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Symbols are objects, characters, figures, and colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.

The Substance Itself 

The experimental drug The Substance does more than drive the plot of Fargeat’s movie, it also symbolizes the false promises sold to women about beauty and success. The advertisement for the drug seems to offer a flawless boutique solution to Elisabeth’s highly specific problem. It offers youth and promises a return to relevance with no effort required. However, this promise carries an inherent irony that Elisabeth initially refuses to acknowledge: instead of solving her problems, the drug just brings them into sharper focus. 

Elisabeth turns to The Substance because it appears to offer an easy fix. Hollywood has discarded her, and the drug presents itself as a way for her to return to the spotlight with all of her flaws erased. However, instead of restoring her youth, it creates Sue. The Substance is still replacing Elisabeth with a younger model, but it’s allowing her to have some control over this version of events. The drug’s requirement for “stabilizer fluid” reinforces this idea. Sue can only survive by draining Elisabeth, just as the industry sustains its obsession with youth by consuming and replacing those who no longer fit its image. By the film’s end, The Substance has left nothing behind but ruin. Its advertising, like Hollywood’s obsession with image, offers a fantasy that cannot be sustained. Those who chase it do not find success—they lose themselves entirely. 

Elisabeth’s Face  

Elisabeth’s face is the embodiment of her desperation and a symbol of the entertainment industry’s warped values. Throughout The Substance, photos of a younger Elisabeth appear on posters and promotional materials. When her physical appearance no longer matches these photos, the industry no longer values her.  

The film’s most unsettling use of Elisabeth’s face appears when Monstro Elisasue explodes out of Sue’s back. There’s a version of Elisabeth’s face on Sue’s back, its mouth open in a permanent scream of horror at what she has become. When Monstro Elisasue is preparing to go onstage, she peels the face from a poster of Elisabeth and sticks it over her own deformed one. It’s a desperate and futile attempt to hold onto an identity that has already been erased. When Monstro Elisasue explodes, Elisabeth’s face is the only part of her that remains whole. It crawls away from the main “Monstro” body to its star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, uniting Elisabeth’s image with the name she was famous for one final time before the face dissolves. 

The Snow Globe  

The snow globe that Elisabeth keeps in her apartment symbolizes a dreamlike moment frozen in time, untouched by change and covered with glitter. While everything is going wrong outside, the scene inside the snow globe remains perfect, immune to aging or decay. The film contrasts this make-believe idea of preservation with the gruesome reality Elisabeth must endure. The snow globe is a fantasy, an illusion of permanence in a world that constantly discards and replaces. In the film’s final scene when Elisabeth’s face crawls onto the star on the Walk of Fame, the people she imagines applauding and welcoming her are also swathed in a mist of golden snow-globe glitter. The progression of time for her has finally stopped. 

Earlier in the film, Elisabeth throws the snow globe at the enormous poster of herself that she keeps in her apartment. When it hits the poster, the globe does not just break, it also destroys the eye of the Elisabeth in the photo, leaving an unsightly hole. Unlike the snow globe’s frozen world, her image now carries evidence of deliberate destruction—and it’s caused by her own hand. While everything else in The Substance reinforces her lack of control, this single act ensures that her “Hollywood” face, once untouched and idealized, is now also flawed.  

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