This piece initially revealed on September 27, 2024. We’re republishing it now that The Substance has acquired 5 Oscar nominations, together with Greatest Image, Demi Moore for Greatest Actress, and Coralie Fargeat for Greatest Director.
Not lengthy after Elisabeth Sparkle’s fiftieth birthday, her boss, a boor named Harvey, delivers some unhealthy information to her over a plate of shrimp: He’s giving her the pink slip. An Oscar-winning actress, Elisabeth (Demi Moore) has spent the second chapter of her profession internet hosting a morning aerobics present. However Harvey (Dennis Quaid) feels she’s “Jurassic,” per the film’s parlance. He tells her as a lot as they’re sitting on this superb eating palace, the place he scarfs down these shrimp heads with such spectacularly off-putting abandon that you just wish to hand him a bib. Elisabeth, in the meantime, doesn’t eat in any respect, her steely expression wavering someplace between despondency and rage.
Because the community strikes to interchange her with a more moderen starlet, Elisabeth seeks determined recourse: She injects herself with a drug that guarantees to make her inhabit a youthful, peppier physique — that of a twentysomething named Sue (Margaret Qualley). The catch is that she should swap corporeal varieties each seven days. That cumbersome course of entails hooking the vacant physique as much as feeding packs, meal replacements whose milky liquid resembles child components. If she deviates from the self-discipline of this routine, her our bodies — sure, each of them — will endure for it.
A goulash of satire and physique horror, Coralie Fargeat’s newly launched The Substance — named after that chemical that hooks Elisabeth right into a harmful cycle of dependence — revels in viscerally repulsive pictures all through its two-hour-plus runtime: Assume slimy organs and cascading gushers of blood. However the visible of Quaid scarfing down shrimp heads, the digicam lingering uncomfortably near his choppers, would possibly make for one in every of its most memorably grotesque photographs. It presages how integral meals turns into to the movie’s provocative assertion on the brutality leveled towards the feminine physique, making The Substance one of many extra notable food-forward movies in current reminiscence.
Meals feels intrinsic to The Substance’s visible language from the primary body: Its establishing shot, and a recurring motif all through, entails a close-up of an egg yolk being needled with a chemical that leads to it spontaneously birthing one other model of itself. That’s adopted by a have a look at Elisabeth’s Hollywood Stroll of Fame star via the a long time because it weathers the vicissitudes of her profession. As soon as a vacationer attraction on the peak of Elisabeth’s movie star, it turns into such an object of neglect — her literal star so invisible — that, at one level, a passerby drops his quick meals order atop it, smearing the plaque with ketchup that appears like prop blood.
That shot anticipates the violence that Elisabeth will quickly precise upon her personal physique with meals. Close to the movie’s starting, we don’t see her eat a lot of something — perhaps she pops an olive into her mouth as she takes a swig of her martini, or fries a pair of eggs (recalling the movie’s preliminary shot). Sue, who takes over for Elisabeth on the community and is prized for her supple body, is much more spartan in the case of her dietary decisions: An inside shot of her fridge reveals little greater than cans of crisp Food plan Coke.
However the extra she transforms into Sue, the extra Elisabeth grows resentful of her dewy-eyed avatar, channeling that self-loathing into meals. Sue will typically awaken after her seven-day dormancy to search out that Elisabeth has left behind rubble of hen bones, waffles, and breakfast hyperlinks in her posh Los Angeles condo, not not like the unkempt mess her previous boss, Harvey, had made with these shrimp. Elisabeth begins to pursue her urge for food with the identical recklessness we noticed in Quaid’s character. She realizes she has each proper to eat the best way a person has unstated permission to, as a result of he’s much less more likely to be punished for his look.
Elisabeth quickly grows agoraphobic, unable to make peace with the best way she seems to be; one evening, she bails on a date and as a substitute reaches into her fridge, stocked with a superbly charred hen, slices of browned toast, and a fats slab of a quiche. (The shot is a direct callback to that earlier have a look at Sue’s extra austere, Food plan Coke-lined fridge.) She digs in, and her physique promptly punishes her for this breach of female propriety. Whereas filming her train present quickly after, Sue feels a bulging object protruding beneath her pores and skin and fishes the overseas materials out from her stomach button: It’s a hen leg. (She wakes up shortly thereafter, implying the episode was a nightmare, however what is obvious is that Sue is wracked with guilt over how a lot Elisabeth eats.) “She wastes seven days stuffing her face in entrance of the TV,” Sue goes on to complain of Elisabeth, with the insolence of a preteen diva, though each girls are one and the identical. That incorrigible urge for food is the problem.
