The Substance is a movie of escalating violence. It was born from director Coralie Fargeat’s beliefs about aging in a society that only values women for their youth and beauty. Its eponymous pharmaceutical requires its takers to birth a younger double out of their spine, their backs splitting open in a fantastic shower of blood and viscera. And, naturally, it ends in one of the wildest, goriest, unhinged body-horror scenes you’ll ever see on the silver screen.
“It explodes in the face of the audience, which represents the world,” Fargeat tells Inverse.
