Back in January, film critics Manuela Lazic and Adam Nayman began working together on a long list that initially had more than 100 titles on it, in order to sum up something interesting—if not definitive—about the past quarter century of film. Narrowing things down was hard. They spread out their picks as evenly as they could over this 25-year period and also across a variety of styles, and dissected one movie per month. They didn’t write to convince each other or to have an ongoing Siskel-and-Ebert-style thumb war. Instead, they hoped to team up and explore a group of resonant movies. We’re also hoping that you’ll read—and watch—along one last time.
Manuela Lazic: I love a title that works on several levels. Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance is about the misogynistic superficiality of Hollywood and society at large, explored via Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), a 50-year-old actress convinced that she is unsubstantial—that she has nothing more to offer to anyone, including herself, now that the inevitable passing of time has stolen her once youthful appearance. More literally, this movie is also about the substance Elisabeth injects herself with to create Sue (Margaret Qualley), a “younger, more beautiful, more perfect” version of herself. But the title also opens up a discussion about the film’s formal approach and ideological stance. Is Fargeat simply representing the materialism and shallowness of the patriarchy, or is she simultaneously playing into it? Is she trying to have her cake and eat it, too? Is The Substance all flash and no, well, substance?
The question of whether representation implies endorsement is more usually broached when filmmakers depict violence. A few weeks ago, after Quentin Tarantino randomly and childishly criticized Paul Dano’s performance in There Will Be Blood, actor Zach Woods stood up for his fellow “very weird-looking white boy” by posting an Instagram Reel in which he denounced Tarantino’s hypocrisy in “taking a historical villain ... and then using them as a thin pretext to enact [his] same old, tired pornographic violence.” I agree with Woods that Tarantino seems to derive great pleasure from inflicting gratuitous pain on his characters, a morally dubious position. Yet Tarantino is an extreme example, and the cyclical resurgence of the question about whether representation equals endorsement makes it clear that we are not close to answering it.
When it comes to depictions not of violence but of normative beauty standards, things get even dicier: Moving pictures are based on voyeurism, on the pleasure of seeing, and Hollywood and its historically male studio executives have of course greatly influenced cinema at large, whether we like it or not. When Fargeat captures Qualley’s sensuous curves in close-up (cinema is also a way of possessing the world), she accentuates their beauty and offers the viewer privileged access to something we’ve all been told to desire or envy. The question is: Why? Is this almost surgical attention to so-called female physical perfection meant only to generate pleasure, or is something else at play?
It felt obvious to me on first viewing, and again on this rewatch, that Fargeat aims to implicate the spectator and their desire to challenge it and reveal its limitations. This begins the very first time we meet Elisabeth. She is filming a fitness class, dressed in a tight leotard and smiling as she performs, encouraging the viewer to keep pushing and to think about their summer body. Casting Moore was a smart choice: Not only had the actress been adored and viciously criticized in equal measure for her physical beauty, transformations, and demands for equal pay in the ’80s and ’90s, but she’d also been less present on screens in recent years. Seeing her give a Jane Fonda–esque performance of female discipline in 2024 was admirable and aspirational and telling: She looked so good—with the caveat “for her age” so heavily implied that it didn’t need to be put into words. The following scene makes our latent ageism literal: Elisabeth overhears her boss Harvey (a perfectly horrible Dennis Quaid) talk on the phone about her being way past her due date and needing to be replaced by someone young. If you didn’t feel bad about your reaction to meeting Elisabeth before, you do now.
Later, when Sue is giving her own fitness class, Fargeat leans all the way into objectification, making the young woman’s routine feel more like a music video than a workout class (arching your back may be sexy, but it means that your core is not engaged). It is obvious that Sue isn’t there to teach anyone about fitness; it is also obvious that Fargeat isn’t simply giving the audience what they want. She is drawing attention, in a maximalist fashion, to our fascination with youth and beauty so as to first make us aware of it and then encourage us to question it.
Adam, where do you stand on that debate about the film’s critique of superficiality? Do you think it’s only skin-deep, or does it go down to the bone?
