If the body horror sub-genre has a guiding principle, it’s in the terror of our infinite consciousness being inextricably tethered to malleable mortal flesh. Most films in the category find humans attempting to circumvent their natural form and being punished in gruesome ways for their transgression. 

The Substance, the provocative new satire from writer/director Coralie Fargeat, abides by this thesis — “you can’t escape from yourself,” as a sinister voice on the phone warns at one point — but pushes the sub-genre into thrilling new territory by taking on the beauty industry and the impossible standards society places on women. In the protagonist’s quest for physical perfection, imagery is evoked that isn’t merely ugly but downright horrifying. It’s as gnarly a parable about self-acceptance as you’re likely to see this year, or any other year, for that matter.

The opening shot of The Substance makes it clear that the star of Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) is fading. As the cracks of her respective Hollywood Walk of Fame emblem have manifested over the years, she too finds the passage of time difficult to take when her long-running aerobic TV show is canceled on her 50th birthday. After a car accident, she learns of a mysterious serum known as “The Substance,” which promises Elisabeth a “younger and better version” of herself. 

Upon first injection, a new being is birthed out of Elisabeth’s spinal column, a younger counterpart who chooses the name Sue (Margaret Qualley) and shares Elisabeth’s interest in sexualized fitness routines. Sue parlays with Elisabeth’s skeezy TV producer Harvey (Dennis Quaid), and she seems to be well on her way to stardom, but there’s a catch: The regimen for The Substance dictates that Sue and Elisabeth switch bodies every week.

Inevitably, this protocol is abused and the equilibrium between Elisabeth and Sue is irrevocably thrown off. The temptation of staying in Sue’s body beyond the weeklong timeframe proves too great and the results become dire in short order. 

It’s difficult to pick a favorite stretch of The Substance, easily one of 2024’s finest, but the initial fracturing of Elisabeth and Sue’s journeys provides the film’s most biting commentary. While Sue spends her week titillating viewers with her new show Pump It Up, Elisabeth desperately grasps for fulfillment through overindulging on junk food. She even accepts a date with a high school acquaintance who is, frankly, not nearly as good-looking as she is, but thanks to the humongous Sue-featuring billboard outside her window, Elisabeth spirals into debilitating insecurity. It’s a heartbreaking scene and Moore pulls it off perfectly.

If The Substance was primarily just scenes where we’re asked to have sympathy for Elisabeth, Moore would already be doing the best work of her career, but what puts this over the top is how much more is asked of her. At the outset, she has to sidestep the grotesque behavior of demeaning male executives who no longer see her as relevant, and by the end, she steps into corporal grotesqueries that are best for viewers to experience for themselves. 

To an extent, I imagine Moore brought personal experience from aging in Hollywood to this role, and it requires so much vulnerability and rawness to make the narrative cohere. It’s as compelling and committed a lead performance as I’ve seen all year, and my hope is that Moore is in talks for Best Actress when Oscar season kicks in.

Following up her brutal debut Revenge, Fargeat demonstrates impeccable control over a story that could go terribly wrong in the hands of someone who wasn’t as passionately intelligent about the material. 

She’s making a movie that is, in large part, about the female form, but the nudity is clinical and considered in the way that Jonathan Glazer was for 2013’s Under the Skin. The sexually charged imagery is intentionally over-the-top and draws attention to the futility of pursuing physical perfection, as Qualley herself is performing with prosthetic enhancements. 

Fargeat also tips her hat to a handful of classics, with liminal spaces right out of The Shining and a pivotal music cue from Vertigo, another movie that involves female doppelgängers under intense male scrutiny. 

The Substance is a shot in the arm for those who have been bored by recent horror offerings.

New movies coming this weekend

• Coming to theaters is The Wild Robot, an animated sci-fi film starring Lupita Nyong’o and Pedro Pascal, about an intelligent robot who is stranded on an uninhabited island after a shipwreck, and subsequently bonds with the island’s animals.
• Also playing only in theaters is Megalopolis, an epic science-fiction movie starring Adam Driver and Giancarlo Esposito, centering around an idealist architect in a decaying city, who is granted a license by the federal government to demolish and rebuild the city as a sustainable utopia.
• Streaming on Paramount+ is Apartment 7A, a psychological thriller starring Julia Garner and Dianne Wiest, involving a struggling dancer who finds herself drawn into dark forces by a peculiar couple promising her fame in 1960s New York.