The Substance

Directed by Coralie Fargeat, The Substance follows an aging performer (Demi Moore’s Elisabeth) as she attempts to revitalize her career by consuming a mysterious product that results in a younger version of herself (Margaret Qualley’s Sue). It’s a workable premise that’s employed to hopelessly (and relentlessly) unwatchable effect by Fargeat, as the filmmaker, armed with her own screenplay, delivers an often astonishingly heavy-handed satire that contains few, if any, compelling attributes – with the picture’s arms-length atmosphere compounded by its ongoing reliance on less-than-subtle, aggressively over-the-top visuals and narrative twists (ie the degree to which nothing here has any basis in reality is ultimately exhausting). And while the picture admittedly does boast eye-catching sets and an impressively go-for-broke Moore performance, The Substance, which runs a needlessly (and painfully) overlong 2+ hour runtime (!), segues into a frustratingly repetitive midsection that builds towards an ineffective, anticlimactic final stretch – with the end result an offensively misguided and garish disaster that seems unlikely to have worked even as a 15 minute short.

1/2* out of ****