A bright, showy, didactic, and generally well-reviewed body horror film about women, aging, and the hypersexualization of the female body, The Substance is the second feature from French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat (Revenge), who’s riding a wave of critical praise and showbiz hype since the film’s Cannes Film Festival debut in May. And I did appreciate her film’s attempts at humor and its bold formal flourishes, such as its eye-popping color scheme and its way of showing Los Angeles as an oddly empty city, a kind of blank canvas with nothing on it but the huge, blown-up images of the film’s main characters that morbidly obsess them. But having a filmmaker illustrate at great literal-minded length that there are nasty cultural attitudes toward aging women gets a weary “No shit, Sherlock” response from me.

“Body horror can be a really powerful weapon of expression for female directors,” said Fargeat, who used the filmmaking process to channel her own anxiety about turning forty.

At every age, we can find something wrong with ourselves, which can make us feel like monsters. . . . Your image defines you and your self-worth. But I thought that if I could create something meaningful about these issues, it could also serve as a form of liberation.

The Substance is about a celebrity aerobics instructor named Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) who stars in her own long-running TV fitness show. She’s fired on her fiftieth birthday by her grotesque TV producer boss, Harvey (Dennis Quaid). Desperate to hang on to her old life, she turns to a mysterious black-market drug called “the Substance” that provides her with a new and improved — that is, much younger — self called Sue (Margaret Qualley). Sue promptly auditions to be Elisabeth Sparkle’s replacement on the fitness show and gets hired by the fawning, pervy Harvey, whose name is clearly meant to evoke Harvey Weinstein.

Thereafter, according to the strict instructions that accompany anonymous deliveries of “the Substance,” Sue and Elisabeth live in alternating weeks. While Elisabeth’s paralyzed body is stored away, sustained by intravenously fed nutrients, Sue lives the exciting public life of a rising celebrity. While Sue is in storage, Elizabeth lives a depressing twilight existence holed up in the massive apartment where the main wall decoration is an enormous glamour shot of herself. She watches TV and eats ever more massive meals in compensation for what she’s missing.

Soon the two are rivals for what the androids in Blade Runner yearningly call “more life.” Sue starts “borrowing” extra time in her body, which has grave physical consequences for Elisabeth in the form of even more accelerated aging. But because there’s no way to undo the consequences of her participation, Elisabeth can’t bear to end the experiment, which rocks on through more gruesome developments until the monstrous blood-soaked finale.

Much is being made of the way Demi Moore, as Elisabeth, is enacting aspects of her own showbiz experience. At sixty-one, Moore looks as extraordinarily young and fit as ever, with a gym-toned body, a tight, sculpted face, and raven-black hair that flows down past her waist. It’s hard to avoid cynical thoughts about how she must live at the gym, with occasional excursions to the hair salon to hide her roots and get her extensions maintained, plus regularly scheduled trips to the plastic surgeon to keep that jawline so amazingly firm.

Through the decades, though, Moore has been one of the stars who has always (somewhat infuriatingly) insisted that she maintains her looks purely through fitness training and controlling her diet, denying any significant plastic surgery: “You know what? Maybe one day I’ll go under the knife. It just irritates me that people are constantly saying how much I’ve spent on plastic surgery.”

At the same time, her career has been punctuated by regular self-promoting displays of her nude, apparently ageless and indestructible body, most famously kicking off with her 1991 Vanity Fair cover while far advanced in pregnancy. But the see-how-incredible-I-look-now spectacles have continued as a reliable part of her stardom, built into films like Striptease (1996) and G.I. Jane (1997) and Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle (2003), in which she played a minor but pivotal role that seemed designed to amaze the public. The scene that caused a small sensation took place on a beach, featuring Moore as she walked by Cameron Diaz, both of them bikini-clad so that audiences could gasp when they saw that Moore looked, somehow, more incredibly thin and toned than the highly athletic former model Diaz, who’s ten years younger than her.

While promoting The Substance, Moore has been giving interviews about the constant pressure to put her aggressively sculpted body on display in order to continue her career. Her 2019 memoir, Inside Out, also delved into her troubled body image, expressed over the years in the form of eating disorders, compulsive exercising, and drug and alcohol abuse.

I did, as I wrote in the book, personally experience being told to lose weight on quite a few films before I ever even had my children. And again, those were humiliating experiences, but the true violence was what I was doing to myself, the way in which I tortured myself, did extreme crazy exercise, weighed and measured my food because I was putting all of my value of who I was into how my body was, how it looked, and giving other people’s opinion more power than myself.

