This essay is adapted from my Turkish-language CultPost podcast episode, first released on December 20, 2024. It has been translated and edited for an international readership while preserving the original argument and critical perspective.

Spoiler warning: This essay discusses the film’s ending.

Written and directed by Coralie Fargeat, The Substance (2024) stars Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley in a disturbing exploration of female identity, socially imposed beauty standards, and the search for selfhood. Its striking cinematography and provocative story attracted considerable critical attention, and Fargeat received the Best Screenplay award at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. The film can be read through several theoretical frameworks, but the concept that most clearly illuminates its divided protagonist is the doppelgänger. More specifically, I regard The Substance as a feminist doppelgänger narrative: one in which a woman’s double exposes both her repressed desires and the patriarchal culture industry that has taught her to reject her ageing body.

The Doppelgänger and the Divided Self

The doppelgänger is a recurring figure in mythology, literature, and art. The term commonly refers to a person’s double: a figure who resembles the original but often acts as a psychological or spiritual opposite. A double does not necessarily share the same body with the original character. Rather, it gives an external form to an internal division, appearing as another self who embodies what the individual has repressed, feared, or been unable to realize.

Several well-known literary works demonstrate the different forms this figure can take. E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman,” which Sigmund Freud discusses in his essay “The Uncanny”, creates a world of repetition, uncertain identities, and destabilized reality. Olympia, the mechanical woman with whom Nathanael becomes infatuated, is not his literal double; nevertheless, she functions as a projection of his idealized but reality-detached desires and contributes to the story’s uncanny atmosphere. Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson” offers a more classical doppelgänger narrative: its protagonist is pursued by a double who repeatedly tries to prevent his immoral actions. In Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, the portrait is not a human twin, but it functions as a double by displaying the internal corruption that Dorian’s outwardly youthful body conceals.

The doppelgänger is also important from a psychoanalytic perspective. Freud associates the double with a return of what consciousness has attempted to repress. The figure confronts the individual with desires, fears, or darker tendencies that cannot easily be acknowledged as part of the self. This encounter therefore produces both fascination and fear: the double is intimately familiar, yet it appears alien.

Three related dimensions are particularly useful when interpreting doppelgänger narratives. First, the double represents repressed aspects of the self. Like a shadow, it brings hidden impulses and rejected qualities to the surface. Second, it is associated with mortality. The double reminds the individual of the fragility and finitude of existence, which is why literature and cinema often present it as a threat or an omen. Third, it challenges the idea that identity is singular, coherent, and stable. By embodying psychological contradiction, the doppelgänger becomes a powerful metaphor for a fragmented self.

These three dimensions provide a direct route into The Substance. Sue embodies Elisabeth’s repressed self; she confronts Elisabeth with her own mortality; and she materializes the contradictions within an identity that cannot remain unified. At one point, Elisabeth decides to end the experiment but cannot complete the termination. Her hesitation is crucial. It reveals that she does not possess a single, consistent desire: she resents Sue, depends on her, and cannot entirely renounce the life Sue makes possible.

Sue as Elisabeth’s Repressed Double

Elisabeth Sparkle is a successful performer whose fame has marked an earlier era of popular culture. Her celebrity is commemorated by a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, yet this public symbol of recognition cannot protect her from the culture industry’s obsession with youth. On her fiftieth birthday, she is dismissed from the television fitness show she hosts because its producer wants to replace her with someone younger.

This moment makes ageism central to the film. Older men can also face discrimination in employment and public life, but The Substance focuses specifically on the more severe and highly visible standards imposed on women in entertainment. Within this male-dominated industry, the ageing female body is treated as commercially undesirable. Elisabeth’s previous success does not free her from this judgement; it makes her fall from visibility all the more painful.

Although she is wealthy and famous, Elisabeth appears profoundly lonely and emotionally unsettled. She has come to understand herself primarily as a media image—an entertainment icon manufactured and validated by the industry. Her existence is tied so closely to performance and public recognition that she cannot imagine a meaningful identity outside them. When the industry rejects her, she does not attempt to build another form of life. Instead, she voluntarily enters the experiment known as the Substance.

The product promises to generate a younger and apparently better version of the user. Sue emerges from Elisabeth’s body, and the two must share a single life by alternating every seven days. The rule appears simple: one week for Elisabeth, followed by one week for Sue. Yet the promised balance soon collapses. Sue attains the attention, admiration, and professional success that Elisabeth has lost, and she becomes unwilling to surrender them. By taking more time for herself, she progressively damages and erases the body from which she came.

This development follows a familiar pattern in doppelgänger narratives. The double frequently appears as an “evil twin,” a figure capable of performing the actions that the repressed self cannot. Over time, however, the double may begin to dominate the original, producing a crisis of identity. Sue enacts Elisabeth’s desire for youth, visibility, and renewed fame, but she also turns that desire against her. The more Sue takes control, the more Elisabeth disappears.

