“remember you are one.”

extending my endless thanks to ms. fargeat for helping me realize that i might just be a body-horror gal! coralie fargeat's "the substance" acts as a sensational blend of the absurdity, denial, terror, and tragedy a women faces as she allows her self-image to be dictated by the preposterous beauty standards she’s held against during every waking hour of her life.

won’t lie, this film hit me in the heart since i’ve been there, and i think most woman have been there. hating ourselves so deeply and wanting to distance our current selves from our past, wanting to kill ourselves (metaphorically) in the process, and start anew. i’ve resented myself for my actions, telling myself to stop and control myself yet continuing on with the bad habits that fuel the self-hatred. though taking the “the substance” sounds intriguing because of convenience, it’s addictive nature of the ‘quick fix” that discourages addressing the root of self-loathing, until it becomes life threatening, has instilled this fear inside me that if i don’t genuinely love myself, any perception someone has of me won’t matter. and i loved how ms. fargeat got me to think of how difficult it is to curate your self-image, since you’re constantly at odds with yourself, and deal with the consequences of keeping up with the perception you want others to have of you. it might seem stupid since, at the end of the day this is just a silly movie, but for me, a girl in her early twenties who has been stuck in a cycle of constantly questioning "who am i, really?” this feels like a little wakeup call.

seeing people share their qualms with sue and elisabeth acting as two different consciousness’ instead of one made me scratch my head a little since i thought they were one in the same, in that they were two sides of the same coin. elisabeth, the “true self,” hates herself so deeply she refuses to admit it and takes the substance to chase the high of wanting to be a younger version of herself unbeknownst of the consequences of resentment she’ll have to face once she switches back into elisabeth’s body. sue, the idealized version of the self, loathes at the idea of herself (in elisabeth’s body) tolerating her bad behavior and takes it out on herself as she’s unable to accept that the root cause of her self-destructive behavior is herself. and at the end, they inevitably are brought back into one body.