Moore brings the same interpretation to The Substance — that it’s about “the violence we have against ourselves” in accepting insane, culturally imposed beauty standards and competing with other women to meet them. But overall, the film is fairly insistent on the fact that it’s the workings of the system that does the imposing, mainly represented by the Harvey character. Often shot with fish-eye lenses to further distort his seamed, pop-eyed mug, Harvey makes a sickening mess gobbling down piles of giant shrimp while lecturing Elisabeth on how women over fifty “lose it.”

“What is it?” asks Elisabeth, cowed. But as gross as Harvey is, he’s unwilling to define what exactly is lost. Presumably he is referring to the loss of fertility, and with it, desirability in the eyes of most men.

The film is aiming at the bleakly funny in many of its grosser scenes, but even in its dramatic moments, it remains a remote and rather abstract treatment of the experience of aging for women. It isn’t as if it were a vulnerable, quailing woman up there offering her ordinary flesh for inspection — it’s Demi Moore, whose film stardom rests on a kind of Teflon quality that comes from the constant reshaping and fine-tuning of the body to keep it ready for spectacular display.

Though the role seems designed to draw accolades for Moore raving about how “brave” she is for taking it on, she can only gesture toward the poignant effects of ordinary-life aging by demonstrating that, no matter how perfectly crafted a woman’s looks are, drawing on all the possible resources of time and money and the expertise of trained professionals, they’re never perfect enough.

The closest Moore comes in the film to an ordinary person’s experience is when her character tries to resume a “normal” life by going out on a date with a man she once knew in high school, who raves that she’s “still the most beautiful woman in the world.” But when it comes time to leave the apartment, no matter how terrific she looks in the mirror, Elisabeth can only see the flaws. She changes her clothes, adds accessories, alters her makeup, and finally ends up rubbing her face violently all over, smearing the layers of cosmetics into a grotesque mask.

It takes effort to really believe the emotion behind this scene. Moore’s never been a particularly gifted actor, and she brings a lot of physically tough self-assurance with her as part of her stardom. When she looks in the mirror, there’s the familiar assertive little jut of her chin and the confident stance of a woman who knows she looks great. We have to take it on faith that, inside, her character is eaten up with insecurity.

In real life, Moore’s reaction to the display of her flaws is less melodramatic: “Going into this, I knew this is not about me looking great, and in fact there was a certain liberation in the role that wasn’t having to be perfect. It’s not that there aren’t shots in it where I go, ‘Ugh, my ass looks awful.’”

And the ass shots are a big deal in this film, because innumerable comparative close-ups insist upon showcasing the superbly youthful, ballet-trained derriere of Margaret Qualley. There are so many close-ups of her gyrating and grinding and swiveling butt during the “Pump it up!” portions of Sue’s aerobics routines, especially, that the line between rank exploitation and the feminist critique of the voyeuristic “male gaze” collapses entirely.

Ultimately Moore gets plunged into the performance of the cultural nightmare figure of the hag, but again, there’s a kind of lame, cosplaying quality to it that fails to go beyond noting, “Oh, hey, they really made Demi Moore look ancient and horrible.” No misogynist bastard of a male director could represent “the crone” more cruelly than Fargeat does here.

The Substance evokes the lurid old “psycho-biddy” or “hagsploitation” horror films of the 1960s, such as What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), Strait-Jacket (1964), and The Nanny (1965). But those films featured aging but ever-formidable stars of the Hollywood studio era such as Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, and Olivia de Havilland, and their outsize screen power was being celebrated in a camp, backhanded way that “hagsploitating” Demi Moore can’t achieve.

Just think of Bette Davis as the scarily delusional Baby Jane, looking like a rotting cupcake in her old child-star getup that only accentuates her wrinkles and jowls and the dark circles under her puffy eyes. When she sees herself in the mirror and is suddenly able to recognize the gargoyle she’s become in trying to stop time, her cry of anguish is so disturbing that you can believe it was pulled up from Davis’s own personal torment.

“After I turned forty,” said Davis, in one of her several frank memoirs, “every time I looked in a mirror, I screamed.”

The Substance is a bright, pop, pulpy, gory, hectoring take on the subject of women’s aging in the public eye, but unfortunately, in the long line of great feminist body horror films, it’s not a particularly moving or memorable one.