Adam Nayman: I don’t think that The Substance is superficial, exactly; there’s a lot of detail and pleasure in those surfaces and some juicy interpretive gristle on those bones. That’s the recipe: a greasy, glossy gross-out buffet with nutritional value—call it allegory, call it critique—baked in. It’s a movie designed to be chewed over by critics (mission accomplished, obviously) and to expose viewers with weak constitutions. I did feel queasy when I saw it last September, but not because I was grossed out. It was more the nauseous sensation of gorging on skillful but ersatz art-sploitation for more than two hours. I felt like I was being force-fed junk food for thought.
I love genuinely tasteless movies, and in that sense, I recognize Fargeat as a kindred spirit; she has a voracious appetite for transgression and likes to have her gore and scarf it, too. As you know, her 2018 debut, Revenge, is a veritable meat lover’s pizza of a movie. It’s also very much a spiritual predecessor to the spectatorial gamesmanship you’ve identified in The Substance, subjecting its own airbrushed heroine to a series of leering camera movements—and some increasingly brutal acts of violence—before resurrecting her, Beatrix Kiddo style, to wreak havoc on the misogynists in her midst.
In your review, you called Revenge “the most carefully curated male fantasy since Garden State, but unlike its Zach Braff predecessor, it seems to know it.” Indeed, I’m hard-pressed to think of another emergent 21st-century director who weaponizes their knowingness—that most post-Tarantino of commodities, capable of flattering filmmakers and their audiences simultaneously—like Fargeat, who’s determined to annotate her influences and make her points as broadly and loudly as possible. She is, you say, a maximalist, and more power to her; subtlety is a virtue only if wielded with purpose, and I’m not sure that The Substance’s distaff remix of The Picture of Dorian Gray would have necessarily benefited from a gentler approach. The rhythm and syntax of the movie are synced, quite deliberately, to Qualley’s gyrations; Sue is a lycra-clad sight gag, embodying her creator’s relentless notion of satirical thrust. Over and over and over, The Substance shoves the idea of idealization as abjection in our faces, and I can see, in theory at least, how the sheer gratuitousness—and almost trancelike repetitiveness—of the imagery and the editing is the point of the exercise. But Fargeat’s knowingness is also a form of smugness, and as the movie goes on, it seems to partake in the same desultory industry cruelty it ostensibly seeks to diagnose and redress.
To give Fargeat the benefit of my doubts for a moment, I’m not going to hold against it the fact that The Substance’s vision of American showbiz—and the city of Los Angeles—is stylized past the point of recognizability. As far as matters of municipal geography and vertically integrated alpha-male patriarchy go, it makes Mulholland Drive look like a documentary, and that’s fine. I agree that Quaid’s Harvey—a stand-in, obviously, for the incarcerated Mr. Weinstein—is perfectly horrible and that there’s potentially as much value in making the character a goofy, shrimp-chewing buffoon as a sinister structuring absence, as in Kitty Green’s (excellent) The Assistant, which remains the sharpest and most unsettling of the post-MeToo meditations on exploitation and complicity. The problem is that by warping the reality of the world around Elisabeth and Sue, Fargeat risks undermining her own critique of systemic sexism, effectively taking something well camouflaged and insidious and making it too ridiculous to take seriously. Meanwhile, the actual purveyors of “the substance” are rendered so mysterious—and, even by the standards of the script’s nearly magic-realist sense of cause and effect, so acutely attuned to Elisabeth’s mood swings and crises of confidence—that they might as well be figments of her imagination. All of which is to say that Fargeat seems to be implying that her protagonist’s decision to experiment with this potentially dangerous drug and to keep using it despite its obviously destructive effects is a by-product of internalized misogyny—a detail that effectively reframes the story as a battle of wills between Elisabeth and herself, externalized as a body-horror spectacle that, at best, hyperbolizes her narcissism and, at worst, indulges our desire to conflate aging and decay with outrageous degradation.
