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Demi Moore’s bonkers body horror The Substance will cause a stir

You don’t have to be a fading Hollywood star or an ageing LA party girl to appreciate the bonkers gross-out body horror The Substance, which positions itself unsubtly and gloriously as a takedown of beauty and anti-ageing culture in our brutally superficial world. From feminist French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat, the film was a hit out when it premiered at Cannes Film Festival – and you can see why its assault on the senses caused such a stir.

Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) is a Hollywood star with an Oscar win under her belt and a career on the wane. Her televised fitness programme is coming to an end because she’s over 50, and her boss (a comically grotesque, boorish TV executive played by Dennis Quaid in full caricature mode) has no trouble telling her so. And then Elisabeth discovers a powerful but shady new beauty treatment, which creates a more beautiful younger self (Margaret Qualley, known as Sue); this avatar of glossy sexuality can live in the world for seven days at a time, and then Elisabeth must return for the next seven. But like any injectable beauty treatment, those most tempted to use it are also the ones at risk of misusing it.

Demi Moore’s bonkers body horror The Substance will cause a stir
The film’s special effects are gristly and pleasurably disgusting (Photo: Universal Studios/MUBI/Christine Tamalet)

With droning, inner-ear-disturbing sound design, this is David Cronenberg by way of The Picture of Dorian Gray, and as Sue grows in acclaim and status, Elisabeth begins to falter and suffer. The beautiful avatar becomes parasitic, ripping chunks of flesh from her originator. The plot isn’t always watertight, but The Substance nails the way female youth and beauty can steam-roll and flatten out the existence of older women.

If female beauty is so much about exfoliating, glossing, grooming and shearing away the reality of the body – body hair, unwanted fluids, stray moles, wrinkles and cellulite – Fargeat pointedly leans into that reality, transforming the body from sagging to taut to monstrous in the trajectory of her story. Her special effects are gristly and pleasurably disgusting, from teeth falling out to mind-reeling mutant blossoms of spare breasts in the wrong places. Fargeat continues to escalate the horror, even when you’re past the point of thinking there’s anything more to mine (or body parts to squelch).

The Substance might approach its themes with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, but it knows what it wants to criticise: the pressure to achieve nonexistent, manufactured perfection and the self-abasement and pain endured to achieve it; the nauseatingly vicious cycle that it perpetuates, wherein a new, younger, bouncier replacement is always waiting in the wings. And finally, in its hysterical, blood-soaked final act (there are some Carrie comparisons to be made), how women who try and “fail” to self-correct are humiliated and destroyed.

There is no winning for Elisabeth, or Sue, or any of us preoccupied by the impossible standards forced on women; that we also force them on ourselves remains, perhaps, the most tragic part of the story.

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