A Body of Horrors

How The Substance turned Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley into one of the year’s best movie monsters.

- MATTHEW JACOBS

CORALIE FARGEAT'S outré satire about modern beauty standards is a cautionary tale and 2024's wildest psychodrama, in which Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley slowly transform into a modern Frankensteined wonder. When Elisabeth Sparkle (Moore), a 50-year-old actress turned TV fitness instructor, is fired by a network executive who deems her too old, she makes a Faustian bargain, injecting herself with neon-green plasma that lets her live every other week as a sexy, spotless 20-something named Sue (Qualley). But each time Sue overstays her welcome, parts of Elisabeth's body age at punishing rates. Soon enough, she will become Monstro Elisasue, a distorted ogress who looks like Anjelica Huston in The Witches, if that movie had been 17 times more sinister.

Over two years, Fargeat worked to construct a beastly mash-up befitting the bloodbath of the film's operatic finale. "All the things that can be seen as pieces of flesh from the outside gazeour breasts, our ass, our teeth, our smile-were totally deconstructed, pulverized, and put in no order," the French director says. "It's the way society has shaped itself by the way men look at women." This is how Elisasue came to life.

1. The Birth

FARGEAT ALWAYS knew her movie would end with a monster-a "Picasso of male expectations," as she calls it. The rejection that motivates Elisabeth to consume the Substance also fosters Sue's addiction to remaining young, which is why Sue defies the mandate to switch bodies with Elisabeth every seven days. Elisasue is the product of minds and bodies stalked by external valuations.