Demi Moore --- with Margaret Qualley as her younger self --- in "The Substance"

[Pink Freud]

This opens here today and I'm really tempted by the writeups, with an alluring --- and lurid --- plot: Demi Moore, an aging star actress accepting it about as well as Norma Desmond (kids, ask your grandparents), takes a substance that literally produces her younger self, in the form of Qualley, who's been anointed by many in entertainment media as the new "It" Girl. She was the leggy hitchhiker Brad Pitt kept coming across in "Once Upon a Time In Hollywood", who eventually led him to the Manson Family camp, and she's in three movies released the last two years.

[GelatinousEndive]

Qualley was stunning in Maid.

Outshines her irritating mother by far.

[todd-parker]

This movie was a pretty crazy watch. The last 20 minutes were especially bonkers. Kudos to Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley for taking the roles and putting themselves out there.

I would be curious to find out what percentage of Coralie Fargeat film budgets is spent on fake blood.

[FrankTheTank]

She is stunning. She was great in The Nice Guys. Also, trigger warning...I think she dated Pete Davidson too.

[Targaryen]

Margaret Qualley is a very pretty and talented nepobaby...

This is her mother Andie MacDowell, starring opposite Bill Murray in 1993's Groundhog Day, when she was only a few years older than her daughter is today:



The resemblance is uncanny. They starred together as mother and daughter in a really terrific limited series on Netflix called Maid that was released in 2021.

[Pink Freud]

Ohhhh...kayyyyy....so I saw "The Substance" today, and wow....what a film. Bonkers, yes. But also very suspenseful for the first 1:45 or so, when it just goes off the deep end, becoming a cross of "John Carpenter's 'The Thing' "; "The Elephant Man", with tanker trucks of blood from "Terrifier".

That's not surprising, since the first, enjoyable 3/4 has derivative echoes of classics like "All About Eve"; "Frankenstein"; "The Picture of Dorian Gray"; and 1986's "The Fly". Late in the film I could swear I was hearing some music from "Vertigo", too.

The film is eminently watchable with framing and lighting out of Kubrick-meets-music videos, and the leads, Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley, really put it out there, leaving nothing to the imagination. Dennis Quaid is almost comical as the coarse, sloppy, and insanely ratings-driven network president. Outside of Moore, Qualley, and Quaid, I've never heard of anyone else in that cast.

And you're telling me that Moore's enormous domicile in the Hollywood Hills is an apartment??? Well, it had to be to justify the noise and impact of renovating a bathroom for sinister purposes.

Which brings us to that final 30 minutes, which I think really should have been left up to the imagination, as the "new body" of Moore, Qualley as newly anointed superstar "Sue", is about to host the network's ginormous New Year's Eve party national telecast....and realizes that strict schedule she had to adhere to for the substance to work has expired.

To say it's over the top doesn't even remotely touch the surface. There's one scene, about 20 minutes from the end, which I think should have faded to black with the background of a screaming studio audience and TV viewers at home providing the viewer's imagined horror and final shot. Think of the final fade to cable-outage in the last episode of "The Sopranos"....which people still talk about.

But...I guess those hundreds of French CGI and art directors needed the work, and boy....they got it.

Great use, by the way, in the opening shot and final shot, of the Hollywood Walk of Fame star. No, it's never "awarded". It will cost you about $250 to submit the application for your star to the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce, which will (ahem) award you the honorary star for an additional $75K.

[Dicktar2023]

"Monstro" is one of the great cinematic atrocities in the history of body horror. Wow. That was...wow. Jesus Christ.

But the movie need to go on for 20 more minutes and turn into a Gwar concert? It didn't. The last section was just a lame attempt to cover the lack of ideas with excess.

And that lack of ideas was a problem throughout. There is a concept, there are great performances from Moore and Qualley (not so much Quaid), and there is a style (oh boy, is there a style), but no real story. You've got basically an episode of Tales from the Darkside here, spread out to feature length by repeating the same scenes over and over.

Schlock aside, Elisabeth trying and failing to leave her apartment for a date is one of the best movie scenes of the year. That was perfect.

[Dicktar2023]

Also, I was annoyed by how carefully the movie establishes the rules but leaves basic questions unanswered. Do the women share memories? Or is time spent in the closet like sleeping?

And of course, the rules it does have are abandoned in the last section, but don't get me started on that.

[GelatinousEndive]

I thought this film was stupid.

That is all.