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Demi Moore · Margaret Qualley · Cannes Best Screenplay · The most provocative body horror film of its decade — from £3 at 98types Camden

Cannes Best Screenplay — The Body Horror Film of the Decade

The Substance (2024), written and directed by Coralie Fargeat (Raw, 2016) and starring Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley, won the Best Screenplay prize at the 77th Cannes Film Festival and received 89% on Rotten Tomatoes. The film follows Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), a fading Hollywood actress and fitness TV host who discovers a black-market substance that creates a younger version of herself (Margaret Qualley, credited as "Sue") — with the condition that the two must share existence in weekly alternation: one week active, one week dormant. The film is a body horror satire about Hollywood's treatment of women's ageing, the entertainment industry's consumption of female bodies, and the specific violence of a culture that demands women remain simultaneously young, beautiful, capable and invisible about their effort to remain so.

The Substance is the most formally ambitious horror film of 2024: its final act escalates from satirical body horror through outright Cronenbergian grotesque (the most deliberately excessive practical effects sequence in a mainstream film since The Thing, 1982) without losing the satirical precision of its social argument. Fargeat's decision to use explicit practical effects — rather than the cleaner CGI that would have made the film more commercially accessible — is a formal statement about visibility: the film refuses to make the horror of its subject comfortable to watch.

Demi Moore — The Career Performance

Demi Moore's performance as Elisabeth Sparkle has been described by critics as the finest work of her career: a portrayal of ageing anxiety, professional obsolescence and the specific horror of discovering that the thing you have been afraid of has already happened, delivered with a commitment to the character's vulnerability and self-destruction that required Moore to abandon the self-protective quality that characterises most major star performances. Moore prepared for the role by confronting specific personal experiences of Hollywood's treatment of female performers over 40 — her preparation was as much psychological as physical, and the performance shows.

Margaret Qualley — The Duality Performance

Margaret Qualley's "Sue" requires her to play a character who is simultaneously Elisabeth Sparkle and someone completely distinct from her: the same woman's younger body inhabited by a different consciousness, initially deferential to Elisabeth's memory and gradually autonomous, finally contemptuous. The specific physical vocabulary Qualley develops for Sue — the specific quality of someone who is performing youth and beauty with total commitment because she knows those qualities are her only resource — is the most technically precise work of her career, and the counterpart to Moore's performance that makes the film's central argument legible.