Demi Moore has what more than one critic calls “the role of a lifetime” in The Substance. She plays Elisabeth Sparks, a Hollywood celebrity who hosts an aerobics show and gets fired by a sleazy network exec on her 50th birthday and is offered a mysterious substance that allows her to live as a younger version of herself—but only for a week at a time. Since this is a horror movie, it’s not a spoiler to say things do not go well. The movie, written and directed by Coralie Fargeat, has an 87% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Four takes:
- Mick LaSalle at the San Francisco Chronicle says this is “one of the most assured, intelligent, evocative, and haunting horror films in a long time”—and it’s “so extreme that it makes you wonder—in the best way—if the filmmaker is crazy. The film, he says, is a “commentary on what the media and society persuade women to do to their faces and bodies as they get older, and yet it’s not a precise critique. Rather, it’s a primal scream, one so angry and horrified that it’s beyond making sense.”
