I finally got around to watching Coralie Fargeat's The Substance (2024), an instant cult-classic body horror fable. The Substance follows Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), a once-famous TV fitness host who's unceremoniously fired for turning fifty. Desperate to reclaim her youth, she's offered access to a black-market drug that spawns a "younger, better, more perfect" version of herself, Sue (Margaret Qualley) with whom she must share a life, swapping every 7 days. Things, obviously, deteriorate from there.
I'd like to frame my thoughts about the movie by contrasting two other reviews, one from Kim Kardashian, the other from The Guardian. Both expressed fundamental misunderstandings of the film, in perfectly symmetrical ways. Because I "respect the balance", I'm going to describe what they each get wrong.
Let's start with the review that broke the internet. Kim Kardashian (apparently?) watched The Substance, a film about a woman who literally tears herself apart chasing youth and beauty standards, and posted to her Instagram story: "Watched the Substance with @demimoore last night 🔥🔥🔥. The visuals are amazing and she looks so amazing!"
yes this is real pic.twitter.com/b2uNpc3YDt
— The Substance (@TryTheSubstance) November 22, 2024
This is almost too perfect. Kim K, who has built an empire on cosmetic procedures, beauty products, and the monetisation of impossible physical standards, watched a horror movie about that exact trap and her take away was "Demi Moore looks amazing!" including a screenshot of the character from early in the movie in her glamorous fitness-instructor era, before everything goes wrong.
People joked that she only watched the first 20 minutes, which is possible. It's also possible that she understood everything perfectly and posted that anyway, as a sort of meta-ironic wink. Or was paid to. Or didn't care. All are equally on brand.
Sometimes real life does satire better than a film ever could.
On the opposite end of the intellectual spectrum, we have The Guardian view on female-led horror: time for a new formula. It's not just a review from a critic, it's an editorial, which makes it feel like an official position statement from the entire newspaper. The Guardian's editorial board clutch their collective pearls about "hagsploitation" - a genre of horror that demonises older women by depicting their aging bodies as horrific.
Their argument, essentially, is that showing aging women's bodies in states of horror is inherently misogynistic and problematic. In their respectable feminist moralism, they see blood, nudity, mutilation and instantly shout, "Misogyny!"
They are not defending women with this critique. They're defending women's respectability. They assume any depiction of female bodily decay is inherently hateful. What they fail to acknowledge is that the movie is critquing ageism, not endorsing it. It takes the invisible violence of Hollywood beauty standards, and the psychological, sometimes surgical, warfare women wage against their own bodies, and makes it all grotesquely literal. Maybe the Guardian thinks it's too smart for such on-the-nose metaphors.
But the most maddening misreading is that the film "revolves around female rivalry". There IS no rivalry in The Substance. The "two" women are the same person, which the film repeatedly makes clear with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. The younger version isn't a scheming antagonist - she's the protagonist's self-hatred given physical form. The film deliberately shows that this isn't violence between women; it's the violence of patriarchy turning a woman against herself.
What's fascinating is how these two responses want opposite things from the movie, yet both manage to completely miss what it's actually doing.
The Substance is not a hard movie to understand. Which I like, because I am stupid and enjoy stuff that is heavy handed and over the top. If you think that's a flaw, it's not the only one. It's also at least 30 minutes too long.
But the film is visually stunning, darkly hilarious, and each actor nails their part. It is, narratively speaking, a fairy tale - where the characters are deliberately one-dimensional and function as mere vehicles for the story, where the setting is clearly not our world but one with its own internalised logic and magic, and there's a clear moral to the story. It has a timeless quality that doesn't lean too hard into cultural trends that would date the movie for future audiences.
The film knows exactly what it's doing. These contradictory misreadings almost feel like proof of concept.
One side wants to celebrate the nightmare; the other wants to censor it. The Substance asks us to look at it - really look - in a way that is true to the conventions of the body horror genre, where you are disgusted but can't look away.
If you ask me I say the film passed with flying, blood-soaked colors.
What do Kim Kardashian and The Guardian have in common? They both missed the bloody point of The Substance (2024)
— Hannah Shelley, MLIS (Monsters, Lore & Infernal Screaming) (@hannahshelley.bsky.social) October 30, 2025 at 2:28 PM
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