There’s something profoundly paradoxical about the way that social activism often plays out on social media. More and more, influencers are using their platforms to draw minute attention to the privileges that shape our world, even as these platforms only exists for the most part because influencers are good looking. Most criticisms of problematic behaviour are delivered to us digitally by people who are extremely attractive, meaning that attraction capital is the one form of privilege that can’t be dissected on social media because in many ways it is the raison d’etre of social media. Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance addresses that bind with a deliberate bluntness and crudeness that seeks to break down all distinction between allegories and the bodies, faces and features – the attraction matrices – that promulgate them. Demi Moore plays Elisabeth Sparkle, an Academy Award winning actress turned fitness influencer who reaches her fiftieth birthday only to be told by her boss Harvey (Dennis Quaid) that she has become too old for her job. In desperation, Elisabeth turns to a mysterious service and product named “The Substance” which allows her to give birth to a younger and more attractive version of herself from a slit in her back. This younger Elisabeth, played by Margaret Qualley, names herself Sue, and picks up the job that Elisabeth lost. The catch is that the two women cannot co-exist at once, alternating between a week “on” in the real world and a week hibernating, during which time they share a specially produced serum.

What ensues plays as a deliberately skin-deep, superficial, bald narrative – and again, all of these terms refer to things that actually happen to bodies in the film, along with the allegorical message behind it. Fargeat draws heavily on the New French Extremity of the 2000s and 2010s, especially its tendency to figure gore in terms of skin and blood rather than other bodily fluids, organs or cavities. Viscera here is skin-level, as Fargeat takes us through a panoply of sutures, sewing and ruptures, with much of the horror revolving around the administration of needles to gradually festuring body wounds and subliminal changes in the colour and texture of skin. The New French Extremity thus morphs into feminist body horror, recalling Julia Ducournau’s Raw and Titane, although Fargeat grounds her vision more concretely in an aspirational influencer milieu driven by continuous injections, punctures and supplements. Only men are allowed to be revolting in this world, and Quaid obliges, whether he’s squeezing out urine from a declining prostate or scoffing prawns as he gives Elisabeth the bad news. Likewise, when Elisabeth runs into an old school friend, a figure who initially seems to exist outside of this influencer-industrial complex, he quickly conforms to the same abjection, writing his number on a piece of paper only to drop it into a fetid, putrid puddle.

The concrete literalism of The Substance is refreshing because it precludes any trite message about the need to traverse beauty, or focus on what’s “inside.” After all, the only thing truly inside Elisabeth is Sue, her younger gorgeous self, yearning to break her way out of her chest cavity. Instead of these panaceas, The Substance suggests that we can only achieve body equity, and combat lookism, once we are able to create a second virtual self that allows us to experience what our original appearance cannot give us. The body horror trope of the double thereby becomes the figure of a world in which everyone has an attractive avatar, meaning that Sue isn’t just better looking than Elisabeth but more synthetic, totally attuned to the airbrushed spaces and mannequinised figures of the network that hosts her fitness program.

By contrast, the more that Sue acclimatises to this workplace, the more that Elisabeth feels oppressed by her embodiment in the world and by the facticity of her body. From the moment she starts taking the Substance, Elisabeth hunches into herself whenever she steps out into Los Angeles, which is largely reduced to the synecdoche of the palm tree blowing outside her window anyway. Her very body becomes a kind of decayed urban structure, encapsulated in her first pickup of the substance, which comes to her in an immaculately appointed PO box in an abandoned warehouse in the midst of an exurban wasteland. Of course, the point of the Substance is to create a symbiosis between young and old bodies, and between real and digitally augmented bodies – the instruction manual reminds Elisabeth and Sue that “You are the matrix: everything comes from you.” Yet Sue quickly starts to harvest Elisabeth, keeping her in hibernation for longer than the allotted week, and only awakening her when she needs her to continue producing the serum that maintains their shared existence. With Sue’s misuse of the Substance, Elisabeth ages prematurely, finding her finger, her arm and then her whole leg bearing the brunt of her alter-ego’s quest for physical perfection. She’s helpless to do anything about it too, since, as the Substance helpline politely reminds her, “what has been used on one side is lost on the other.” Elisabeth can never recover what Sue has appropriated.

In this way, The Substance presents the looksism of influencer culture as a kind of vampirism, in which digitally attuned and augmented bodies are continually leaching their power from the relative paucity of “real bodies.” The result often reminded me of Severance, as Elisabeth and Sue each spend weeks at a time in hibernation, leaving residues of their very different lives behind in the apartment. Whereas Sue cloaks it with images of herself, airbrushing her fifty-year-old self out of existence, Elisabeth takes her revenge by leaving abject textures all over the apartment – food scraps, overflowing rubbish bins, newspapers glued to the windows and television – as if to remind Sue of the bodily imperfection that is gradually but inevitably coming her way. Sue tries to repress Elisabeth by shoving her and the detritus back into their hibernation space but the two inevitably have to wake at the same time to share the last of the serum, and it is at this point that the film enters full New French Extremity territory. In a panoply of ruptured, ripped and punctured skin, Margaret and Sue fight almost to the death before Sue takes another shot of the initial Substance, and a Margaret-Sue composite breaks out of her back. It’s this Elisabeth-Sue hybrid that presents herself at the fitness company’s New Year’s Eve celebrations, designed initially as Sue’s great breakout moment, where it sprays blood from every conceivable orifice at its audience, and then stumbles outside. Here, it collapses into a bubbling medium from which Elisabeth’s disembodied face makes its way, jelly-fish like, on a saucer of skin, to her Hollywood Boulevard star. There, she melts, her final residues clinically street cleaned the following day.   

No doubt this final sequence is preposterous and perverse but that’s also kind of the point – Forgeat makes it clear that her message is skin deep, that it must be transmitted through someone’s skin, by reducing Elisabeth to nothing more than a fragment of skin, in a powerful riposte to an influencer culture that validates every critique of privilege except that of the attractiveness of the people delivering it. The reduction of all messaging to a skin-level address is all the more resonant in that this final section draws heavily on the history of cinema – the New Year’s Eve audience exclaim “monster!” at Margaret-Sue in a homage to James Whale’s Frankenstein, the theme from Vertigo plays when Margaret-Sue puts on her makeup, and “Thus Spoke Zarathustra,” forever immortalised by 2001: A Space Odyssey, crescendos as Margaret-Sue reveals herself to the audience, with a sly nod at its appropriation for the Barbie trailer as well. In the end, the bluntness, brutality and genius of The Substance all works to insist that all critique, however modulated, melancholy or dexterous, is just skin-deep, dependent on an attraction economy that Fargeat skewers with remarkable viscerality.