THE SUBSTANCE ★★★1⁄2 (R) 141 minutes “Death to subtlety” appears to be the motto of Coralie Fargeat, the French writer-director of The Substance , an audaciously morbid satire on Hollywood, the beauty industry, and the dream of eternal youth. There are drawbacks to this approach, but it does ensure the images stick in your mind: a chrome orange corridor out of a Hanna-Barbera version of The Shining , or Dennis Quaid as a good ol’ boy TV executive leering into the camera, misogyny oozing from his pores. Demi Moore as Elisabeth Sparkle, a TV exercise show presenter deemed past it by her station boss (Dennis Quaid), in The Substance.
Credit: Madman The “body horror” aspect of The Substance takes a while to kick in. But from the outset, techniques such as wide-angle lenses and extreme close-ups are used to distort and fragment everything we see, perhaps reflecting how the heroine, Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), views her body as well as the grotesque system she’s part of. For decades, Elisabeth has been the alluring yet wholesome host of a breakfast aerobics show, a role presented as the height of mega-stardom (the film is set in Los Angeles but was shot in Paris, and Fargeat’s idea of the US entertainment industry remains abstract).
When her overseers insist she’s finally reached her use-by date, Elisabeth strikes a Faustian bargain with the mysterious purveyors of a new miracle drug, letting her transfer her consciousness into a glamorously youthful alt.