In The Substance, Coralie Fargeat (Revenge) delivers a deliriously entertaining and satirical body-horror masterpiece that dissects toxic beauty culture through a gripping tale of ambition, identity, and the terrifying cost of perfection. 

Demi Moore gives a career-best performance as Elisabeth Sparkle, a former A-lister past her prime and suddenly fired from her fitness TV show by repellent studio head Harvey (Dennis Quaid). She is then drawn to the opportunity presented by a mysterious new drug: THE SUBSTANCE. All it takes is one injection and she is reborn – temporarily – as the gorgeous, twentysomething Sue (Margaret Qualley). The only rule? Time needs to be split, exactly one week in one body, then one week in the other, without any exceptions. A perfect balance. What could go wrong? When Elisabeth’s ambitious younger self refuses to surrender her newfound fame, the elder begins paying the price, with a gruesome physical disintegration, among other consequences.  

In a daringly deranged lead performance, Moore leans into Elisabeth’s professional self-loathing with zeal. And as her rebellious clone, Margaret Qualley (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) matches the mayhem at every turn with the film’s outrageous premise. Filmmaker Coralie Fargeat (Revenge) ruthlessly uses Cronenbergian tropes, from 1980s-inspired production design to some truly superlative prosthetics, provocatively depicting the turmoil of ageing as a woman in a patriarchal world: the horror that part of oneself may be gone forever.  

Deliriously entertaining and relentlessly satirical, Coralie Fargeat’s Cannes sensation (Winner of the Best Screenplay award at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival), turns toxic beauty culture inside out with a be-careful-what-you-wish-for fable for the ages. Explosive, provocative and twisted, The Substance marks the arrival of a thrillingly visionary filmmaker.