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Not long after Elisabeth Sparkle’s 50th birthday, her boss, a boor named Harvey, delivers some bad news to her over a plate of shrimp: He’s giving her the pink slip. An Oscar-winning actress, Elisabeth (Demi Moore) has spent the second chapter of her career hosting a morning aerobics show. But Harvey (Dennis Quaid) feels she’s “Jurassic,” per the movie’s parlance. He tells her as much as they’re sitting in this fine dining palace, where he scarfs down these shrimp heads with such spectacularly off-putting abandon that you want to hand him a bib. Elisabeth, meanwhile, does not eat at all, her steely expression wavering somewhere between despondency and rage.
As the network moves to replace her with a newer starlet, Elisabeth seeks desperate recourse: She injects herself with a drug that promises to make her inhabit a younger, peppier body — that of a twentysomething named Sue (Margaret Qualley). The catch is that she will have to swap corporeal forms every seven days. That cumbersome process involves hooking the vacant body up to feeding packs, meal replacements whose milky liquid resembles baby formula. If she deviates from the discipline of this routine, her bodies — yes, both of them — will suffer for it.
A goulash of satire and body horror, Coralie Fargeat’s newly released The Substance — named after that chemical that hooks Elisabeth into a destructive cycle of dependence — revels in viscerally repulsive images throughout its two-hour-plus runtime: Think slimy organs and cascading gushers of blood. But the visual of Quaid scarfing down shrimp heads, the camera lingering uncomfortably close to his choppers, might make for one of its most memorably grotesque shots. It presages how integral food becomes to the film’s provocative statement on the brutality leveled against the female body, making The Substance one of the more notable food-forward films in recent memory.
Food feels intrinsic to The Substance’s visual language from the first frame: Its establishing shot, and a recurring motif throughout, involves a close-up of an egg yolk being needled with a chemical that results in it spontaneously birthing another version of itself. That’s followed by a look at Elisabeth’s Hollywood Walk of Fame star through the decades as it weathers the vicissitudes of her career. Once a tourist attraction at the height of Elisabeth’s celebrity, it becomes such an object of neglect — her literal star so invisible — that, at one point, a passerby drops his fast food order atop it, smearing the plaque with ketchup that looks like prop blood.
That shot anticipates the violence that Elisabeth will soon exact upon her own body with food. Near the film’s beginning, we don’t see her eat much of anything — maybe she pops an olive into her mouth as she takes a swig of her martini, or fries a pair of eggs (recalling the film’s initial shot). Sue, who takes over for Elisabeth at the network and is prized for her supple frame, is even more spartan when it comes to her dietary choices: An interior shot of her refrigerator shows little more than cans of crisp Diet Coke.
But the more she transforms into Sue, the more Elisabeth grows resentful of her dewy-eyed avatar, channeling that self-loathing into food. Sue will sometimes awaken after her seven-day dormancy to find that Elisabeth has left behind rubble of chicken bones, waffles, and breakfast links in her posh Los Angeles apartment, not unlike the unkempt mess her old boss, Harvey, had made with those shrimp. Elisabeth starts to pursue her appetite with the same recklessness we saw in Quaid’s character. She realizes she has every right to eat the way a man has unspoken permission to, because he’s less likely to be punished for his appearance.
Elisabeth soon grows agoraphobic, unable to make peace with the way she looks; one night, she bails on a date and instead reaches into her refrigerator, stocked with a perfectly charred chicken, slices of browned toast, and a fat slab of a quiche. (The shot is a direct callback to that earlier look at Sue’s more austere, Diet Coke-lined fridge.) She digs in, and her body promptly punishes her for this breach of feminine propriety. While filming her exercise show soon after, Sue feels a bulging object protruding beneath her skin and fishes the foreign material out from her belly button: It’s a chicken leg. (She wakes up shortly thereafter, implying the episode was a nightmare, but what is clear is that Sue is wracked with guilt over how much Elisabeth eats.) “She wastes seven days stuffing her face in front of the TV,” Sue goes on to complain of Elisabeth, with the insolence of a preteen diva, even though both women are one and the same. That incorrigible appetite is the issue.
