Not for the squeamish: The Substance reviewed

Both horribly familiar and wonderfully shocking, this body-horror film written and directed by Coralie Fargeat does a very traditional thing – turning the scramble for youth and beauty into a monster of immeasurable disgust and immorality – in a huge way. There is nothing minimal or restrained or overly clever here; nothing of the nuance in language or wit that makes its forerunner, The Picture of Dorian Gray, so haunting. This is a presentation of the horror of ageing for the bombastic mash-up age, melding vampire, sci-fi, feminist tragicomedy and dystopian genres. It’s like a reverse Barbie but with lashings of Poor Things, Blonde, the uncomfortably up-close Marilyn Monroe biopic, and plenty more.

The story begins with Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), who has lost hers in a big way. She is a middle-aged morning TV aerobics star who was once the toast of Hollywood and she’s been sacked, in the crudest terms, on her 50th birthday for being too old. Strolling out of work in a daze, she is in a car accident. One of the (gorgeous) doctors who treats her slips her a USB drive entitled ‘The Substance’ and a note: ‘It changed my life.’ Desperate and depressed, Sparkle orders the product promoted on the drive. The next thing we know, she is injecting herself with a mysterious serum, triggering a process of duplication. As she lies lifeless on the floor, her younger, idealised self scrambles out of her spine. The two versions get a week-on, week-off schedule, which creates the core tension: the young, increasingly successful one, a starlet who calls herself Sue (Margaret Qualley), doesn’t want to switch back every seven days and begins literally sucking all the life out of Sparkle to go on in the youthful body for longer.