If you could be younger, sleeker, and 10x more desirable, would you be? To be fair, it’s something of a non-question, because simply on its face, I feel that most of us would answer with a simple Yes. However, since reality is the way it is, and we must suffer its constraints, we also understand that beyond the impossibility of reversing time and age, even if some midnight daemon were to offer us this option, such things always come at a price. Wisdom, then, compels us to say No—but there is always, behind that No, the Yes which tickles our desires and pays little heed to the caution of wisdom, or the concept of constraint.

In Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (2024), the offer comes in the form of a futuristic serum that creates, from your body-stuff, a younger, more attractive duplicate. The only price, it seems, is a somewhat tedious process in which each version, as it lives out its allotted portion of days, must tend to the vegetative state of the other. Supplied are feeding tubes and thick needles. Time, again, is split between the forms. A certain level of, according to its makers, “respect” is required. And then you get to be beautiful. […]