The Substance is Sad

When The Substance came out last September, I caught it in theaters on the second week of its release. Because of my delayed watch, I came walking into the theater with a mind clouded by my friends' reactions to the film a week prior.

I knew to expect a few things: gore, sexuality, and more gore. I knew that it pulled no punches, that it was immodest, unintuitive, and gross. I even heard some shock-value accusations being thrown around above the movie’s central theme. Personally, I walked out of the theater with an additional insight, something that I think every woman felt a touch of during the movie: sadness.

At least, “sadness” is the best way that I can describe it. Without spoiling more than I have to, The Substance follows Elizabeth, a famous aerobics instructor who loses her job on her fiftieth birthday. Insecure about her aging body and yearning for the beauty of her youth, Elizabeth signs up for a subscription-based black market super-drug that supposedly allows you to access a “better version” of yourself. Except, like any drug, there are side effects upon misuse. Now, of course, there is no hidden metaphor here, or anywhere in this movie for that matter.

But honestly, upon seeing the disparity between the amount of empathy given to this film being marked by gender, there might be a hidden feeling. I think sadness is this hidden feeling, or is it dread, maybe? A feeling only those who have been inadvertently taught to correlate beauty with value their entire lives can feel. Because what this film tackles isn’t necessarily the absurdness of beauty standards, anyone can agree with this statement, man or woman, leftist or conservative. It isn’t about how they’ve “gone too far,” a social liberal manifesto about “reeling ourselves back” as women to only shaving our legs twice a week, and the importance of “personal choice.” No, The Substance is strictly radical. There is no “beauty on both sides,” no “self-acceptance,” no “everyone is beautiful” speech at the end. Certainly, The Substance knows our society very well, specifically our beauty standards. It knows that not everyone is beautiful here. Actually, very, very few people are. The Substance instead questions why that sentence made your stomach drop or made you mad at me.

The Substance, through yes, its shock value, displays the societal importance of feeling beautiful to women, even when no one is present, and the lengths we will go to achieve it. As we watch Elizabeth mutilate herself on camera, sticking needles and questionable fluids into her body, it’s hard not to look away. Whoever you are, you just want to grab her face and scream, “STOP!” After discovering some of the less-desirable side effects of the drug, there is a poignant scene where Elizabeth almost decides to quit The Substance. She is on the phone with the subscription service begging for help, only to learn that all side effects are irreversible. With that, she technically had two choices: to keep mutilating herself towards possibly unsafe results or to quit now and age naturally for the rest of her life. Could you guess what she chose?

Well, you don’t have to. You can just look at the lives of real-life women to find your answer. Each year, thousands of women around the globe suffer the severe consequences of pursuing beauty through extreme and often dangerous procedures. According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, over 1.8 million cosmetic surgeries are performed annually in the United States alone. While most are successful, complications can be devastating: in 2021, reports indicated that nearly 1 in 3 women undergoing Brazilian Butt Lift (BBL) procedures faced complications, and its mortality rate is alarmingly higher than other surgeries, reaching as high as 1 in 3,000.

The Substance’s true obsession, and true goal, is to explore the state of mind that compels women to change themselves. As we watch Elizabeth’s absurd transformation, a question is posed: can all this really be chalked up to personal choice? Waved away? To many, feminism is about doing whatever makes you comfortable, after all. But is that all it is? Do women not deserve any further exploration into the root causes of our destructive obsessions, of our conditioning to feel comfortable only when we look a certain way? I think women deserve it, and so does The Substance, although it isn’t a very happy route to take.

And that is why, along with all of my other big emotions, sadness accompanied me as I left the theater. Not just because I saw myself in Elizabeth, but also in my grandma, mother, and sister. You could say that The Substance views women’s beauty standards through a nihilistic, but very necessary lens for the times that we are in. I think it encourages women to think critically about the beauty practices that we engage in, further than just checking if it is something we “want to do.” It’s about questioning why we want to do it in the first place. Many women, myself included, say that we feel “cleaner” when we shave, for example. But have you ever stopped to wonder why? Biologically, the purpose of body hair is to protect the skin from germs, after all.

The Substance tells us that as long as girls are taught to correlate beauty with self-worth, with our mood and therefore quality of life, there is no winning, no escape. The comfort that comes with adhering to beauty standards, provided by whatever super-drug we take, is always conditional.

Writer: Luisa Santos

Artist: N/A - image courtesy of MUBI