Black balled and white walled: Interiority in Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance”

I’m Nobody! Who are you?

You know what they say: Women take forever in the bathroom.

This is certainly the case in Coralie Fargeat’s buzzy new body-horror film The Substance, where a bathroom as shiny and nondescript as its owner, TV and fitness icon Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), becomes a site of epic regeneration and self-destruction. 

On her 50th birthday, Elisabeth is fired from her longtime workout hosting gig, deemed too old to be marketable by her cartoonishly misogynistic boss, Harvey (Dennis Quaid). With her physical appearance no longer in demand, Elisabeth doubts that she has any remaining value and decides to inject herself with the titular Substance, a far-from-FDA-approved neon green goo that springs from her back a “younger, more beautiful, more perfect” version of herself. This offshoot, Sue (Margaret Qualley), soon usurps Elisabeth’s fitness empire and what little life she leads beyond it.

The Substance isn’t a subtle film: As Elisabeth drives away from the restaurant where Harvey stamps her with an expiration date, she sees a crew of men literally rip her smiling visage from a toothpaste billboard. This directness extends to the set design of the film’s most used locale: Elisabeth’s bathroom. 

Everything in it is white. 

White square tiles, separated by thin lines of black grout, cover the floors, crawling upward to wrap themselves around the sink and bathtub, the walls, and even the ceiling. Depending on the camera angle, the tiles take the shape of a suffocating cube of negative space or a lifeless pit of despair too deep to climb out of. Harsh white lighting leaves the space feeling clinical, more closely resembling a lab than a domestic commode. It’s the perfect place for Elisabeth to experiment with The Substance. 

After she injects herself with the first dose, the camera rises to an aerial shot of her writhing on the stark white floor. Here, the tiles are spotlights. They provide a blank backdrop for the deeply pigmented liquids that emanate from Elisabeth’s body as Sue cracks through her spine. Thick, red blood splatters mix with the neon green of The Substance to form foreboding inkblots on the ceramic. The design choice of sterile white tiles leaves us viewers with nothing to look at but these squelching liquids next to a suffering woman’s body.

Aside from offering visual emphasis, the bathroom conveys Elisabeth’s mental state. It’s “a cocoon where she confronts herself,” Fargeat explains in an interview with Vogue. 

Throughout the film, both Elisabeth and Sue regard their images in a white framed mirror that hangs above the bathroom sink. Only one likes what she sees. 

Whenever Sue appears in the mirror, she meets her own gaze and caresses her youthful skin as a smile creeps onto her lips. By contrast, Elisabeth averts her gaze from her own image, a look of disappointment in her eyes. In perhaps the film’s most heartbreaking scene (referred to by Fargeat as “THE mirror scene”), Elisabeth returns to her reflection multiple times as she gets ready for a date. Each time she faces herself, she becomes increasingly disgusted with what she sees. Violently so. She smears her lipstick into a Joker-like smile until she is clawing at her own skin, pulling and scraping it into red, coarse oblivion. The scene ends with her mascara stained and wild eyed, hands grasping at her hair.

As viewers, we usually see both characters through their reflection, framed by the bathroom’s white tiles. The effect is one of a gallery, where pallid walls emphasize the art on display: These women are objects to observe and analyze. It’s a message heightened by the complete lack of interiority within the room and its inhabitants. There is no art on the walls or rugs on the floor to show Elisabeth’s personality or aesthetic sensibility. There are no visible beauty products revealing what she can afford or what decade she lives in. No balled up towels or abandoned cups of coffee indicating that she left in a rush to meet a friend or pick up her kid. No evidence that she has any such relationships. There is only that mirror, a singular focal point that narrows Elisabeth’s focus to her singular interest: how she looks inside of it.

“My scripts don’t have backstories,” Fargeat tells Vogue. The Substance is no exception. The only thing we know about Elisabeth is that she is a woman whose career depends on her appearance. Because she exists in a world where career is synonymous with survival, with value, Elisabeth mutilates her own body in the hopes of preserving what has historically made her employable. Lovable. And because Elisabeth is essentially no one, she could be anyone. As viewers, we can project whatever we want onto those white walls, including an image of ourselves in that mirror.