The Substance (2024) If we had seen this before the onslaught of awards season, we would have laughed hysterically at the idea of Demi Moore winning a Best Actress Oscar for her role here......
We do know how much the Hollywood community loves Moore and how they so sympathized with her story of producers denigrating her work, dismissing her as a 'popcorn actress'.
If we'd seen her in a film that truly showcased her range of talent, we'd be rooting for her right along with everybody else.
But when we caught up with this film the day after the Oscars, we could only shake our heads at the so called 'momentum' that was supposedly growing for her to take the prime prize.
Sorry, Demi fans, she was never going to grab hold of the gold for this film.
Simple math did her in......we think two thirds of Academy voters most likely bailed out of this 141 minute film before its first hour was up.
You can't impress those folks appearing in a movie that pounds you on the head with the same basic premise for two hours and twenty minutes. Especially when it rubs your nose in body horror gore as if it were directed by an ADD afflicted film school dropout who watched way too many David Croneneberg movies.
Writer-director Coralie Fargeat came up a great idea for a 90 minute horror film.......show the ultimate result of women striving to maintain impossible levels of youth and beauty demanded of them by a male dominated culture. A culture that elevates physical perfection and beauty above all else.
What's sad: that swift, punchy movie died gasping for air somewhere underneath the repetitive, pretentious arthouse sludge that Fargeat buries her premise with.
And she expects to be celebrated for rendering her male characters as gibbering cartoons and eating up the overlong running time with a slaughterhouse carnival of mutated flesh, firehose arterial sprays, and bodies collapsing into a trash heap of organs, bones and viscera.
Demi Moore soldiers on like a trouper, but her performance turns out as the least thing this movie concerns itself with.
By the time Margaret Qualley (playing Miss Hyde to Moore's Jeckyll) staggers around like a cross between the Elephant Man and one of make-up master Rob Bottin's creatures from "The Thing", we'd long forgotten about Moore.
And so did the Academy membership. Sorry, Demi, that's showbiz......
Forget all its attempts at attaining a High Art pedigree...."The Substance", for all its excessive efforts to make 'elevated' horror out of itself remains strictly for Grindhouse ghouls.....
Zero stars (0).
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