The film repeatedly insists that Elisabeth and Sue are not truly separate people: they are one. Nevertheless, each speaks and acts as if the other were an enemy. This contradiction is the tragedy at the center of the experiment. Sue tries to secure her independence by destroying Elisabeth, while Elisabeth alternates between rejecting Sue and preserving her. Yet neither can survive without the other. Once their interdependence is denied and the required balance is broken, both identities begin to collapse.

From the Double to the Grotesque

The film’s final transformation intensifies this fragmentation. After Sue misuses the activator in an attempt to create another “better” version, she produces the grotesque creature known as Monstro Elisasue. The creature can be understood as a third manifestation of the self, but it is not an independent identity. Rather, it gives bodily form to the accumulated damage, conflict, and repression shared by Elisabeth and Sue.

Sue has treated the New Year’s Eve broadcast as the culmination of her ambitions. Even after the transformation, Monstro Elisasue goes to the studio and walks onto the stage. The audience responds first with shock and then with violence. The creature attempts to identify itself as Elisabeth, but the crowd attacks the body that no longer corresponds to the idealized image it expects. Blood then erupts across the auditorium until the glamorous setting is turned into a sea of red.

This sequence is especially powerful when considered through the grotesque. The Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin developed an influential account of the grotesque body in Rabelais and His World. In this aesthetic mode, established boundaries and hierarchies become unstable. Bodies are exaggerated, opened, fragmented, and transformed; order gives way to excess. Such imagery can challenge the existing social order while also carrying associations of change, death, and renewal.

Monstro Elisasue is a distinctly grotesque figure. Its body no longer conforms to the culture industry’s carefully regulated image of femininity. It is excessive, unstable, and impossible to classify. The eruption of blood at the end can therefore be read as more than an attempt to shock the audience. It makes visible the violence that the patriarchal and capitalist system has tried to conceal. The industry demands bodily discipline, beauty, youth, and perfect surfaces; the grotesque body destroys those surfaces and covers the spectacle’s audience in the material consequences of its own demands. In this scene, the film’s feminist critique acquires a physical and performative form.

A Socially Grounded Science Fiction

Alongside its thematic concerns, The Substance is distinguished by its forceful visual language. It approaches a recognizable problem in contemporary society through a form of socially grounded science fiction expressed as body horror. Throughout the film, visual oppositions, mirrors, divided spaces, and bodily transformations reinforce the doppelgänger structure.

In this respect, the film reminded me at times of David Lynch’s work. Twin Peaks, for example, creates a doppelgänger for Dale Cooper and uses this double to construct a dark, multilayered account of identity and evil. The Substancesimilarly treats the double through an unsettling and thought-provoking visual style. Its imagery opens the film to discussions extending from psychoanalysis and the grotesque to feminism, science fiction, and perhaps even transhumanism.

The science-fiction premise remains “realistic” in a social sense because Elisabeth’s desperation is rooted in an existing structure of discrimination. The Substance itself is fictional, but the desire it exploits is not. The experiment magnifies pressures already exerted on women by advertising, entertainment, and celebrity culture. Its speculative technology makes the violence of those pressures visible on the body.

The Limits of the Film’s Critique

The film’s doppelgänger structure and its critique of the male-dominated culture industry are valuable. At the same time, the story does not seem entirely new. Over the past decade or more, technological dystopias have repeatedly examined how media and cultural industries can reshape, exploit, and destroy human beings. Black Mirror has addressed these anxieties particularly forcefully, and numerous contemporary productions have explored their gendered forms. For this reason, I do not think The Substance carries the discussion to an entirely new level or offers a radically innovative narrative.

Its strongest effects come instead from its graphic treatment of the body. The film has the intensity of an extended corporeal performance: its images are visceral, surreal, and deliberately excessive. Yet this visual approach can overshadow the human story beneath it. The spectacle produces a powerful immediate response, but at times the film feels more like an audacious work designed for broad popular impact than a subtly developed psychological drama.

This reservation does not diminish the achievement of the film’s visual language. Its imagery is central to its critique, and the final grotesque eruption would not have the same meaning without such excess. Nevertheless, a more nuanced treatment of Elisabeth’s inner life might have given the narrative greater emotional depth and allowed its questions to remain with the viewer for longer.

The Substance is therefore most compelling to me as a feminist doppelgänger narrative whose bodily horror makes ageism and patriarchal beauty standards impossible to ignore. Sue embodies Elisabeth’s repressed longing for youth and recognition, while Monstro Elisasue exposes the violence created by the conflict between them. The film may not offer an entirely new story about technology, media, and gender, but it gives that story a memorable visual form. Its greatest strength—its spectacular, grotesque treatment of the body—is also the source of its principal limitation.