Elisabeth is a body fitness star. From day to day she is dismissed gracefully by the boss of the channel who wants to find her a younger replacement so more able to boost the audience of this aging show. Coralie Fargeat, director of The Substance, signs a gloomy horrifying comedy (body). With this second feature film, she monkeys (without shadows) our society of the show and her kleenex agries according to the good old capitalist recipe applied to beings. A provocative and outrageously trash slap, tone on tone with the red carpet of the cruise.
Criticism of The Substance
Faces, figures
If The Substance certainly divided the Cannois audience because or rather because of its stated taste of the overbidding and hemoglobin, the regulars of the genre films had from the beginning flaired a perfect candidate for the body horror. At the casting, Coralie Fargeat offers a comeback Fracasing for the actress Half Moore. The latter shares Elizabeth's first role with her « lining » Sue, played by the very photogenic Margaret Qualley. Rattled by old age, the sword of Damocles, how painful for big screen stars, Elisabeth participates in a mysterious program « Medical ». True custom drug addict kit, it controls its doses and treatment, almost as we order a Deliveroo. « Have you ever dreamed of a better version of yourself? You should try this new product: The Substance » announces this commercial offer. « Younger, more beautiful, more perfect »... pleonasm is an integral part of the set design.
The miracle product claims to generate a double of ourselves in the literal sense of the term. A youthful cure prodigiously explained in the minimalist intro that announces the color. A syringe appears on the screen and injects the precious liquid into an egg yolk. And paf, a few seconds later, the egg is duplicated... The Substance plays constantly on metaphor and parallels. A film has rarely been seen using as many macro lenses throughout the film to produce epidermal images. The shift is greatly amplified by oversaturated clinical noise. The decors are also sleek too to focus on the subjects. Just see the CEO of the TV channel's group eat a shrimp for nausea! Coralie Fargeat immediately announces the color: the bodies will be husked until reveal the flesh. The lights are so bright in the spotlight that the actors are deprived of shadows. In the cruel world of showbiz, it is impossible to hide any fault.
Defining, disfiguring
This permanent outburst, the French director cultivates it throughout the film with an enjoyable insolence. Whatever the coherence of the choices of characters driven by a questionable adventurism, everything is orchestrated in the perspective of producing shock images. Like the somewhat stupid rules of the Gremlins, treatment The Substance supposes the respect of summary rules that we will not all state here to preserve the discovery. For medical follow-up, it will be necessary to go back and if the pitch of departure grows many incongruous, it is to the benefit of a situational black humor... and a critical speech smarter than it seems.
The Substance separates bodies and spirits by reducing our bodies to simple interchangeable envelopes. A cruel metaphor of the consumer society applied to humans and especially to women, the film meticulously detricates our representations of bodies by permanent caricature. Elisabeth, like her duplicated version, cultivates an excessive ego, like the cult of personality that has long been involved with celebrity. A gigantic self-portrait worthy of Soviet dictatorships proudly reigns in his loft. It should be remembered that capitalism also maintains its own cult of personality.
Mirror film, The Substance offers a crazy critique of our consumer society and Demi Moore's choice was all found. The one that first appeared in Choices In 1981, he was the actress and symbol of an entire generation. This star yesterday had a course to say the least. Whether it's his addiction to cocaine that has long been obstructed or the dark years that left him out of the big screen around the 2000s, Demi Moore is the archetype of the ransom for success. Star one day, ghost the next. The DLC of women exposed to fame is short, very short in a world that cultivates the fantasy of eternal youth.
Extras to erase
For this film, the actress makes a radical change with a daring role not to say terribly swollen. Behind Fargeat's camera, the complete nude is omnipresent both outside and inside. Baroque criticism of mental and physical mutilation, The Substance does not like out-of-field and the film inflicts all the abuse on the bodies (and the spectator) to remain competitive and loved by others. In this sense, Coraline Fargeat fits into the courtyard of the great body horror, black humor in addition. De Carpenter retrospective) to Cronenberg, the influences (many) have been digested and are vomited to the face of the spectator who, let us recall, is complicit in this human exploitation. The director thus dissects the image and the bodies by taking refuge behind the comedy, by nature more conducive to excesses.
The most candid success of Coralie Fargeat is probably to have allowed such a freedom of tone that limits to eschatology. In addition to Carpenter, which appears obvious, other directors act as reference. If the carpet The Shining At the outset announced the hectolitres of future hemoglobins, no one was prepared for such a tsunami at its end. The elevator scene and its blood waves in the Overlook hotel is rightly convened. The blinks of the eye are numerous and never feel naphthalin, all the more so as they are systematically mobilized to serve the same message: « pornography » of the Male gaise.
When Sue dances for the new show where she takes the place of Elizabeth, the pastel tones of a childish-looking show contrast with the zooms closest to the bodies. Are we shocked by the constant exploitation of women's bodies imposed by advertising? Are its standards that have been imposed everywhere and all the time really a conscious choice? This is Coralie Fargeat's perspective by imposing on us a body horror decomplexed which rightly explains her selection at the Cannes festival.
Faces A, faces B
If we can blame him a little for his length (and again), The Substance crossed a course in genre cinema by marrying body horror with satire. Certainly the big hooves are out, but no one had dared to denounce with such a cranial our representations by literally daring everything to the image. Congratulations to the producers who believed in the artistic approach. For this reason alone, Coralie Fargeat imposes herself as a punk author capable of opening up the public to new critical considerations: those of a society paradoxically more focused on the surface than on beings, while our gaze dictated by the market strove to destroy both scrupulously. Debord's thesis, « True is a time of falsehood » is illustrated on the screen. Regressive, outrageous but jubilatory, The Substance is a feminist black comedy that you are invited to support during its release. An Arm of Honour titanium addressed to our show society. The Freaks Are they really the ones we believe?
Trailer of The Substance
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