It’s ironic that the only thing holding The Substance together is Moore, whose performance is a study in watching somebody fall apart; she’s about as good as she can be in a part where anything like recognizable human behavior or motivation has to be generated from the inside out. When the Oscar nominations came out last year, it was widely understood that Moore’s most persuasive for-your-consideration clip was the scene in which Elisabeth, having been invited on a date by a nebbishy former high school classmate thunderstruck by her celebrity, methodically and monomaniacally wipes her makeup off while seething in front of her mirror—that instead of recognizing her beautiful reflection for what it is, she can only gaze into an abyss of insecurity. It’s a good scene, and Fargeat knows it; for about 30 seconds, she slows down her strobe-like editing rhythm and gives her star space to operate. The way Moore modulates Elisabeth’s emotions—the shift from carefully sublimated fury into compulsive self-abuse—is so eloquent that it renders a lot of what follows redundant. I suppose the extended Carrie riff of the climax is fun, but beyond the fact that it’s borrowed, it doesn’t feel like there’s anything at stake beyond Fargeat showing how far she and her makeup team can go. For me, the image of Moore’s wide, staring eyes encased in the bulbous body of Elisa-Sue is less suggestive of a character absorbed by her anxieties than of a lean, mean B movie trapped in the body of the sort of gentrified genre exercise that plays at Cannes. The Substance’s rapturous festival reception got the ball rolling on its status as an indie blockbuster (the biggest ever acquisition by MUBI) and Oscar season conversation piece. I wonder whether it’s worth talking about what Fargeat and her film represent to the industry as much as how well we think it works ...
Lazic: Systemic sexism seems well camouflaged and insidious only to those less likely to experience it! And if MeToo—and other sex scandals, such as one involving a seemingly endless list of high-level personalities, for example—have taught us anything, it’s that the perpetrators of sexism and worse aren’t able to carry on with their toxic behaviors because they’re subtle or discreet but because they are well protected. Quaid’s Harvey is barely a parody, and Fargeat doesn’t make sexism more ridiculous than it already is; instead, she makes it clear that it has been normalized despite how ludicrous it is.
Elisabeth—and Sue—have to accept the reality of sexism and ageism and pursue the maintenance of their youth and sexual capital as a matter of life or death, literally. What strikes and moves me about the film, beyond its formal and critical qualities, is its unrelenting atmosphere of loneliness. As you described, Elisabeth almost gets to experience a real human connection with her former classmate, yet it isn’t narcissism that keeps her at home but self-hatred. She doesn’t think she’s better than him, and she certainly isn’t thinking only about herself in that moment in front of the mirror. She’s thinking that no one, not even this nebbishy guy, could possibly want her. The self-focus that internalized misogyny creates isn’t the kind that makes you selfish; it is a survival strategy for trying to remain acceptable and relevant in a world that constantly threatens to kick you to the curb. As for conflating aging with rotting away, that is the equation that misogyny promotes, and Fargeat takes it to its logical, albeit extreme, conclusion, the better to show how outrageous and ridiculous it is. This is the kind of B-movie jump to conclusions that I find at once sleazy and brilliant: Some images (like a Picasso-esque she-monster with a boob coming out of an orifice, or a sexy car driving its lustful owner insane as in John Carpenter’s Christine, for instance) are worth making because, however absurd they are, they speak a thousand words.
I was pleasantly surprised when the film won the Best Screenplay award at Cannes because I’d heard so many detractors argue that the plot strained credulity. To this day, I don’t understand the criticism: From the very moment Elisabeth hears the instructions for how to best use this technology, we depart from Cartesian logic. “Remember: You are one” is not to be taken literally, and it doesn’t mean that Elisabeth and Sue are aware of each other’s thoughts and feelings. It means that their actions affect the other, just like when you get drunk one night and know that the person you will be tomorrow will suffer the consequences. Their relationship is symbiotic but not equal. It is even more surprising that Fargeat’s metaphorical approach to feminist filmmaking was so recognized, considering that the Cannes jury was presided over by Greta Gerwig. Her own take on the dawn of woman, Barbie, suffered from an anxious desire to be clearly understood as progressive, even though it also exists to sell sexualized female plastic dolls; America Ferrera’s monologue about the impossible standards placed on women was heavy-handed and simplistic, especially when compared with Elisabeth tearing her made-up face apart before her date.
Perhaps these two wildly successful woman-directed films do say something about where the industry is, in several respects. It is hard not to see both of them as inevitably playing into the very forces they decry: Although there was no The Substance promotional doll as far as I know, the media still emphasized the glamorousness of the film’s female stars, much as it did for Barbie. The question of whether one can criticize and dismantle a system from the inside continues to be a thorny one. Yet the economic trajectories of these movies are also interesting. On the one hand, a $145 million, two-hour-long ad for an outdated toy, made palatable thanks to a hefty dose of nostalgia and a soupçon of irony; on the other hand, the $17 million vision of an auteurice, set in Los Angeles but made in France, full of references to male-directed genre classics, whose extended gory finale made some people queasy, and which got acquired by an indie streaming platform for almost the equivalent of its budget. The MUBI acquisition, to me, puts a damper on the success of Fargeat’s film, which is designed for a real big-screen experience. Yet it does seem to represent the best-case scenario for that kind of project nowadays. Can a young filmmaker today, female or otherwise, hope to make personal work and reach a large audience without either selling a product or accepting their film being referred to as “content”?
