In the entertainment industry, youth and beauty equals currency for women. In Coralie Fargeat’s satirical follow-up to Revenge (a brutal spin on the rape-revenge genre), Demi Moore stars as celebrity aerobics instructor Elisabeth Sparkle who is confronted with unattainable Hollywood beauty standards placed on her by her boss Harvey (Dennis Quaid). The answer to all her problems is presented in a mysterious substance which offers her a fountain-of-youth type treatment. 

Films like The Neon Demon and Death Becomes Her have examined the desperate measures women are driven to in order to maintain their careers under a patriarchal system. Fargeat continues this conversation for the digital age with a twisted and violently gory body horror. The film plays out in a heightened way with the neon 80s aesthetic, synth-heavy score and surreal camera angles all nodding to an industry consumed by artifice. 

Fargeat visually reflects how women have been represented in media through both Moore and co-star Margaret Qualley’s changing appearance and costumes. The conventional Disney princess archetype is worshipped while the wrinkled skin of an ageing woman is presented as witch-like and undesirable. It may all sound depressingly familiar and obvious but there’s something daring in the way Fargeat contorts the monstrous pressures placed on women to conform via cosmetic surgery into a discomforting and darkly fascinating fairytale. Her flashy direction (reminiscent of Gaspar Noe’s enfant terrible days crossed with David Cronenberg’s visceral horror), Moore’s unhinged performance and the excessive self-destructive tendencies her character exhibits effectively get under the skin. 

The Substance was screened as part of Edinburgh International Film Festival and is in cinemas on Friday 20 September.