The Substance

Elisabeth Sparkle is dropped from her aerobics show on her fiftieth birthday and takes a black-market drug that generates a younger duplicate, on the condition that the two of them swap every seven days. Neither of them respects the seven days.

Fargeat shoots the male gaze in exactly the grammar it actually uses: extreme close-ups, slow pans up bodies, and a producer eating prawns in enormous, wet, amplified sound. The film makes you complicit for an hour and then starts charging you for it.

Demi Moore is doing the bravest work of her career and the film is explicitly about the industry that discarded her, which gives every scene a second floor.

The last twenty minutes go somewhere very few studio films would permit. The effects are practical and there is an extraordinary amount of them.

Moore was nominated for an Academy Award for a film that ends the way this one ends, which is remarkable.