The Substance (2024 Melbourne International Film Festival) ★★★★

TWO French women are among my favourite current directors.

Julia Ducournau has given us Raw in 2016 and Titane (2021) and Coralie Fargeat, Revenge in 2017.

Fargeat’s latest is the absolutely bonkers sci-fi horror The Substance featuring a career-best performance from Demi Moore.

These two writers/directors are able to take audiences on visceral and cerebral rides.

While they produce genuine horror and gore, they also produce cinema that is challenging and provoking.

In particular they are interested in presenting female characters in a rounded and complex manner that confronts the conventions, perceptions and expectations society places on them.

In The Substance, Fargeat excoriates the notion that physical beauty is the primary definition by which women are judged, by both others and themselves.

Her lead character is Elizabeth Sparkle, played by Moore, who might be termed a fading star.

In a brilliantly conceived prologue, Fargeat shows the path of Sparkle’s career to date and the fickle nature of fame via a static camera view of Sparkle’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and audio of changing public reactions.

We’re then thrown into the present-day where 50-year-old Sparkle is about to lose her high-profile gig because ratings are falling and the despicable studio boss, played gleefully by Dennis Quaid, thinks she is too old and no longer pretty enough.

The vain and lonely Sparkle takes the setback hard starts to spiral until she hears about a revolutionary treatment called The Substance that promises to produce a better, younger and beautiful version of your true self.

Intrigued and desperate to try anything that will improve her looks and relevance, Sparkle injects herself with the mysterious ‘substance’.

Initially delivering everything Sparkle has wished for, the substance eventually threatens to cause the exact opposite as it unleashed horrific consequences.

Margaret Qualley plays the new, improved Elizabeth who appears in a manner that you won’t forget in a hurry.

As the film progresses, the story, characters and approach become more and more creative, dynamic, horrifying and fascinating.

The Substance is a big, ballsy entertaining horror film and so much more.

It competed for the major prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival where Fargeat won the Best Screenplay award.

I loved every smart, humorous and downright gory minute of it.

Make sue you experience it with a crowded at the cinema.

Watched at the cinema.

★★★½