Provocative Substance: Challenges Posed by The Substance to Feminist Film Criticism

Abstract The present article explores the ambiguous treatment of female bodies in the film The Substance (Coralie Fargeat 2024) in order to outline some of the political dilemmas and representational paradoxes that characterize contemporary film culture, in which a postfeminist cultural framework redefines previously held norms of what counts as ethically sound, feminist, progressive, or politically responsible. It argues that the categorization of The Substance as feminist social satire or feminist body horror symptomatically reveal a set of contemporary political and theoretical issues that arise in a cultural milieu where the borderlines between art and exploitation may become increasingly blurred, and where the term feminist is often used as a marketing tool to legitimize extreme and exploitative content. The article thus does not simply analyse the political implications of the film’s formal qualities and representational choices, but uses The Substance as a sort of litmus paper that indicates shifts in the politics of representation in early twenty-first century film culture. In order to highlight these changes, the paper contrasts contemporary reviews of the film with such concepts of feminist film theory as bodily affect, masquerade and satire, and spells out the ways the film is informed by such trends as postfeminism, the postmodern horror film, and French extreme cinema. The article indicates the way the critical reflection of these concepts and contexts may contribute to a more complex understanding of the representational strategies of The Substance, and may also serve as important reference points for film scholarship in the age of postfeminism.