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The Substance (2024) Summary
People are never content with their current state - ultimately, they are a product of greed. This is a delicate balance and struggle between the beauty and ugliness of human nature. The beauty of human nature lies in: a female star's devout and faithful commitment to her career, treating ideals as a lifelong belief, and maintaining an ambitious pursuit of life. The ugliness of human nature reveals itself in: the original sin of desire, the inherent vanity that drives individuals to pursue goals at any cost, where humans can never truly find satisfaction, even if it means losing oneself, losing identity, losing value, and ultimately perishing.
Even Sue, embodying the symbols of "beauty," "youth," and "vibrant energy," would inject herself to pursue a better version of herself - an ingenious stroke that places greed and desire in a bottomless vacuum.
In "The Substance (2024)," the protagonist, a film star named Elizabeth, daringly accepts a transformation after her beauty begins to fade, simultaneously racing down two paths: one of youthful beauty and another of accelerated aging that mutates her into a monster. Demi Moore is almost a living embodiment of this character. No wonder director Colary Faria, after reading Moore's autobiography, immediately decided she would star in the film - no one could better interpret this obsession with a beautiful appearance while being irreversibly trapped in an accelerating aging process.
"The Substance (2024)" undoubtedly pushes the judgment of female bodily value to a metaphorical peak: it completely cartoonizes the psychological pressure imposed on women by public/male gaze, simultaneously transforming this pressure into symbolic action. Through a brutal exploitation of one's remaining value via radical cellular mutation (reminiscent of cosmetic surgeries that extract and repurpose one's own tissue), it simultaneously ignores the risk of self-destruction amid completely expanded desire. This precisely reflects the intense psychological conflict in many women's subconscious: they are moved to tears by every minute improvement of themselves, yet simultaneously terrified of the potential cost.
The film graphically illustrates the psychological self-conflict typically found in dramatic narratives, transforming internal struggles into competition and harm between two distinct entities. The two selves, split from the same body, sprint in opposite directions: one toward more youthful beauty, the other toward more monstrous ugliness. Like a funhouse mirror, it playfully yet psychologically horrifyingly contrasts desire with reality, dreams with consequences, and physically magnifies the psychological turbulence of female experience. Unfortunately, the director transforms what could have been a profound sociological discussion into an exaggerated B-movie horror rendition.
