The Substance is a 2024 body horror film written and directed by Coralie Fargeat. It follows a fading celebrity (Demi Moore) who is fired by her producer (Dennis Quaid) due to her age and uses a black market drug that creates a younger woman (Margaret Qualley) with unexpected side effects.
Fargeat wrote the screenplay to explore societal pressures surrounding women's bodies and aging. Principal photography took place in France from August to October 2022. The film is noted for its use of satire and grotesque, hyperrealistic imagery, accomplished through prosthetic makeup and other practical effects, including bodysuits, puppetry, dummies, and approximately 21,000 liters (5,500 U.S. gallons) of theatrical blood. Originally set for distribution by Universal Pictures, the rights were later acquired by Mubi after a dispute between Fargeat and Universal over final cut privilege.
The Substance premiered at the 77th Cannes Film Festival on May 19, 2024, where it won Best Screenplay and was nominated for the Palme d'Or. The film was theatrically released in the United Kingdom and the United States on September 20, 2024, and in France on November 6, 2024. It received widespread acclaim, with particular praise for Fargeat's writing and directing, the special effects, and Moore's performance. At the box office, the film grossed $77–82 million on a budget of $18 million, becoming Mubi's highest-grossing film. Moore's performance earned her a Golden Globe Award, Critics' Choice Award, and Screen Actors Guild Award, as well as nominations for an Academy Award and BAFTA Award. The film also received nominations for Best Picture and Best Director at the Academy Awards, Critics' Choice and Golden Globes.
Plot On her 50th birthday, faded Hollywood film star Elisabeth Sparkle is dismissed from her long-running aerobics TV show by its producer, Harvey, due to her age. Elisabeth crashes her car while distracted by a billboard of herself being taken down. At the hospital, a young male nurse gives her a flash drive advertising "The Substance", a black market drug that promises a "younger, more beautiful, more perfect" version of oneself.
Elisabeth orders The Substance and injects the single-use serum. She convulses as a younger woman named Sue emerges from a slit in her back. The two bodies must switch consciousness once every week, with the inactive body remaining unconscious and fed intravenously. Daily injections of stabilizer fluid, extracted from the original body, are required to prevent Sue from deteriorating. Sue becomes an overnight sensation after auditioning as Elisabeth's replacement, and Harvey offers her the chance to host the New Year's Eve show. While Sue lives a confident and hedonistic life, Elisabeth becomes a self-hating recluse. Near the end of one weekly cycle, Sue brings a man home for casual sex; she delays the switch by extracting additional stabilizer fluid, causing Elisabeth's right index finger to rapidly age. Elisabeth contacts the supplier, who warns that delaying the switching schedule will lead to irreversible, rapid aging of the original body.
Elisabeth and Sue gradually become separate personalities and begin to hate each other. Elisabeth resents Sue's frequent disregard of the switching schedule, causing further aging, while Sue is appalled by Elisabeth's descent into unhealthy binge-eating. Following a particularly destructive episode, Sue stockpiles stabilizer fluid and refuses to switch back. Three months later, on the day before the New Year's Eve show, Sue runs out of stabilizer fluid and contacts the supplier, who informs her she must switch back to replenish the fluid. When they switch, Elisabeth finds herself transformed into a deformed, hag-like hunchback. To stop Sue aging her further, Elisabeth orders a serum designed to terminate her. However, Elisabeth, still craving Sue's celebrity status, stops before fully injecting the serum and resuscitates Sue, leaving both of them conscious. Realizing Elisabeth's initial intent, Sue beats Elisabeth to death before leaving to host the show.
Without Elisabeth, and due to most of the serum already being injected, Sue's body rapidly deteriorates. She attempts to create a new version of herself using the leftover substance, despite the single-use warning. This results in the creation of a grotesque mutated body, "Monstro Elisasue", with both Elisabeth's and Sue's faces. Wearing a mask cut from a poster of Elisabeth, Monstro Elisasue attempts to host the show, but the audience erupts into chaos. An audience member decapitates her, only for an even more mutated head to grow back, and one of her arms to break and drench the audience and studio in blood.
Fleeing the studio, Monstro Elisasue collapses and explodes into viscera. Elisabeth's original face detaches from the gore, crawling onto her neglected star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. She smiles as she hallucinates being admired before melting into a puddle of blood, which is cleaned up by a sidewalk scrubber the next day.
Cast
Production The Substance was an international co-production between France, the United Kingdom and the United States. Coralie Fargeat was director and producer alongside Working Title Films co-producers Eric Fellner and Tim Bevan, and Blacksmith, a Paris-based production company created by Fargeat that same year. Filming began on May 9, 2022, and wrapped in October 2022, spanning 108 shooting days. The film's budget was $17.5-18 million. The project took five years from concept to release.
