The Substance

The Substance (2024) is body horror and the most argued about film of its year. It won best screenplay at Cannes and then put Demi Moore at the centre of the awards season. Elisabeth Sparkle presents a television fitness show. On her fiftieth birthday she is fired. She then buys a black market compound that generates a younger version of herself, with one condition: the two bodies must alternate weekly, and breaking the rule costs something. The film is not subtle and is not attempting to be. It takes how an ageing woman is looked at and converts it into flesh rather than allegory. Coralie Fargeat uses the camera without mercy: hard close ups, wide angle distortion, and skin in almost every frame. The final twenty minutes go somewhere cinema rarely goes and split the audience completely. Some call it a masterpiece. Others say it repeats its single idea until it breaks. Demi Moore does the work of her career. Who should skip it: extremely gory, physically nauseating, and full of nudity. Do not watch it after eating, and that is not a joke. Who it is for: body horror, satirical horror, and viewers who want genre cinema taken to its limit.