The following is a personal opinion and review of The Substance (2024). Views expressed in the article are those of the author.
What’s the scariest movie this Halloween season? It’s not Smile 2 or Terrifier 3. This move makes those two look like a trip to Disneyland.
No, this year’s most horrifying—yet insightful—film is, hands-down, The Substance.
I’d argue it’s the most horrifying movie out this fall. And not just because of the grotesque body horror scenes (which seem to never end, and personally, I could have done with less of), but for its underlying and insidious theme of the internalized hatred women feel as they age.
This film stands out because it’s so over the top—but it needs to be to effectively communicate its message. It’s so extreme and gory that you just want to scream at the screen, “Stop, stop, stop!”
And that’s the point.
Directed by Coralie Fargeat and starring Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, and Dennis Quaid, this horror-as-a-metaphor film takes the cake for best horror of the year—and maybe even for best film of 2024, period.
The Substance does an award-worthy job of emphasizing the horrifying lengths women will go to look younger. Moreover, it explores the dark psychology of how aging can affect of sense self-worth.
As anti-aging treatments and procedures have become popular and readily available, society has become both too desensitized and accustomed to them.
The film effectively employs absurd dramatization to “re-sensitize” audiences to just how bizarre and self-destructive some of these “treatments” are. The macabre theatrics are a hyperbolization of the extreme lengths women go to in the pursuit of maintaining their inevitably fleeting youth and beauty.
One of the film’s key points is how people, especially women tend to go overboard, even risking their health and safety to look younger. Even after complications, they keep going, often ending up looking strange – almost unrecognizable, an uncanny valley of who they once were.
Rooted in the internalized hatred and deep-seated fear of their bodies’ natural aging process, the movie delves into how this unfolds. In one poignant scene, Moore’s character takes her makeup off in a mirror. As she smears it across her face, she begins hitting herself in frustration.
It highlights how women’s reception in society is often a direct function of their age. Most unsettlingly, if ‘the substance’ in the movie were real, there would almost certainly be a real-world demand for it
By the end, Moore’s/Qualley’s character look so diabolical that I honestly had no words for what I was witnessing. I was truly left speechless.
The movie has been the talk of the Reddit horror community for its originally and has landed a 90% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Many horror fans have declared it the best horror of 2024, with only The Oddity coming close for the title.
Did it open my eyes to how differently women are treated as they age and the deleterious effects the shift has on our mental health? Yes—message received, unfortunately.
Will I ever be able to unsee some of those body horror scenes? No.
Did I definitely apply my retinol serum the night I watched it? Absolutely.
This article is for informational purposes only. Trendy Matters has no affiliation with any of the brands or people mentioned. The views in this article are that of the author.
