What Critics Are Saying About Demi Moore's New Film

Demi Moore has what more than one critic calls "the role of a lifetime" in The Substance. She plays Elisabeth Sparks, a Hollywood celebrity who hosts an aerobics show and gets fired by a sleazy network exec on her 50th birthday and is offered a mysterious substance that allows her to live as a younger version of herself—but only for a week at a time. Since this is a horror movie, it's not a spoiler to say things do not go well. The movie, written and directed by Coralie Fargeat, has an 87% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Four takes:

• Mick LaSalle at the San Francisco Chronicle says this is "one of the most assured, intelligent, evocative, and haunting horror films in a long time"—and it's "so extreme that it makes you wonder—in the best way—if the filmmaker is crazy. The film, he says, is a "commentary on what the media and society persuade women to do to their faces and bodies as they get older, and yet it's not a precise critique. Rather, it's a primal scream, one so angry and horrified that it's beyond making sense."

• The Substance is "well-made and entertaining" for most of its 140-minute runtime, writes Krysta Fauria at the AP. "But the film's deliciously unhinged, blood-soaked and inevitable polarizing third act is what makes it unforgettable." If there's a critique to be made, she writes, "it's that the satire and caricatures are a bit heavy-handed, with most of the male characters being not-so-subtle misogynists. But that overkill is part of what makes it so much fun."
• One of the more negative reviews came from Katarina Docalovich at Paste, who finds the title ironic "as the film is substantial from neither a genre perspective nor a thematic one." "Its satire is as fresh as a dead body rotting in a basement," she writes. "An overuse of stale horror conventions in an already predictable plot—combined with decades-old, thoroughly unchallenging ideas about women's relationships to their bodies—leads to a film that claims to support its protagonist, while treating her like the butt of the joke at every turn."
• Justin Chang at the New Yorker says the movie "can be called many things: a body-horror buffet, a feminist cri de coeur, an evisceration of the sunny, surface-obsessed Los Angeles where it unfolds." He writes that Moore is "persuasive" in the role, "and for reasons that are painful to consider. At the height of her nineties stardom, she drew misogynist jabs aplenty from the press, who targeted her movies, her performances, and her personal life. Now sixty-one, and with a quieter Hollywood profile, she is as poignant an emblem of sexist, ageist industry neglect as Fargeat could have hoped to conjure." Reviewers also praised the performances of Margaret Qualley, who plays Sue, the younger version of Elisabeth, and Dennis Quaid, who plays sleazy exec Harvey.

(More movie review stories.)