The Substance: Demi Moore’s new bloody horror film could win her an Oscar

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P.People have been staring at Demi Moore’s body for over 40 years. On the cover of Vanity Fair in 1991, naked and seven months pregnant. Waving with muscles GI Jeanne. In the Strip Club Spotlight Striptease. In his new horror film The substance – which became the most publicized premiere of the Cannes Film Festival – we find his body. Then again and again. But it’s more complicated this time. A younger woman emerges from Moore’s back, leaving behind two gruesome flaps of flesh on either side of her spine. Over the course of the film, Moore ages and rots, every fold of his skin captured on camera with gooey sadism. This may be his shock ticket to an Oscar.

In the film, which received an enthusiastic 11-minute standing ovation after its premiere at Cannes last night, Moore plays a faded Hollywood superstar whose yearning for youth leads her to an experimental procedure: once injected with a fluid mysterious, it gives birth to an alternative version. of herself (played by Margaret Qualley) – someone fizzing with sex appeal and youthful vibrancy, whose body she can only inhabit for a total of seven days at a time, before having to revert to her old self . If these Cinderella conditions are not met, things will go badly. Which they do, naturally.

The film, by French director Coralie Fargeat, has already sparked discord, with some critics calling it a “bold masterpiece”, and others calling it a tired hagsploitation with little to say about women, l age or Hollywood. Regardless, Moore is receiving the best reviews of his career. “Moore has never really taken a risk of this nature before,” wrote IndieWireIt’s David Ehrlich. “The places where risk takes him in the film’s absolutely bonkers final act will have you hitting the floor with your jaw, even though it’s still attached to your body.” “Playing his best big screen role in decades, Moore is fearless,” said the BBC. “Extraordinary,” added The telegraphwith Variety remarking that Moore’s performance “is full of anger, terror, despair and vengeance.” Some have suggested she could surprise win the best actress award at Cannes, which would propel her straight to the top of prediction lists for next year’s Oscars.

Moore doesn’t usually generate this kind of conversation. Why bother discussing her performances when we have to talk about her famous ex-husbands Bruce Willis and Ashton Kutcher? Or nude scenes or huge salaries? (Her demand for pay parity with ’90s male movie stars earned her not respect from the media at the time, but a sarcastic nickname: “Gimme Moore.”) Scratch the gossip and she’s one of our most underrated actors, however, a woman who has always altered, subverted and exploited her physical form to tell stories. Think of her not as a ’90s bombshell, but rather as the female Christian Bale.

Let’s just take a look back at some of his most famous roles. Indecent Proposal, in 1993, saw her place a figure on her own body: a million dollars for a single night with, sex as a strictly transactional enterprise. The sexual harassment thriller Disclosurepublished a year later, described her mere presence in her workplace as an act of violence: she is so sexually confident, so openly indifferent when it comes to matters of the heart, that men find themselves helpless. Striptease And GI Jeanne There were two notable failures from Moore – in 1996 and 1997 respectively – but both saw her push her body to its limits. In the first, her character turns to exotic dancing to pay the bills; Moore’s nudity and sculpted, toned physique comprised the entirety of the film’s marketing campaign. For the latter, Moore bulked up and shaved her head to play a female Navy Seal.

Regardless of the quality of these films, they were roles that Moore was delightful to play; the star’s acting, physical prowess and image all work in tandem. It wasn’t until this time, when Moore began to interrogate and subvert facets of her own celebrity, that she became a truly interesting actress.

Unfortunately, this is also when the backlash began. For her naked Vanity Fair cover – an image so shocking that it has its own Wikipedia page – Moore’s reviews were split down the middle. “One camp called it disgusting pornography and accused me of exhibitionism,” she wrote in her 2019 memoir. Upside down. “Another saw it as a liberating step forward for women. » It was a conflict that would be repeated throughout the ’90s, with Moore at the center of many cultural referenda on female sexuality, equality and power in Hollywood. No one really talked about his acting – his determination to GI Jeanneor the haunting image of her dying in the TV movie If these walls could talkhis character having undergone a clandestine abortion.

The substance is, in a sense, a bold move for Moore, and there’s a meta-thrill to her playing an actress mourning her prime and obsessed with age and experimental plastic surgery (she had to repeatedly deny in the mid-2000s that she had spent $300,000 on cosmetic work before the 2003 shoot Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle). But there’s also something quite classic about her choice to appear in the film: Moore has long made fun of her own image and the media’s obsession with her body; stripping it bare, distorting it and pushing it to the extreme. If she catches Oscar’s attention, it won’t be because she’s doing something truly radical and new. It will be because people will finally pay attention to it.

“The Substance” will be released later this year