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This paper reads Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance as a clinical case study of the mother–daughter relationship and its constitutive impasses. Bringing Lacanian psychoanalytic theory into dialogue with feminist film criticism, I argue that the film dramatizes what happens when maternal desire is left without adequate paternal mediation. Drawing on Lacan’s claim that the Woman does not exist, alongside Eric Laurent’s revision of Winnicott’s “good enough mother” into the “bad enough mother,” I trace how Elizabeth Sparkle and Sue enact a relation of specular identification, rivalry, and mutual consumption rather than subject-to-subject recognition. Body horror, I suggest, is uniquely suited to literalizing these psychic dynamics, rendering visible the drives, jouissance, and identifications that structure the mother–daughter dyad. The film’s visual register, its split consciousness between the two women, and its grotesque conclusion all stage the consequences of insufficient symbolic mediation, culminating in what I read as a melancholic rather than mournful structure, one in which loss cannot be named or metabolized. Ultimately, I argue that the mother–daughter bond is irreducibly marked by mourning, the mother mourning her own incompleteness, the daughter mourning the impossibility of ever fully knowing maternal desire, and that The Substance offers a bleak but illuminating framework for thinking through this structural, rather than merely developmental or cultural, impasse.