She has become known for baring all (or, at least, a lot). But her work, including her newest film, The Substance , should be understood in a wider context. By the end of the 1990s, after years of giving her all to Hollywood and baring most of her all, too, Demi Moore began her fade-out.
She had been a major film star that decade, complete with huge hits, humbling flops, famous friends, a celebrity marriage and headline-making magazine covers. Like all stars, she put in the work and sold the merch, herself included. And, like a lot of female stars, she made movies with male filmmakers who turned her into a spectacle of desire, a spectacle that she partly sought ownership of via her body.
You see a lot of her body in Moore’s latest movie, The Substance , from French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat. It’s a body-horror freakout that satirically takes aim at the commodification of women, and Moore is ferociously memorable in it as an actress who’s fired when she hits 50. It’s a performance that’s strong enough that you stop thinking about the fact that she’s naked in a lot of the scenes, strong enough to make you stop wondering what her exercise regime is or what work, if any, she’s had done.
By the end, I admired how she had risen above the material; I also hoped she has better movies in her future. She deserves them. Her performance in The Substance is a gaudy, physically demonstrative role that requires her to convey a range of outsize states that dovetail with the mov.