‘The Substance’ Movie Ending, Explained
Made it through to the end of Coralie Fargeat’s incredible but relentlessly gory body horror, The Substance? Well done you! You already fared better than two people who quit halfway through the screening Esquire was at, and who missed out on the crescendo of the wild bloodbath ending. In retrospect, maybe a wise decision, as they probably managed to sleep that night without being plagued by night terrors of oozing wounds, gaping flesh and bloodied organs flying around.
Anyway! The film has obviously been divisive since it screened at Cannes earlier this year, but Demi Moore – who plays Elisabeth Sparkle, a TV star dumped callously by a Hollywood exec on her 50th birthday, who then undergoes a hideous medical treatment to spawn a younger version of herself called… Sue – and her committed, fully all-in-to-the-madness performance is already building up an Oscar buzz.
The Substance went on mainstream release on September 20, and over the weekend, has split the public like Elisabeth’s spine in its reception, though Esquire enjoyed its big swings. While this year’s Saltburn continues to be debated furiously online, let’s breakdown that mad ending, and try to make sense of what it all means…
The ending, act 3: Monstro Elisasue
It’s New Year’s Eve and Sue’s (Margaret Qualley) big night: except her young, hot clone body is literally falling to bits. Her teeth are falling out, and her bloody ear’s dropped off and she’s got that wailing, screaming tinnitus thing that means she’s long outlived her stint in this body. But with Elisabeth’s old corpse at home – and her brains splattered around the retro penthouse, thanks to Sue killing her off – and with no spinal fluid (*gags*) to rejuvenate herself, she formulates a new plan.
As Elisabeth and Sue are both mucky pups – technically being the same person – Elisabeth hasn’t got around to throwing away the single use drug that she injected her body with at the start of the process, so there are still a few mls of the fluorescent yellow black-market drug in the injection vial. “Single use only!” the instructions scream out on the screen, but, oh, too late. Sue’s already jabbed it into herself. The horrifying process starts all over again, but instead of birthing a stunning younger version of Sue/Elisabeth, it’s mutated, and instead a hideous mass of flesh emerges from Sue’s spine, with random eyeballs and teeth and boobs everywhere, and stuck with the contorted screaming face of Elizabeth in its back. This is, as the film reveals, the third self: Monstro Elisasue.
The monstro tears off a life-size photo of Elisabeth’s face and puts red lipstick on it, before adding the final touch: two dangling diamond earrings, pierced into the mottled, undulating flesh. Pretty!
Off the monstro goes, back to the studio to host the NYE show. And to the strains of Thus spoke Zarathustra by Richard Strauss – another nod back to Stanley Kubrick, this time 2001: A Space Odyssey – she takes to the stage in front of a rabid audience. They’re all smiles when they see she’s wearing an Elisabeth Sparkle mask – how meta, after she took over her exercise TV show! – but when she finally reveals herself, they’re appalled at what they see.
This is likely a comment on what it feels like to age as a woman, to have to present yourself as “pretty” to the wider public, and on the fear of what will happen if you don’t. Despite Elisasue yelling on stage “it’s me!” as a random, de-bodied breast pops out of one of her mouth, the audience turn on her, yelling out “freak” and start to physically attack her.
As various bits of the monstro are lopped off, the blood comedically gushes out like a waterfall, going all Carrie, and drenching the entire audience in the sticky, red liquid. As the people around her try to kill her and she is decapitated, she just regenerates – well, shape-shifts into a new form – until she makes it out of the studio and onto the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
The final scene
The final scene takes us back to the beginning of the film, Elisabeth Sparkle’s Walk of Fame star, where at the start, we journeyed through her career, from being adored on the launch night, to chat about how much fans loved her, to the star eventually becoming cracked and faded – how the real life star is treated on being told she is too old at 50 for the industry – to someone spilling a burger on it, with the ketchup spreading all over it.
The ending of the film sees Elisabeth’s face, which has broken free from the mass of flesh, and manages to slither over to her star, where she lies, bloodied, like the ketchup from the burger, until eventually, with a silent scream and a hallucination of glitter falling, she just eventually evaporates, and a street cleaner cleans her into the bin.
When it comes to ageism, Fargeat seems to argue, women can’t win, no matter the extreme body modifications taken to stay youthful. A society that has pushed them into surgery then regards them as carnivalesque freaks; a source of ridicule, or they become expendable or invisible, and expected simply expected to disappear, leaving us with just the memory of when they were at their most attractive – or commodifiable –; when they were young. The film is correct in saying that we are one with our younger selves, but we can’t go back that, and we can only be happy in our bodies in accepting that our older self is not something to be disgusted by, as Sue calls Elisabeth, or to be in battle with, but a sense of self-acceptance and kindness towards ourselves is what we should be reaching towards.
Ultimately, the film reminds us that you’re born, you live, you birth a terrifyingly selfish hot version of yourself through an illegal drug who then kills you, and you die; a very warped circle of life that Elisabeth is desperate to reverse, due to society’s own twisted ideas of worth as a woman.
‘The Substance’ is in cinemas now
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