Conception and screenplay
After the critical success of Revenge (2017) in the United States, Fargeat was in contention to direct studio films including the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) film Black Widow (2021). However, the prospect of a studio film did not appeal to her, as she would not receive final cut privilege. Fargeat spent several months in Los Angeles following the release of Revenge, and began writing the first scenes of The Substance, as a spec script, at a coffee shop in Silver Lake; she became a producer to maintain creative control. Eric Fellner, who co-produced the film, traveled to Paris several times for lunch with Fargeat after seeing Revenge in 2017 to persuade her to choose Working Title for her next project. The screenplay was developed over two years, loosely inspired by her short Reality+ (2014). The script was written in both English and French, with descriptions in French, but with English-speaking audiences in mind.
Fargeat aimed to continue the feminist themes developed in Revenge, exploring the pressures and expectations placed on women. During the period when she began writing the film, she was in her 40s and was confronting negative thoughts about her relevance and appearance. "I really started to think and [have] these voices in my head like, 'Now your life is over. No one is going to care about you.'" She described the process of making the film as a way to confront and release this internalized violence, using the body horror genre as a "weapon of expression".
Fargeat crafted the 146-page script with a scant 29 pages dedicated to dialogue. She has described her writing style as like writing a novel. She wrote in extensive detail; every sensory experience the audience would feel in the final film including sounds (with onomatopoeia like "splosh" and "aaagh") and sometimes even specified close-ups were written in the script.
In lieu of character backstories, Fargeat used colors, actions, and attire to symbolize character traits — Elisabeth Sparkle's yellow jacket represented a "superhero-like" quality before her transformation, and Sue's pink leotard represented her femininity. The character Sue, described as blonde in a 2020 draft of the script, was given her namesake to subconsciously evoke Lolita and Marilyn Monroe, "baby-doll"-like iconography, and enduring beauty standards. Fargeat chose the name Elisabeth for its "iconic resonance" with stars of Old Hollywood, and Sparkle because of its literal meaning to "shine and be under the light".
Fargeat conceived the pivotal birth scene, in which Sue emerges from Elisabeth's back, while in the shower. It was the first that she wrote, and in her view, "the most important scene of the film". She recalls, "I didn't even know who my character would be. It's the first one that really came to my mind, and it holds the core DNA of the movie as a true visceral experience with no words, making you feel what the characters are going to feel". Fargeat later decided that the main character should be an actress to explore societal perceptions of bodies. She chose to have Elisabeth Sparkle host an aerobics class, inspired by Jane Fonda's transition from a successful actress to her second career starring in exercise tapes.
Fargeat listened to a variety of music to influence the screenplay. She cited Mica Levi's score for Under the Skin (2013), and other experimental music and composers that had "this kind of heartbeat or pulsation... related to the heartbeat of the new human being or the way you can feel with your body". Fargeat also listened to hypersexualized music to influence the in-universe Pump It Up show.
Casting
Fargeat knew that casting would be challenging, as the film features minimal dialogue and relies heavily on the characters. Elisabeth Sparkle needed to be cast first, given that she was the center of the film's narrative. Fargeat wanted to cast an actress who had been at the heart of the star system, a real-life icon. Fargeat did not include Demi Moore on the initial list of potential lead actresses, stating 'She will never do it'; several actresses were considered but declined the role before Moore. Eventually, with nothing to lose, Moore was sent the script.
At her agent's insistence, Moore read the script before knowing specific details, later speculating that this was due to the film's sensitive subject of aging. She was impressed by the script and its subject matter, though she was unfamiliar with the body horror genre. Moore felt that the film could either "really work and be part of a cultural shift" or "be a fucking disaster". She remained unsure of the audience reaction up until the premiere when she knew the film had worked.
Surprised by Moore's positive response, Fargeat read her autobiography and was struck by her resilience. "I read her autobiography, and she had some tough years in her personal life. [...] She made herself on her own [...] in a place that was a totally male-dominated industry, being ahead of her time in many regards, like doing this naked picture of her pregnant, taking a lot of risks and having a lot of feminist statements, wanting to be paid as much as her co-stars". Fargeat had previously worked as a trainee assistant director on the Moore-led film Passion of Mind (2000), handling tasks like making copies and bringing her coffee in the mornings.
Before being offered the role, Moore discussed the film with Fargeat over six meetings. Fargeat explained the film in detail: the film's extensive prep work, prosthetics, meager resources, shooting location and the level of nudity, which she felt was foundational to the story.
Moore understood the meta-nature of the role but did not feel that she was the character, as Elisabeth had no family. As she further explained, "she's dedicated her entire life to her career, and when that's taken, what does she have?" However, Moore sympathized with the character's pain. She recognized that the characters were deeply important to Fargeat, and saw them as stand-ins for the director herself: Elisabeth represents Fargeat, while Qualley's Sue is the girl from the '90s that Fargeat always felt pitted against. Moore would later reflect positively on her role, saying, "What I love is this was a rich, complex, demanding role that gave me an opportunity to really push myself outside of my comfort zone, and in the end to feel like I explored and grew not only as an actor, but as a person".