In her gory new thriller, Demi Moore plays an aging star who will do anything to be younger. She tells us what the outrageous premise says about beauty standards

At the end of a recent press screening of “The Substance,” I sat there, my mouth agape. As the lights came up, I remained in my seat, shaken, as my colleagues chatted amiably and filed out of the theatre. I felt like I had just … witnessed something. A scorching screed against beauty standards, against self-hatred, loud and unabashed. A capital-M Movie. And a capital-M Masterpiece.
I eventually drifted downstairs to the bathroom. I just wanted to be alone, to savour the last few moments of the trance created by writer-director Coralie Fargeat and her brave actors, Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley, both of whom deliver career-best performances of complete and utter fearlessness.
“Have you ever dreamt of a better version of yourself?” So intones the purveyor of the movie’s mysterious titular elixir. Moore plays Elisabeth Sparkle, a Hollywood star who has aged out of her fitness show gig. She’s offered a trial run of the Brat-green liquid, a treatment that allows her to split time between her current self and a younger, more nubile version named Sue (Qualley). But managing both forms becomes … difficult. Maximum body horror ensues. This is a movie meant to be seen in the theatre, so you can scream along with an audience and have your eyes popped out by the glorious Grand Guignol of it all.
Think you know where the movie might go, how it might end, based on that description? I was completely unprepared for how far Fargeat takes it. When you think she might have pushed it — the rampant gooey gore, the sheer volume of blood and flesh — to the limit, the film careens ahead, roaring into the red and beyond.
“I knew I needed actresses who wouldn’t shy away from doing the movie that was on the page, and it was a very challenging movie,” Fargeat says. “It was a movie that invented its own language, its own rules, its own excess. I knew it had to be actresses who would be willing to take risks, who would be willing to trust the filmmaking process and me as the director. This requires instinct, this requires courage, this requires what I call true intelligence, which is the emotional intelligence.”
Reading the script, Moore says, she knew that the movie could go one of two ways. “This could either work,” she says. “Or it could be a disaster.”
Qualley agrees: “We basically just spent five months in a crazy lab of an apartment (set) that’s meant to be in Hollywood, in Paris, gluing things to our bodies and being naked and screaming and being like, well …” Moore joins in, as they sing-song and shrug dramatically in unison, “Who knows!”
For Qualley, the role required many daunting acts: for starters, there is a lot of nudity. Her Sue has an ultra-horny vibe, her wardrobe all leather catsuits and lamé leotards, lips perfectly glossed, her glutes in constant close-up. “I’ve never done something so overtly sexual. And that was really scary, to be honest. I’ve intentionally chosen parts that didn’t rely on that as part of the character development, so I thought this would be a hard thing for me to do,” Qualley says. “And I was right.”
This movie is all about bodies: how we look, how people look at us, how we look at ourselves. It is a deeply physical film, from its pile of prosthetics to its gnarly fight scene. And the meat is twinned with mental torments.
Moore had to push herself out of her comfort zone to accept the role, due to the “emotional rawness of it,” as she puts it. “Knowing that I was stepping into something that was really about showing not the most glamorous sides of myself, showing the kind of things that we generally would like (to hide) — like, where’s my good lighting, where’s the things that we don’t want people to see — once I really stepped into the vulnerability of that … it’s exactly why I wanted to do it.”
Watching this film as a woman ratchets up the intensity. Watching this film as a woman over 40 cranks it up to skin-crawling levels. Even though she’s played by one of the most beautiful actors in film history, Elisabeth feels just like me: annoyed with society’s stringent beauty standards, but sometimes too tired, too indoctrinated to fight back against them. (I myself endured my own mini-“Substance” crucible post-interview: I’d worn a pair of whimsical heels I hadn’t taken out in ages, only to mangle my feet when I had to walk 12 blocks in them, leaving behind grotesque blood blisters and scrapes that are still healing weeks later.)
“So many of the scenes were really difficult and challenging,” Moore says. Yet, in a film filled with grisly sequences of extreme viscera, it was a much simpler scene that was perhaps the toughest. In it, Elisabeth prepares for a date, second-guessing her makeup, her outfit, her accessories, over and over and over, before angrily smearing lipstick across her face. “But (it was) also one that I was really looking forward to,” she says.
Moore’s passion for the material shines. Her Elisabeth is furious, she is miserable, she is vulnerable, she is seething. (And she wears the hell out of her glam wardrobe, all royal-blue silk blouses and bright-yellow coats.) Just as Elisabeth and Sue are urged by the makers of the Substance to remain “one,” Elisabeth’s frustration with her physical self merges her with the viewer.
Even though Qualley is playing the “more beautiful, more perfect” version, the actor is familiar with that unease, too. “It’s a universal feeling,” Qualley says.
Elisabeth’s occupation only heightens the pain, Moore says. “She’s an actress in her life, she’s being rejected, she’s in total despair. But it’s not what’s being done to her, it’s what she’s doing to herself that then leads us to where it ends up going.”
Fargeat — who won Best Screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival in May — is skilled in conjuring many of our worst fears around aging, bloating, scarring, sagging. She, like many women, has struggled with these issues her whole life. Writing the script, Fargeat felt strong — and vulnerable.
“I felt ready to address them in a very violent and cathartic way,” she says. “But at the same time, as much as you want to free yourself from those issues, confronting them is challenging. Writing it was challenging because it makes you face what makes you suffer.”
It’s tempting to see the film not only as an attack on beauty standards, but on vanity itself. But that is not exactly right, according to Fargeat. She is more interested in why Elisabeth wants to be seen, why Elisabeth wants people to look at her. This is because Elisabeth’s appearance, Fargeat says, is the way she has earned affection.
“So, when this light goes out, when the camera shuts down, she feels that nobody sees her anymore. She feels that the love is taken away from her,” Fargeat says. “And I think that’s why it’s so violent, especially when you’re a woman — to feel that you don’t deserve to be loved, you don’t deserve to have a place because you’re not good enough, you’re not perfect enough, you’re not this or that enough.
“There is always someone to tell us you’re not good enough,” she adds. “Because this voice is so powerful, you internalize it, and you grow with it and it grows inside you. Even if no one tells you this anymore, you tell it to yourself.”
And that’s what makes Elisabeth’s fate so heart-wrenching, Moore says, “because it really is that reflection of how violent we can be towards ourselves.” Weeks after seeing the movie and right in the middle of this interview, I feel the power of that message still and tear up slightly at it — at the idea that we are our own torturers.
But Moore is hopeful that the film may help us ease up on ourselves, if we can dare to do it. “The Substance,” she says, shows the physical manifestation of this brutal self-flagellation. “It allows you in a certain way to have this little objective view and go, ‘Wow, if I could paint that, if I could illustrate it, what would it look like — the violence of how horrible I am when I criticize myself?’
“What’s powerful about that is that we have the ability to change.”