It's always heartening to see an actor find their iconic role — one that perfectly fits their skills while also playing slyly on their public persona. Demi Moore has found hers with The Substance, the sophomore feature from French writer-director Coralie Fargeat (Revenge), which won a screenplay award at the Cannes Film Festival. This satire of Hollywood's obsession with youth is also the most outrageous body horror film I've seen in years.
In her prime, actress Elisabeth Sparkle (Moore) was a megastar. At 50, she's happy enough to host a daytime aerobics show — until the piggish network boss (Dennis Quaid) decides she's over the hill.
Fired and adrift, Elisabeth crashes her car and lands in the hospital, where a nurse slips her a flash drive labeled "the Substance." It leads her to a storage locker where she finds a kit that promises to help her recapture her youthful physical perfection. One injection, and a gorgeous replica of the younger Elisabeth (Margaret Qualley) births herself from the older one's spine.
Self-christened "Sue," Elisabeth's second self is eager to snag Elisabeth's former job and become a star in her own right. But the Substance has strict rules: The two symbiotic selves must switch places every seven days, with one remaining comatose while the other is active. If one perishes, so does the other.
Elisabeth will learn that sharing a life with your younger self is trickier than it sounds — especially when she wants to replace you permanently.
What is it about French women filmmakers and body horror? Julia Ducournau's Raw is one of the few films that have made me cringe in visceral repulsion; The Substance is another. Both these directors know that true horror involves far more than putting blood and guts on-screen. Longtime genre fans easily detach themselves from such imagery — unless the movie gives them an emotional connection to what they're seeing. The Substance somehow accomplishes this feat, despite not featuring a single conventionally sympathetic character.
Fargeat's storytelling and visual style are glossy, hyperreal and cartoonish, almost to a Zack Snyder degree. The story takes place in an '80s-tastic version of Hollywood in which cellphones exist, yet the entertainment industry is still obsessed with TV ratings and aging stars revitalize their careers by doing aerobics. The characters are archetypes with scant backstory or inner life. They all have a bit of monster in them, as hideous close-ups of their chewing mouths and straining glutes emphasize. (Let's just say this movie has a slight butt fixation.)
Elisabeth might as well be Norma Desmond, empty without the crowd's adoration; her name, Sparkle, sums up everything she wants from life. Sue is Barbie, eternally bouncing, preening and smiling, although she's actually less complex than Margot Robbie's take on the character. They're surrounded by symbols as obvious as those of any classic melodrama: a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, a billboard, a crimson hallway (because yes, there will be blood).
Some viewers will be turned off by The Substance's lack of subtlety, not to mention its copious gore and nudity. They may even see Fargeat as objectifying her female characters and mocking their struggles. But sometimes hyperbole is the best way to tell a story, and at the core of all this exaggeration and artifice, there's genuine pain.
For all the florid grotesqueries on display in The Substance, the movie's most disturbing scene involves Elisabeth's preparation for a date with a high school acquaintance, a man she once would have considered beneath her. Redoing her makeup over and over, struggling to re-create Sue's dewy youthfulness, she spirals into depths of self-hatred that movies have seldom plumbed. Moore is with her character every step of the way, and the scene is all the more gut-wrenching because the actor is famous for her successful defiance of aging.
That self-sabotage is what The Substance is about. Its overt feminist message — that our culture values women for their bodies — is both true and old news, but the real story here is how women enact society's disgust on themselves.
And that story resonates. Elisabeth represents an extreme of shallowness, but we've all had our moments of feeling like her. In the film's universe, all flesh — young, old, healthy, diseased, human, animal — has the power to turn vomitous, because it carries the seeds of its own mutation and decay. It's easy for us to claim we don't relate to this Boschian vision of the world. But the horror genre is the devil's advocate; it never stops insisting that, deep down, we are as much meat as we are spirit.
By the end of The Substance, we don't know whether to laugh, cringe, cry or all three. Watching this movie is like opening the tackiest of sparkly wrappings to find a literal bleeding heart.
Revenge (2017; AMC+, Philo): Fargeat's feature debut is a feminist twist on the rape-revenge horror film with a visually bold, hyperbolic style similar to that of The Substance.
Titane (2021; Disney+, Hulu, rentable): Perhaps the wildest film you can watch under the auspices of the Mouse, Ducournau's body horror drama follows a murderous young fugitive with a fixation on all things automotive.
"Dead Ringers" (2023; Prime Video): If you liked The Substance, you're probably already intimately familiar with David Cronenberg's oeuvre. But you may not have caught Alice Birch's gender-switched TV adaptation of the book on which his 1988 Dead Ringers was based, and you should.