Why The Substance's disgusting ending is so delightful

We follow Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), a famed aerobics instructor who’s axed from her televised show when she hits 50, prompting her to take a gamble and inject a black-market drug that makes the body generate a younger clone.

Out of her spine she births Sue (Margaret Qualley), a younger, fitter version of herself, who auditions to be Elisabeth’s replacement and gets her own show.

There’s just one catch: after seven days of being Sue, she must switch back to being Elisabeth.

When Sue inevitably begins to breach the contract, Elisabeth must suffer the consequences, and starts to show rapid signs of ageing, beginning with a blackened finger.

The cracking, squelching and cracking of the body switching scenes might become increasingly horrific, but they’re nothing in comparison to the action that comes in the film’s final stretch.

Sue – her teeth falling out on the night she’s meant to be hosting the New Year’s Eve show – tries to start the process again with a few drops of the drug left in the packaging from Elisabeth’s first injection.

But instead of birthing a better version of herself, it’s a mutated combination of the two of them – Monstro Elisasue, as the film calls her, a mess of flesh with random eyeballs and teeth and boobs.

Elisasue heads back to the studio to host the NYE show, but this is when the film really descends into chaos, and breast vomiting, blood showers and explosions of flesh ensue in a lengthy and gut-wrenching climax.

It’s an ending that has proved divisive with critics and viewers alike, with some suggesting the extreme gore in the final act obscures the film’s message.

But I found it cathartic, and even necessary. When more serious in its approach to taking a swipe at society’s fear of ageing in the opening hour, the film risks perpetuating stereotypes about beauty and youth by, yes, actually making the viewer fear an ageing woman.

The film is justified, then, in taking the notion that ageing is horrifying to such a grotesque extreme in the finale to emphasise how utterly ridiculous and laughable society’s beauty ideals are – and to ultimately free us from them in the process.

The horror I initially felt towards Elisabeth’s increasingly aged and monstrous body every time it was unveiled subsided completely in the final act, as I laughed out loud at the ridiculousness of society’s standards of women. And I left the showing feeling liberated.

By challenging our horror at the female body in this way, The Substance is shaking up the traditionally male-dominated body horror genre, which has typically employed a male gaze and portrayed female characters as innately monstrous as a result of their body or sexuality.

Fargeat isn’t the only female/non-binary writer/director breathing new life into the genre.

Earlier this year, Rose Glass challenged the genre with her crime thriller Love Lies Bleeding, which viewed its central female characters through a female gaze and showed its bodybuilding lead, at least in part, generating her own monstrous transformations.

In 2023, Alice Birch reinterpreted Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers by gender-swapping the twin gynaecologists brought to life in the original film, and explored the concepts of motherhood and bodily autonomy through a female gaze and feminist perspective.

The Substance, of course, takes a different feminist approach when it comes to challenging the male gaze, critiquing it not by ignoring it but by reconstructing it. And again, it’s in the film's finale that this approach becomes most effective.

While earlier on in the movie, repeated close-up shots of Sue’s crotch and body during her aerobics show could be accused of simply recreating the male gaze, the finale takes the satire to such an extreme that surely it’s exposing how horribly violent and ridiculous that gaze is.

Before the chaos fully begins in the finale, Elisasue – proud of her reflection for the first time – drags herself on stage but, as the lights flood her, she begins to degenerate, birthing a disembodied breast.

It’s in this moment that we hear a line from earlier in the film, when a casting director didn’t like the woman who auditioned before Sue. "Too bad her boobs aren't in the middle of her face, instead of that nose," the voice booms. Well, he's got his wish now, hasn't he?

But it turns out to be too much for the crowd to bear, as they start yelling out slurs like "freak", before physically attacking Elisasue.

The ending might not exactly be subtle, but at what point in the film is Fargeat trying to be? Instead, it is a gleefully violent takedown not only of the absurd beauty ideals pushed upon women by men, but also of the humiliation and ridicule women face when they do try and alter themselves to fit those unattainable standards.

The Substance is showing now in UK cinemas.

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