Sue (The Substance)

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Evil-doer
Full Name	Elisabeth Sparkle (body template)
Alias	Sue Monstro Elisasue
Origin	The Substance (2024)
Occupation	Aerobics Instructor Media personality
Powers / Skills	Charisma Seduction Brute strength
Goals	Become famous. Host her own aerobics TV show (both succeeded, until her death). Maintain her youth and beauty forever by killing Elisabeth (succeeded, but backfired).
Crimes	Attempted sabotage Usurpation Murder Assault and battery
Type of Villain	Egotistical Alter-Ego

“	Hi, everybody. I'm Sue. And it's time to Pump It Up!	„
	~ Sue performing.

Sue is the main antagonist of the 2024 body-horror film The Substance.

In her characterisation, she is a younger and more beautiful version of the solidly middle-aged actress Elisabeth Sparkle. It was then she served as her archenemy as the more "perfect" version soon resolved to eliminating Elisabeth at all costs. Sue has the appearance of being 20 years old.

She was portrayed by Margaret Qualley, who also played Mia Sutton in Death Note.

Personality

Being a "perfect" version of Elisabeth, Sue is confident, charismatic, and energetic. She lands the fitness job, and the town becomes obsessed with her. And, of course, things go downhill as Sue gets a taste for the adulation, the success, and the youthfulness of her new life.

Initially, when she was first created, Sue was more stable and calm, acting as an "alter ego" for Elisabeth to live a new, young life again. However, as she sticks around for longer than her seven days, Sue quickly becomes entitled, self-absorbed, arrogant, and disassociated from her original identity as Elisabeth. Having her seven days in the sun, her narcissism draws her to taking over the TV show formerly hosted by her older self. She wants people to tell her how beautiful she is—all that drives her is having herself be ogled at, being on TV, and being told how beautiful she is, nothing more—just the vapid life that she already lived as Elisabeth. She's making the same choices that led her to living alone, without friends or family or community. All that matters is the adulation of her beauty, which ultimately led to her downfall and demise upon being mutated and being blown to bits.

However, even with this in mind, Sue’s behavior isn't all on her own, as it's a subconscious manifestation of Elisabeth’s own desires, and making Sue a physical extension/duplicate and representation of everything Elisabeth desires to be (being famous and having a young, perfect body), but also everything she hates about her current self. The two are essentially still the same, and everything Elisabeth has gone through and felt throughout her life, notably her desire for fame and to be young, manifests as Sue.

This is why Sue later resents Elisabeth for binge eating and leaving a mess from her self-hatred, as Sue represents Elisabeth’s arrogance in her new body and shaming her old body for being "old and unattractive" from her view, not wanting to return to her old self and be Sue forever without rules or consequences.

This may also explain why Sue attacked Elisabeth without remorse when the two had split, not only because Elisabeth tried to terminate her, but also because they share a consciousness, and Elisabeth hates herself; the same self-hatred from her extends to Sue, causing Sue to hate Elisabeth.

Biography

Backstory

Sue's genetic template, Elisabeth Sparkle, was once one of the most desired and successful actresses in Hollywood in her younger years. However, age was rapidly diminishing her and her status, so she's clearly had a long career she's proud of. But she's forced to brutally confront her approach to its inevitable end when she overhears her sleazy executive producer, Harvey, scheming to replace her with a younger and "better" version of her.

Taking The Substance

A distraught Elisabeth crashes her car while distracted by a billboard of herself being taken down. At the hospital, a young nurse covertly gives her a flash drive advertising "The Substance," a black market drug that promises a "younger, more beautiful, more perfect" version of oneself.

Elisabeth, intrigued and desperate, orders the Substance and injects the single-use activator serum. She convulses as her body grotesquely generates a younger woman, emerging from a slit in her back similar to a butterfly emerging from a cocoon. The two bodies must switch consciousness every seven days without exception, with the inactive body remaining unconscious and fed intravenously with a weekly food supply. Daily injections of stabilizer fluid, extracted from the original body, are required to prevent the new body from deteriorating.

The new body, naming herself Sue, becomes an overnight sensation after auditioning to be Elisabeth's replacement. While Sue lives a confident and hedonistic life, Elisabeth becomes a self-hating recluse. Near the end of one weekly cycle, Sue parties and brings a man home for casual sex; she delays the switch by extracting additional stabilizer fluid. During the make-out session between Sue and the man, Sue’s back splits open and her organs fall out. It quickly cuts to Elisabeth waking up and seeing her right index finger rapidly aged, implying Sue did actually take more spinal fluid, but her organs falling out was a bad dream for Elisabeth. Elisabeth contacts the supplier, who warns her that disobeying the switching program will lead to irreversible, rapid aging of the original body. As time goes on, Elisabeth stands up her date with her childhood classmate Fred due to her insecurity and hatred for her body and envy of Sue's "better" body and begins to stay at home—binge eating and leaving her house messy from her intense self-hatred. During Sue's aerobic exercise, she gets a bump on her rear, causing her to yelp in shock. She goes to her dressing room to pull out the bump from her belly button, which turns out to be a chicken drumstick, though it's later revealed this scene is presumably another bad dream. Sue then continues to take more extra spinal fluid from Elisabeth to keep performing for the upcoming New Year's Eve event, causing Elisabeth to rapidly age even more. Despite their shared consciousness (being the host’s consciousness, being Elisabeth in this case, switching between the host’s original body and the new body every week), Elisabeth, from her intense self-hatred and rapidly aging body, begins to slowly disassociate and descend into madness as she begins to see herself differently from Sue. This same madness extends to Sue, who sees herself differently from Elisabeth; Elisabeth resents Sue for her disregard of the switching schedule, while Sue resents Elisabeth for her self-loathing and binge-eating. Following a particularly destructive episode as Elisabeth, making a lot of food and causing a mess, Sue gets disgusted and angry to the point of stockpiling stabilizer fluid and refusing to switch back, ignoring any potential consequences.

