The Reel Review
When a famous actress-turned-exercise guru gets fired from her daytime TV show on her 50th birthday, she turns to a mysterious black-market drug called The Substance to give her a new, younger body – with disastrous results. Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley star in this sci-fi/body horror from French writer/director Coralie Fargeat (Revenge).
The Substance is David Cronenberg-styled body horror on steroids, reminiscent, at least initially, of other recent genre films like Crimes of the Future, Titane and Possessor. The first two hours are actually pretty cleverly filmed and thought-provoking, as the film explores such themes as desperately chasing the fountain of youth, internalized and overt misogyny and loneliness. Moore and Qualley both give standout performances as older and younger versions of the same person, the latter “birthed” from the former as a result of the drug. When one abuses the rules of The Substance, disaster ensues. Shot through exceptionally unflattering extreme close-ups and a fish-eye lens, Dennis Quaid, as the sleazy TV executive, never looked so awesomely grotesque.
Unfortunately, it is the third act where The Substance goes off the rails, trading a cleverly conceived and stylishly filmed, post-modern version of Oscar Wilde’s 1891 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray for a blood-drenched finale that is so bonkers in its shock value that it overshadows and ultimately diminishes its own story – great start, distracting and unnecessarily crazy, weak finish.
REEL FACTS
• Demi Moore, 61, credits co-star Margaret Qualley for adding levity and making her feel more comfortable in the scenes where they were fully nude.
• Margaret Qualley, the daughter of Andie MacDowell (who co-starred with Demi Moore in 1985’s St. Elmo’s Fire), says her breasts in the film were actually a prosthetic breast plate.
• Originally Ray Liotta was to play the sleazy network TV executive, replaced by Dennis Quaid after Liotta’s unexpected death in May 2022.
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