Nayman: I agree that The Substance is ideally seen on a big screen, but a $77 million box office haul is pretty good for a hard-R-rated horror-comedy whose director insisted on final cut—a rarity for most filmmakers these days and almost unheard of for female ones. (Another exception: Lynne Ramsay, whose underrated, misunderstood Die My Love burned up some of MUBI’s Substance profits earlier this fall.) It’s possible that one of the things that Gerwig responded to in The Substance was its obviously uncompromised vision, a quality harder to square with a project like Barbie, which may have been designed as a Trojan horse for social commentary but still had to meet Mattel’s bottom line. (The existential question encoded in Billie Eilish’s “What Was I Made For?” could just as easily apply to a movie so brazenly foregrounding the dichotomy between art and commerce.) Your comparison of Gerwig’s and Fargeat’s films is apt in other ways; the long sequence near the end of The Substance in which the wizened, wrecked versions of Elisabeth and Sue finally throw down in the apartment has moments when it seems like we’re watching an especially wicked kid slamming her dolls together with extreme prejudice—two truly weird Barbies locked in a battle to the death.
As for the question about “content,” the en-sloppification of Hollywood is a depressing state of affairs. Still, I’d like to flip your thought experiment around for a moment in the spirit of Fargeat’s generational allegory to say that the 2020s are no country for old(er) men and women. One thing that’s been frustrating for me over the past few years is seeing a whole cycle of variously talented and ambitious (and self-branding) young genre specialists—Fargeat, for sure, as well as Julia Ducournau, the Philippou brothers, Osgood Perkins, Ari Aster, Robert Eggers, etc.—pay explicit homage to OG visionaries like David Cronenberg, Claire Denis, Paul Verhoeven, Catherine Breillat, and Brian De Palma while the latter cohort struggles to find financing. I realize that, on one level, this is the way of all flesh, but it’s hard to see great and potentially still transgressive artists being marginalized by distributors in search of hot new commodities. Perhaps I’m being stubborn and reactionary by clinging to the auteurs who helped me come of age in the 1990s, or maybe it’s that so many acclaimed contemporary directors are so determined to show their work that even the most stylish new releases feel like certified copies: They’re cinematic equivalents to Sue, winking blithely at their own status as simulacra.
That sense of an earlier era’s tragic disposability gets visualized at the end of The Substance in the sight gag of Elisabeth’s disembodied, grotesquely splayed face getting flattened over her own Walk of Fame plaque: A star is torn. I can appreciate the symmetry of the image, which pays off the Hollywood boulevard of broken dreams satire of the prologue, yet there’s also something pat about it—it doesn’t open the material up to further interpretation so much as suture it neatly shut. I prefer when movies feel more like an open wound, like Ducournau’s Raw, in which the characters become reconciled to their own insatiable desires, or Rose Glass’s Saint Maud, with its horrific shock-cut anti-grace note (or Cronenberg’s The Shrouds, which ends in medias res, with its hero projecting necrophiliac fantasies of his dead wife onto his new lover as they fly off into the sunset). I suggested earlier that The Substance was ripe for interpretation, and maybe my problem is that I don’t feel that there’s much left once it’s been deconstructed. Elisabeth Sparkle leaves her bloody mark on the world, but The Substance doesn’t have much residue.
Speaking of deconstruction: It’s been a pleasure to write back and forth with you for the past year and to try to reckon with some of the most important movies of the past 25 years. What a lovely coincidence that the last scene of The Substance takes place on New Year’s Eve; ideally, by now, our ideas and opinions have fused together into the film-critical equivalent of Monstro-Elisa-Sue—a hybrid creature putting on a worthy show for our readers (or just dousing them in blood). To quote the occupant of another red room—whose star vehicle we would have surely chosen if it had qualified as a movie instead of a television show—I’ll see you again in 25 years. Probably sooner.
