‘The Substance’ Brilliantly Makes Horror Skin Deep With an Unforgettable Demi Moore 

Alci Rengifo

Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance” is a merciless experience aimed at our current ageist dystopia. We are a species in a desperate race against our biological clocks, injecting or trying a collection of methods to convince ourselves age is just a number. Celebrities become the ultimate lightning rod for it all because they age right before the eyes of the world. Today’s sex symbol is tomorrow’s elder screen veteran. Fargeat takes the very classic idea of seeking eternal youth and turns it into a wild body horror fable brimming with vicious satire. She could make no better choice for her lead than Demi Moore, an actor who for so long defined screen sex appeal. Moore rips apart that sense of appeal and the male gaze in a blistering performance.

Could there be any city other than Los Angeles for this story to take place? Moore plays Elisabeth Sparkle, the aging face of an aerobics TV brand. She’s still attractive and fit, but studio head Harvey (Dennis Quaid) feels it’s time to find a fresh, young new face. As he puts it during lunch, once women hit 50, “it’s over.” Angry and desperate, Elisabeth gets into a car accident. At the hospital, a nurse (Robin Greer) gives her a referral number. This leads Elisabeth to discover The Substance, a mysterious new experiment that promises to generate a better you. After receiving certain items and indeed, substances, Elisabeth initiates the process. In painful fashion, the substance produces a double, Sue (Margaret Qualley), who is young and “hot.” Both Elisabeth and Sue are linked, and must follow certain procedures to sustain the process. When Sue struts into Harvey’s office and lands the aerobics gig, it should seem like an easy way for Elisabeth to secretly reclaim her glory. Think again.

It is no surprise that Fargeat won the Best Screenplay award at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. “The Substance” feels original even as it nods at its predecessors like body horror maestro David Cronenberg. This is a filmmaker who knows how to make a genre her own. In 2017 Fargeat made her directorial debut with “Revenge,” a bloody take on the classic plot of a gorgeous rape victim who then annihilates her attackers. It mocked the male gaze while unabashedly being feminist with early hints of Fargeat’s taste for anatomical close-ups and gore. You couldn’t call it gratuitous because the point was to rub in our faces shallow, violent revenge movies. “The Substance” is even smarter and edgier. It doesn’t care about making us uncomfortable with its unflinching look at a society obsessed with looks, willing to do anything with our bodies to sustain our conceptions of beauty.

The casting of Demi Moore is a masterstroke. Gen X and elder millennials surely still have vivid memories of Moore at her peak as sex symbol in films like “Striptease,” “Indecent Proposal” and “Disclosure.” Her work as an actor was always strong, especially in “Ghost” and “A Few Good Men,” yet the popular image was always dominated by her looks. Fargeat pushes Moore to places where we have never seen her go before. This is a role that requires vulnerability and physical exhaustion. She begins as an attractive diva made to feel small, suddenly hating the image looking back at her from posters festooned in her lavish apartment. Elisabeth lives in a hell of knowing she still has presence, but misogyny is ruthless. Dennis Quaid, who we can forgive for “Reagan” after his devilish scumbag delivery here, is another brilliant choice. He too was once a young leading man with a hot streak. The industry is infamously kinder to men, so now he’s in charge as the master of Elisabeth’s fate. Fargeat likes to use a trademark shot of close-ups of mouths chewing food, to emphasize the piggish nature of brutes. Quaid’s Harvey munches on shrimp like a slavish animal, always dressed in tacky clothes.

Then, the substance of the title takes effect and the film becomes a gruesome roller coaster. Sue appears to give Elisabeth a second chance via biological proxy. As the mysterious makers of the substance warn, both women are one. It’s evident in the process to keep the experiment going, including needing to switch every seven days where one woman remains comatose, fed by a special food packet left attached intravenously. After Sue literally emerges out of Elisabeth’s body, this being the movie’s first great shocker, she instantly takes over the aerobics show after Harvey and other creeper producers approve of her natural charm and looks. Of course they do, since they have no idea they’re essentially rehiring their original star. Fargeat’s visual approach with cinematographer Benjamin Kracun is sly, filling the frame with color, sometimes almost looking like ‘60s retro. Before the real body horror begins, the camera closes in on aspects of the human body we tend to deem attractive in young people. Fargeat slows down the image, zooms in on sweat and the movement of skin. During a late night tryst, a very fit lover’s buttocks fills the screen and simply looks absurd, almost laughable. Young or old, we’re but flesh and bones. Margaret Qualley before our eyes can suddenly become grotesque beauty.

Great satire and sci-fi is aware of a story’s logical progression. Once Sue gets a taste of fame, she will not want to go back to sleep for seven days. Anything could happen during that time period, right? This is where the plot dives fully into a contemporary, gruesome Frankenstein’s monster of a tale. All you need to know is that Sue needs to keep extracting a particular substance from Elisabeth to elongate her time awake, which also drains years from the older woman’s body. The grime of corroding skin and puncture wounds becomes a visual fixture. An eventual, nearly operatic climax is a masterful use of makeup, gallons of fake blood and nightmarish ideas. The final manifestation of the substance, after both Sue and Elisabeth have pushed things too far, is a pitiful, gross horror that is also an embodiment of what we are doing to ourselves as a species. A lot of the violence in “The Substance” is brutal, bone-crunching, though like any good satirist, Fargeat knows when to keep the camera’s glance away. The breakneck energy and focused delivery of the film’s ideas is what fuels the nonstop intensity.

Surrounded by the anatomical deformities and clash between youthful fantasies and the terror of aging we find a fantastically revived Demi Moore. She never left us, but “The Substance” is her first truly excellent film in a long time. She was always too good for “Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle” and the string of indies and VOD releases we forget she has been in over the last few years. As Elisabeth Sparkle, she recovers her movie star status while mocking it. The movie opens with a shot of Elisabeth’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. It ends there as well, with the star splashed in viscera and Moore smiling. She has been through all the levels of what this plastic paradise has to offer. “The Substance” is a director taking a stinging aim at the system while letting Moore exorcise much of what she has probably experienced. Society is making us hate our physical selves, rarely pondering the monstrosities we could create as a result. You may cheer or hurl during this movie, but you won’t forget it. 

“The Substance” releases Sept. 20 in theaters nationwide.