How often is it that popular cinema gives us such sequences as grisly as these involving food? Food has long had a place in horror films; two years ago, The Menu (2022) — which straddled the line between comedy and horror, much like The Substance — featured Ralph Fiennes playing a chef with a dictatorial grip on his kitchen and his diners alike, weaponizing food over his unsuspecting guests. The graphic treatment of food in The Substance feels especially simpatico with The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989), which, in its unforgettable denouement, features Helen Mirren — playing the titular adulterous wife — vengefully demanding that her abusive husband ingest human flesh as penalty for his misdeeds. Fargeat genders hunger with a precision seen in novels of recent vintage like Chelsea Summers’s A Certain Hunger (2020) and Lottie Hazell’s Piglet (2024), both macabre explorations of the female appetite in all its messy dimensions.
In The Substance, the enmity crescendos one night when Elisabeth unwraps a goodbye present given to her by her former boss: It’s a cookbook titled French Cuisine from A to Z: 26 Recipes From the Greatest French Chefs, its cherry-red cover boasting a beaming man with a toque. (The book seems only to exist within the diegetic world of the film, with no real-life counterpart.) That cookbook is a catalog of caloric density, with recipes for Caen-style tripes, marinated veal brains, and Christmas turkey stuffed with foie gras. Elisabeth, her once-black hair now ashen due to her deviation from that seven-day trade-off schedule, wields it as if it were a witch’s spellbook.
Elisabeth’s subsequent performance in the kitchen is far removed from the symphonic sequences of women cooking you’d find in something like Babette’s Feast (1987), where cooking became, in that title character’s hands, an expression of beauty and possibility. In The Substance, Elisabeth defies any expectation of precious docility put upon women in the kitchen. Plummy blood sausages sizzle on the pan, resembling Elisabeth’s now-gangrenous limbs. “Eviscerate the turkey,” one instruction commands, and Elisabeth does just that, tearing the raw bird’s bones with vicious force. That turkey may as well be Sue, whose job demands she parade her near-naked body before the eyes of the world. Elisabeth takes an electric hand mixer to a pool of yolks, her stringy hair strewn with chalky yellow sludge. In this moment, Fargeat’s thesis crystallizes: The film depicts the cruelty that women face as they age in the glare of the spotlight, and how women can become the agents of such cruelty against themselves. For Elisabeth, each meal becomes an opportunity for self-flagellation.
The sinister overlay that cooking takes on in The Substance ultimately makes the film feel like the twisted progeny of La Grande Bouffe (1973) and Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), two canonical food films. Fargeat’s film contains the excess of the former (in La Grande Bouffe, a quartet of male gourmands literally eat themselves to death). But the spirit of the latter, a feminist masterpiece where the main character’s sequences of domestic drudgery culminate in a shocking act of murder, is treated with maximalist force by Fargeat. And the victim, in this case, is a woman: Elisabeth metes out punishment towards her younger self in the form of chickens and chocolate bars.
What makes The Substance challenging is the bleakness of its outlook, especially when applied to food: Elisabeth does not indulge out of pleasure. Rather, she eats with such ravenousness that she seems to be expediting the inevitable. Girls like Sue will grow old; they, too, will suffer the same indignities that Elisabeth has had to contend with upon reaching 50. The world, she knows, will punish her for the crime of following her appetite. As Elisabeth’s hands weave ribbons of cheesy mashed potatoes for the dish known as Aubrac aligot, we realize that, for her, eating what she wants — and on her own terms — is one way of wresting control of her body in a society determined to deny her of it.
Mayukh Sen is the James Beard Award-winning author of Taste Makers (2021) and the forthcoming Love, Queenie: Merle Oberon, Hollywood’s First South Asian Star (2025). He is a 2025 Fellow at New America.