Three months later, on the day before the New Year's Eve telecast, Sue runs out of stabilizer fluid and contacts the supplier, who informs her that she must switch back to replenish the fluid. When they switch, Elisabeth finds herself transformed into an elderly hunchback. Desperate to stop Sue from aging her further, Elisabeth orders a serum designed to terminate her and to end the host’s experience with the Substance. However, Elisabeth, still craving the admiration that Sue's celebrity status provides, stops before fully injecting the whole serum and tries to switch into Sue, which instead resuscitates Sue while Elisabeth is still active, causing a glitch where both are physically split and exist at the same time. Realizing Elisabeth's initial intent, Sue brutally attacks Elisabeth and beats her to death. During this, "You are one" flashes before Sue suddenly becomes aware of what she has done—likely a subconscious realization from Elisabeth or Elisabeth’s consciousness re-entering Sue’s body, as the two are still mentally connected despite their temporary physical separation.

Mutation and Aftermath

After killing Elisabeth’s physical body and seemingly earning her place as host of the New Year's Eve program, Sue's body begins to decay due to the termination fluid injected beforehand and the fact Elisabeth’s physical body, which supported her body through the stabilizer fluid, is now dead. It begins when a couple of her front teeth fall out, which progresses to her fingernails and even an ear. In desperation to retain her younger form, Sue realizes the remaining activator could give her a new and possibly even better form of herself. She rushes back home and takes the fluid, ignoring its "single-use" warning, begging for the best version of herself to come out.

As she wakes up, the solution has indeed worked, but not to the desired effect. Instead, what has come out of Sue's back is a heavily mutated and fleshy abomination called Monstro Elisasue, having a mutated mixture of both Elisabeth and Sue’s physical characteristics and presumably respective identities with the former’s consciousness. Still influenced by Elisabeth/Sue’s desire for fame and status, Elisasue decides to go to the New Year's Eve program. She puts on Sue's gown, tearing it heavily in the process, and makes herself "presentable" by putting on Sue's earrings and necklace and using a curling iron on what little hair she has. Elisasue then breaks open a large poster of Elisabeth that has been hanging on her wall throughout the film and cuts out the face in it. She then glues it to her face, puts lipstick on it, and races back to the studio to host the New Year's TV program.

When she attempts to make her speech in front of the audience, her glued face comes off, and her body mutates to grow a breast from her body. the audience erupts into chaos. The audience calls Elisasue a monster and shoves her around while Elisasue tries to calm the audience and say it’s still her (calling herself both Sue and Elisabeth) as she cries. Amidst this madness, an audience member attempts to decapitate her, only for an even more mutated head to grow back, and one of her arms to break and drench both the audience and studio in blood. As Monstro Elisasue flees the studio, it eventually collapses and explodes into viscera. Following Elisasue’s body falling apart into pieces, Elisabeth’s consciousness is still temporarily active, as her face that emerged from her remains moved towards her street star and reflected on her past life, finally able to experience her happiness again before dissolving into nothing but a reddish liquid substance.

As morning came, a street cleaner came by and cleaned off all of her remains, ultimately removing all traces of both Elisabeth and Sue for good.

Quotes

“	This balance is not working!	„
	~ Sue's mental breakdown.

“	I won't be out late, so just wait for me. Don't eat too fast.	„
	~ Sue to Elisabeth.

“	Gross, old, fat, disgusting!	„
	~ Sue to Elisabeth.

“	PLEA-HE-HEASE! COME ON!	„
	~ Sue's Last words.

“	I'm the Say-ay-ame.	„
	~ Monster Elisasue's Last words.

Gallery

Trivia

• The prosthetics actress Margaret Qualley used for Monstro Elisasue were so constricting on her skin that they caused an acne breakout for several months. Some of the scars were incorporated into Qualley's character in Kinds of Kindness.
• Sue's role is similar to Mr. Hyde, the alter ego of Dr. Jekyll in all known incarnations of the literary classic The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and its adaptations.
  • It'd be more accurate to say she's similar to Buddy Love from the 1996 version of The Nutty Professor, as unlike Edward Hyde, Buddy did try to take over Sherman's life at the expense of Sherman, much like Sue did to Elizabeth. The difference is Sherman won in the end.