Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.What is in The Substance? We never do learn the chemistry of the bright green liquid in the dark new shocker of the same name. The film is easier to break down: a grimly madcap sci-fi, lurid fairytale and entertainment industry exposé all at once. A cultural hot potato too after a divisive Cannes premiere, and a dire warning. Never, it counsels gravely, become a movie star, or a woman over 50. The lead is Demi Moore, who is both. Coralie Fargeat directs. The result is a potent rush with matching comedown. The first star we see is exactly that. In a hypnotic overture, the name of Moore’s character, actor Elisabeth Sparkle, is set gleaming into the Hollywood Boulevard Walk of Fame. Then come footfall, inattention and ketchup. The sequence is economical and brilliant. It isn’t meant to sound backhanded to say the movie could end there.But it doesn’t. Instead, we meet Elisabeth now, a little past her professional peak, hosting a TV fitness show. If not quite the stellar mid-career of, say, Nicole Kidman, the gig still has upbeat dignity. At least till she is fired on her 50th birthday. Her time is simply over, explains a hyper-glib producer (Dennis Quaid).So to the substance: a mystery medical treatment. That fluro-green gloop does its thing. In a grisly, grandly literal scene, Elisabeth’s younger self now physically erupts from her older body. Two eyes briefly jostle in a single socket.Another movie might have digitally de-aged Moore. In this one, the newcomer is played by Margaret Qualley. Now the pair take turns at life, while Qualley claims Moore’s TV show. There is a lot of youthful skin on screen. The Picture of Dorian Gray is one running reference. So too the great 1960s sci-fi Seconds; operatic junkie drama Requiem for a Dream; the signature “body horror” of David Cronenberg.In her own 2017 debut Revenge, Fargeat channelled rage against male sexual violence into a manic B-movie. Now with The Substance, anger fuels wild, witty visual flights. The bad guys are grey corporate shareholders. But the movie saves its smartest, saddest thinking for Elisabeth’s own internalised misogyny. War breaks out between Moore and Qualley’s versions of the character: self-loathing made flesh. Casting Moore in this full-frontal Sunset Boulevard is a coup. The rhymes between character and actor are obvious, a once blockbuster name who slipped out of sight near middle-age. But credit to Qualley too. It takes nerve to play a role this barbed about the careers of Hollywood women so early in one.So why does The Substance leave us wanting less? Put it down to time. A film where nothing is not spelt out in letters big enough to see from space ends up numbingly repetitive. And the longer the movie plays, the more you find other flaws. How gross beauty standards are, we are told, while for reasons that would be a spoiler, also being invited to shudder at elderly women’s bodies.If that affronts audiences older than Fargeat, who is 48, she may face more doubts at the other end of the age spectrum. I took an 18-year-old to see the film. Afterwards, they shrugged. A satire of the male gaze this filled with young women twerking, they said, can look a lot like what it is meant to be satirising. I could only agree. Eventually, the young outmatch us all.★★★☆☆In UK and US cinemas from September 20
