Online Sex Therapist Reviews film ‘The Substance’
By: Dr. Denise Renye
Sometimes you watch a film that’s so intense you keep thinking about it for days. That was my experience of The Substance (2024), starring Demi Moore as Elisabeth Sparkle. A brief synopsis of the psychological thriller/sci-fi film: Elisabeth is renowned for an aerobics show and faces a devastating blow on her 50th birthday when her boss fires her. A mysterious laboratory offers her a substance that promises to transform her into an enhanced version of herself.
As an online sex therapist, my take on The Substance is it’s a haunting exploration of identity, desire, and transformation with rich psychoanalytic underpinnings. The film interrogates the pressures placed on women to conform to societal beauty standards, the pervasive influence of the male gaze, and the psychological toll of objectification. The story delves into themes of personal disintegration, repression, and cultural expectations that demand women embody contradictory ideals, which is a key feature of patriarchy.
The “substance” is a mysterious material that induces profound physical and psychological transformations. Psychoanalytically, the substance symbolizes the unconscious—a force that unravels societal constructs and surfaces repressed desires and fears. For Moore’s character, the substance becomes a catalyst for confronting her shadow self, a Jungian concept describing the unacknowledged, darker parts of the psyche.
The other central character in the movie, Sue, represents an alternative approach. Where Moore’s character resists the substance’s changes, Sue seems to embrace them and offers a stark counterpoint to the protagonist’s struggles. Both women’s journeys are shaped not only by their inner conflicts but also by external pressures rooted in a patriarchal gaze. Both women are actually facets of the same woman as we hear from the mysterious lab over and over again, “Remember you are one in the same.” They personify different aspects of the same person and, from my perspective as a Marin County psychologist, present an internal conflict from different viewpoints.
The Substance is steeped in commentary on the relentless societal obsession with women’s appearances. The transformations induced by the substance amplify these pressures, making the characters’ bodies sites of both fascination and horror. Moore’s character struggles with losing control over her body and identity, which reflects the anxiety many women feel about their autonomy in a world that demands physical perfection.
Sue’s apparent willingness to succumb to the substance’s changes, by contrast, evokes a different kind of compliance: the internalization of beauty standards that promise power or acceptance in exchange for self-erasure and self-abandonment. These transformations bring to the surface the impossible expectations placed on women to simultaneously conform to societal ideals while maintaining authenticity.
The film also critiques the male gaze, both as a cultural force and as a psychoanalytic concept. The "male gaze" is rooted in psychoanalytic theory, drawing primarily on the work of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, particularly the concept of scopophilia, the pleasure of looking. Film theorist Laura Mulvey expanded on this concept in her feminist analysis of cinema, asserting that mainstream films frequently position the camera to cater to a male gaze, leading to the objectification of women on screen. For instance, the camera will follow a woman’s hips or breasts during a background shot but zero in on a man’s face.
In The Substance, the director flips the script on objectification and portrays breasts that are on aging bodies, disembodied, or even grotesque rather than sexual. The psychological use of the breast in this film is multifaceted and complex, but then again, so are our relationships with breasts. From the mother to lovers, to our own, breasts can mean so many different things.
Returning to the male gaze, catering to the male gaze not only reinforces gender stereotypes but also influences viewers of all genders to adopt similar patterns of objectification. In other words, women are not immune to doing this and misogyny can become internalized. From a Freudian theoretical perspective, the male gaze operates within the framework of psychosexual development and unconscious drives. From this perspective, the male gaze objectifies women, reducing them to images that exist to satisfy male desire.
We see this in the early introduction to the character of Elisabeth and through the character of Sue. The substance itself, with its seductive and destructive properties, can be seen as a metaphor for the male gaze. It transforms the women into objects of fascination while stripping them of control, reflecting the tension between agency and objectification. Moore’s character fights against this process while Sue’s seeming embrace of the gaze raises questions about complicity and survival in a system that commodifies women’s bodies.
The relationship between Elisabeth and Sue further illuminates these themes. Their dynamic reflects not only their individual responses to the substance but also the complex relationships women have with one another in the face of patriarchal pressures. Sue’s apparent ease with transformation might represent a critique of how women are often pitted against each other—those who conform to societal expectations versus those who resist. The film invites viewers to question whether Sue’s acceptance of the substance is empowering or emblematic of deeper psychological surrender to external standards.
The uncanny (das Unheimliche), a Freudian concept describing the discomfort of encountering something simultaneously familiar and alien, permeates the film. The transformations caused by the substance evoke this feeling, particularly in how the women’s altered appearances and behaviors challenge the boundaries of identity and humanity. This uncanniness underscores the film’s critique of beauty standards, as the idealization of women’s bodies is pushed to grotesque extremes, forcing viewers to confront the dehumanizing effects of these cultural norms.
From my perspective as a Marin County psychologist and online sex therapist, The Substance is a psychoanalytic exploration of identity, repression, and transformation. It’s layered with incisive commentary on the pressures women face under patriarchal beauty standards and the male gaze. Through the contrasting experiences of Elisabeth and Sue, the film examines the psychological toll of societal expectations, the allure and danger of self-objectification, and the challenge of reclaiming agency in a world that often reduces women to objects. Both a chilling psychological thriller and a poignant social critique, The Substance invites viewers to reflect on the intersection of personal and cultural forces that shape the female experience.
These forces continue throughout a woman’s life up to her Crone years, at which point she may shrug off the mantel of patriarchy and start saying, “No. I’m taking my power back and doing what I want to do.” This can happen sooner of course but is quite common in the Crone years.
If this is something you’d like support with, I’m happy to help you. Healing from the effects of patriarchy is something I’m passionate about. Get in touch if you feel moved.