s the crux of Elisabeth’s arc in the movie: she reaches the age that Hollywood’s powerful old white men have deemed to be her expiration date.
The Substance Ending Explained
The ending of The Substance underscores the themes of the film and highlights the dangerous double standard that exists in Hollywood.
Hollywood’s unfair beauty standards are causing people to resort to extremes like getting botox injections or taping their mouths shut while they sleep to slow down the aging process. Elisabeth’s experiments with the Substance are an even more extreme exaggeration of those extreme measures. The Substance uses gonzo Cronenbergian body horror to convey a timely commentary on society’s absurd expectations of women.
The Substance
- Release Date
- September 20, 2024
- Runtime
- 140 Minutes
- Director
- Coralie Fargeat
Cast
Demi MooreElisabeth Sparkle
Margaret QualleySue
WHERE TO WATCH
Elisabeth Sparkle, a fading celebrity, turns to a mysterious drug that promises to restore her youth by creating a younger, more beautiful version of herself. But splitting time between her original and new body leads to horrifying consequences as her alternate self, Sue, begins to unravel her life in a disturbing body-horror descent.
- Writers
- Coralie Fargeat
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