How usually is it that widespread cinema offers us such sequences as grisly as these involving meals? Meals has lengthy had a spot in horror movies; two years in the past, The Menu (2022) — which straddled the road between comedy and horror, very similar to The Substance — featured Ralph Fiennes enjoying a chef with a dictatorial grip on his kitchen and his diners alike, weaponizing meals over his unsuspecting visitors. The graphic therapy of meals in The Substance feels particularly simpatico with The Cook dinner, The Thief, His Spouse & Her Lover (1989), which, in its unforgettable denouement, options Helen Mirren — enjoying the titular adulterous spouse — vengefully demanding that her abusive husband ingest human flesh as penalty for his misdeeds. Fargeat genders starvation with a precision seen in novels of current classic like Chelsea Summers’s A Sure Starvation (2020) and Lottie Hazell’s Piglet (2024), each macabre explorations of the feminine urge for food in all its messy dimensions.
In The Substance, the enmity crescendos one evening when Elisabeth unwraps a goodbye current given to her by her former boss: It’s a cookbook titled French Delicacies from A to Z: 26 Recipes From the Biggest French Cooks, its cherry-red cowl boasting a beaming man with a toque. (The guide appears solely to exist throughout the diegetic world of the movie, with no real-life counterpart.) That cookbook is a catalog of caloric density, with recipes for Caen-style tripes, marinated veal brains, and Christmas turkey filled with foie gras. Elisabeth, her once-black hair now ashen as a consequence of her deviation from that seven-day trade-off schedule, wields it as if it had been a witch’s spellbook.
Elisabeth’s subsequent efficiency within the kitchen is way faraway from the symphonic sequences of ladies cooking you’d discover in one thing like Babette’s Feast (1987), the place cooking turned, in that title character’s palms, an expression of magnificence and chance. In The Substance, Elisabeth defies any expectation of treasured docility put upon girls within the kitchen. Plummy blood sausages sizzle on the pan, resembling Elisabeth’s now-gangrenous limbs. “Eviscerate the turkey,” one instruction instructions, and Elisabeth does simply that, tearing the uncooked chook’s bones with vicious drive. That turkey could as effectively be Sue, whose job calls for she parade her near-naked physique earlier than the eyes of the world. Elisabeth takes an electrical hand mixer to a pool of yolks, her stringy hair strewn with chalky yellow sludge. On this second, Fargeat’s thesis crystallizes: The movie depicts the cruelty that ladies face as they age within the glare of the highlight, and the way girls can turn into the brokers of such cruelty towards themselves. For Elisabeth, every meal turns into a possibility for self-flagellation.
The sinister overlay that cooking takes on in The Substance finally makes the movie really feel just like the twisted progeny of La Grande Bouffe (1973) and Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), two canonical meals movies. Fargeat’s movie incorporates the surplus of the previous (in La Grande Bouffe, a quartet of male gourmands actually eat themselves to dying). However the spirit of the latter, a feminist masterpiece the place the primary character’s sequences of home drudgery culminate in a surprising act of homicide, is handled with maximalist drive by Fargeat. And the sufferer, on this case, is a lady: Elisabeth metes out punishment in direction of her youthful self within the type of chickens and chocolate bars.
What makes The Substance difficult is the bleakness of its outlook, particularly when utilized to meals: Elisabeth doesn’t indulge out of enjoyment. Moderately, she eats with such ravenousness that she appears to be expediting the inevitable. Ladies like Sue will develop previous; they, too, will endure the identical indignities that Elisabeth has needed to deal with upon reaching 50. The world, she is aware of, will punish her for the crime of following her urge for food. As Elisabeth’s palms weave ribbons of tacky mashed potatoes for the dish referred to as Aubrac aligot, we notice that, for her, consuming what she needs — and on her personal phrases — is a method of wresting management of her physique in a society decided to disclaim her of it.
Mayukh Sen is the James Beard Award-winning creator of Style Makers (2021) and the forthcoming Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood’s First South Asian Star (2025). He’s a 2025 Fellow at New America.
