No one who sees Demi Moore’s twisted film about a special anti-aging treatment will forget it. But is it a feminist masterpiece or superficial, misogynistic and exploitative?

In The substanceIn French director Coralie Fargeat’s much-discussed, opulently stylized and lavishly gory gonzo horror, a disembodied voice overlaying a marketing video for a dark new beauty product asks, “Have you ever dreamed of a better version of yourself – younger, more beautiful, more perfect?” ?” It’s a question that gets to the heart of Fargeat’s intent – to explore, with splashes of blood, thrills and a dash of science fiction, what happens when this desire to conform to beauty standards gets out of control.

The film begins with the famous aerobics teacher Elisabeth (Demi Moore) turns 50 and is deemed by television managers to be too wrinkled to continue presenting. She learns that she is being pushed out of her daytime slot in favor of a younger, prettier star. Draw attention to the entry “The Substance,” a suspicious green serum for which a shady medical company is looking for test subjects. It promises to create a “younger, more beautiful” version of yourself. And so emerges Elisabeth’s successor Sue (Margaret Qualley), who in a cruel twist emerges from Elisabeth’s spine.

While his premise may bring something new to the mix, Fargeat’s chosen theme of fear of aging is already well-trodden territory. Think of Margo Channing (Bette Davis), whose career is in danger of being snatched away by her younger assistant (Anne Baxter) in All About Eve (1950), or Veronica Ghent (Alice Krige) in 2021’s She Will, an aging Hollywood star with a vengeful spirit. “The Substance” has also been compared to “Death Becomes Her” (1992), in which an aging actress, played by Meryl Streep, drinks a potion that gives her eternal youth.

But it’s not so much Fargeat’s subject matter as her treatment that angers some critics. The Substance is the follow-up to Fargeat’s Revenge (2017), an equally brazen, pulpy, and blood-soaked rape-revenge thriller – a grisly subgenre notorious for its excessive depictions of suffering women. One of his formative works, I Spit on Your Grave (1978), appeared in the wake of the rise of the anti-rape movement in the United States, when feminists began to raise concerns about sexual violence as an endemic social problem, but infamously contained a lengthy, ten-minute Rape scene that many found to be disgustingly exploitative.

Fargeat’s take on the genre trained a camera on the body of his protagonist Jennifer (Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz) to ironize the way men sexualize women. This objectifying gaze returns in Fargeat’s second film, focusing on Qualley’s scantily clad body. While Fargeat’s debut aimed to subvert that look in the film’s second half, when a dirt-covered Jennifer miraculously returns from the dead to exact revenge on her tormentors, Qualley’s sequel shots fail to accomplish the same purpose for some . “I thought they really overdid it,” critic Hilary A. White told the BBC. “The camera is really staring at her. I’m not sure there’s enough ironic distance created between the film’s message and these constantly sweaty, up-close body shots of the younger star.”

The line between subversion and concession to misogyny is not easy to delineate. Similar accusations have been made against Revenge, claimed Slate critic Lena Wilson in your review that “while the film makes a valiant attempt to subvert a sexist formula by cloaking itself in French art-film trappings and pseudo-empowering femininity, it ultimately falls victim to its exploitative roots.” Overall, however, the film’s critics weren’t having much major influence on its critical reception: it scored a solid 88% Rotten tomatoes at the time of publication.

The substance falls into a camp known as “body horror,” characterized by fleshly mutations, mutilations, and copious amounts of gore. Its popularity is often attributed to the Canadian king of horror David Cronenbergbut in recent years female and non-binary filmmakers like titanium Director Julia Ducournau, Rose Glass, Amanda Nell Eu and Laura Moss have taken the genre in new directions. Body horror has offered these directors the opportunity to explore themes of growing up, female desire and gender fluidity, and in the case of Glass Love lies bleedingto wallow in patriarchy-destroying violence. Critic Katie Rife describes the movement as “a burgeoning wave of aggressive, stylized female genre directors” who engage in “intrusive feminist metaphors.”

“The Substance is not a subtle film,” says Rife. “I personally like this kind of aggressive hyperstylization, but I would say that there are people who don’t particularly like being pressured with excessive style.”

This cruel excess arguably obscures Fargeat’s meaning rather than clearly conveying her message. The conditions for using the substance include that Elisabeth and Sue must swap places every seven days. When this “equilibrium” gets out of balance, body horror sets in. White explains, “I found that the very believable and very serious themes that were satirized so effectively in the opening hour were all smothered in this rain of blood and viscera in the final 20 minutes – monstrous body horror prosthetics that exude coming towards us from all angles.

Additionally, the portrayal of aging women in film has also sparked a decades-long debate about the portrayal of older women on screen. There is a long line of films that are categorized as “Psycho-Biddy.” or “hagsploitation” Cinema in which women, whom Hollywood considers outdated, are portrayed as grotesque and descend into madness and murder. Billy Wilder’s “Sunset Boulevard” (1950), in which Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) is a former Hollywood icon driven to violence, provided the archetype for later horror films such as “The Nanny” (1965) and “Strait-Jacket” (1964). ) demonized older women in obviously more lurid ways. Rife believes that The Substance’s use of witchploitation tropes, which dramatically alters Moore’s body with visual effects, is laced with irony. “There’s a big ironic element to the whole thing here. Something that (Fargeat) said in the question and answer session at the Toronto International Film Festival was that she told the actors that when the characters finally like each other, they become a monster – and I think That’s the core of the film.”

Perhaps the crux of the debate surrounding “The Substance” is the film’s alleged superficiality. As Hannah Strong gets to the point in her review of Little White Lies: “By reviving old talking points about Hollywood’s obsession with beauty and its fear of aging, The Substance becomes a sterile facsimile of Hollywood itself.” Rife believes the film makes “serious and legitimate” statements about the beauty industry and the titular substance’s parallels to mass-produced drugs like Ozempic and Botox that are pushed on women – but she doesn’t deny that it’s superficial. “As an expression of anger (the lack of substance) it doesn’t hurt the film at all,” says Rife. “It doesn’t really detract from the film as a visceral, cathartic experience, which I think is its main value.”

The question that many will ask is: does the film reinforce the idea that beauty and youth are society’s greatest assets, while at the same time mentally attacking such values? “Anything that at first glance is glamorous and opulent and lush and luxurious and has a dark underbelly, it’s the calibration,” adds White. “It’s about finding the balance between watching and being seduced by the protagonist, while at the same time pulling back the curtain enough to see the monster that lurks behind it.”

Whether “The Substance” achieves this balance is apparently still unclear. Whether it’s a triumph of feminist anger, pure entertainment, or a superficial catastrophe, viewers will have to see for themselves.

The Substance is now in cinemas in the US and UK