The Substance understands that beauty injectables can be self-harm

I can’t stop looking at my face. I have been this way for as long as I can recall. 

In my small-town American high school, I was voted ‘Most Likely to Be Caught Looking in the Mirror,’ by my graduating class. It’s funny, and a little embarrassing, but it’s accurate. To this day, I have a mirrored phone case to check my lipstick, my skin, my hair. And as I’ve grown older, I’ve noticed small changes, crinkles, tiredness that’s more apparent and permanent than it was before. So if you’re like me, you start to think about injectables. If you’re like me, you get them periodically, to mixed reactions from friends and family. If you’re like me, you don’t really want to stop.   

Elisabeth Sparkle, the protagonist of Coralie Fargeat’s new feminist body horror film The Substance, knows a thing or two about this habit of self-monitoring into oblivion. She spends a lot of time obsessing about her appearance, to the detriment of nearly every other priority in her life. The world around her tells her she should care, but it’s more than that: the call is coming from inside the house. Played by Demi Moore, as an Oscar-winning actress now aged into obsolescence in a cruelly patriarchal show-biz world, Elisabeth works tirelessly on a television fitness programme for middle-aged women. But she’s hit 50, and she’s going to be replaced by a bouncier, shinier version of herself. And so Elisabeth tries a mysterious, too-good-to-be-true, experimental beauty treatment known as the Substance, which allows a young, hot version of yourself to live your life for seven days, after which point you must swap out again.

There’s a sense this is a reckless choice; the origin of the product is murky, its HQ in some dingy downtown basement, its colour a vicious neon green. And, not by accident, it’s administered via injection. The fact that the actual benefits of this treatment seem scarce, or like a bit of a scam, is hardly a coincidence; while Sue (Margaret Qualley, playing Elisabeth’s youthful avatar) takes the wheel, Elisabeth only seems to get the shadow of her younger version’s experience. It leaves her tantalisingly close, pressing her face against the window into a more perfect self, and it slowly drives her mad with envy.

Many women – including younger ones than Moore’s character – have knowingly ignored risk to health, mental wellness, or even life to try a new and promising beauty tweak. Beauty has its own kind of power, after all, and if you’ve relied on it for long enough, feeling any loss of that power is significant. What The Substance underscores is how addictive – how dangerous – this impetus to keep ‘fixing’ imaginary flaws really is. Even when Sue is plunging a needle into an infected wound for her own gain, destroying what’s left of Elisabeth’s body and life, Elisabeth cannot seem to put an end to the process. She’s too caught up in the hope she might finally find perfection. 

Critiques of The Substance have often referenced its emptiness – a frustrating lack of depth in its characters and their motivations. It’s my contention that the superficiality is precisely the point. It is a warning. Look at the production design of Elisabeth’s luxury LA flat. An enormous photograph of her, firm-thighed in unforgiving latex, smooth as a dolphin, with sleek dark hair and an almost-plasticine perfect face, fills her living room. There is little else there of note; large picture windows, a sofa, some dusty awards in a case. There are few signs of any inner life, any books, any paintings. The kitchen is tiny and the bathroom weirdly cavernous, bright white like a laboratory. Appetites must be suppressed and bodily realities must be monitored and adjusted, after all. It is never good enough, and requires constant and exhausting labour from morning to night. Nonetheless, the body will continue to age – it will sag, it will dimple, it will grow unwanted hair. Beauty treatments are no longer self-care when you cannot reconcile with this fact; instead, they can become self-harm.

After a couple of years of uneventful and well-received beauty injectables, my body started to revolt on a cellular level. I developed swelling, itching, and a painful allergic reaction which required all of the product to be dissolved. My face was visibly patchy and asymmetrical. And then, like Elisabeth, I made a reckless choice: I went back and had a slightly different treatment, taking a considerable and unwise risk in doing so. I couldn’t stand the idea of leaving well enough alone. So listen: when Elisabeth’s back literally rips open and the first sight of her perfect, pert, youthful avatar pops fully formed from her body, I may have been horrified, but I could kind of understand it. 

After she saw the film, a friend of mine said to me: ‘This is for the girlies who have at some point in their lives got so frustrated while getting ready that they’ve hit themselves on the head with their hairbrush.’ I’m not sure I have done that, but I immediately understood the impulse and knew I’d felt what drove it. The sense that no matter how you adjust your straps or reapply mascara, something is just not right; there’s a rage that comes from it. In one scene, Elisabeth gets ready to go out on a date with a nerdy friend who clearly adores her; she looks stunning in a red cocktail dress. But she cannot stop fixing her hair, picking at her appearance, comparing it to the lush image of 25-year-old, dewy-mouthed Sue. She overapplies her make-up. Then she gives up; she rubs it off and she doesn’t go out.

It is understandable that some women viewers have come away finding the film’s messaging depressing, hopeful that decades of feminism would make a woman like Elisabeth a relic of the old, bad days, or a film about this subject stereotypical and rote in how it presents the pressure of beauty standards. But as far as I can see, those standards remain pretty evergreen. Cyborgian make-up, undetectable filler, glass skin, TikTok ageism, AI beauty contests; these trends all underline the same desire for thinness, femininity, conformity and symmetry of features, only increasingly augmented by tech innovation and capitalist hunger. We are more flooded with images of perfection (a la Fargeat’s wilfully distasteful, music-video leering at Sue), bombarded with the normality of aesthetic treatments, and faced with the additional pressure of opting out, as a good feminist. That’s before you factor in the fear of something going wrong, and it often does – permanent bumps or overdone lips which bleed and burst. And you’re sure to be judged for that, too.

Granted, my experience with injectables didn’t turn me into a slimy blood and teeth-spewing mutant à la Elisabeth and Sue. But Fargeat’s cautionary tale is enough to scare a person straight. The urge to win an unwinnable battle against the vicissitudes of age is what drives the protagonist of The Substance to doom. Ultimately, she is still trying to straighten her hair in the mirror when she has an extra eyeball growing out of her back. The vicious cycle of taming and glossing and streamlining the female body is neverending, and so Fargeat chooses to end with its opposite. There’s a kind of retributive, violent expulsion of bodily fluid that brings the truth of the human body to a kamikaze conclusion. It’s disgusting, because we are all disgusting, with wrinkles and spots and cellulite, and thank god for it. The alternative is an empty luxury apartment. A wooden hairbrush-to-the-head. A sharp needle in the spine. Or a foreign body in your face, seeping underneath your skin, making you itch. What could be more of a horror than that?