Subjected to the inexorable passage of time and the relentless male gaze, Elisabeth collapses under the weight of commodified beauty. In The Substance, she abandons herself to a malleable fluid, a fragile metaphor for modern artifices — cosmetics, surgeries, digital filters. This tangible material, an ephemeral promise of eternal splendor, becomes dependence and poison. Each dose modifies it, making it a mirror of societal diktats, where the illusion of perfection is only a slow dissociation.
By consuming her own reflection, she generates a double: an inhuman creature, an inverted image which, from a dream of beauty, turns into a nightmarish allegory of body horror, magnified here by a vivid pop palette. In the vein of the literary “grotesque body”, Elisabeth embodies the drift of an ideal that has become a prison, an identity remodeled to the point of alienation.
Thus enslaved to the image she has fashioned, Elisabeth becomes parasitic on her own monster, consumed by her own excessive aspirations.
The dazzling pop of The Substance acts as a decoy, and conceals the brutality of a norm that devours singularities, marking a natural evolution of visual storytelling. Implicitly, the shadow of Cronenberg, (but not only) where the sublime and the grotesque intertwine in a symphony of flesh and fear.
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