‘The Substance’ has divided audiences at the Cannes Film Festival, but Moore is drawing the best reviews of her career. And it’s another role that allows the star of ‘Ghost’ and ‘Indecent Proposal’ to distort, subvert and exploit her physical form on film, writes Adam White
eople have been looking at Demi Moore’s body for more than 40 years. On the cover of Vanity Fair in 1991, nude and seven months pregnant. Rippling with muscles in GI Jane. Under strip club spotlights in Striptease. In her new horror film The Substance – which has become the most talked-about premiere at the Cannes Film Festival – we see her body again. Then again and again. But it’s gnarlier this time. A younger woman hatches out of Moore’s back, leaving behind two macabre flaps of flesh on either side of her spine. Over the course of the film, Moore ages and rots, every crease of her skin filmed with gooey sadism. It may be her shock ticket to an Oscar.
In the film, which received a rapturous 11-minute standing ovation after its Cannes premiere last night, Moore plays a faded Hollywood superstar, whose yearning for youth leads her to an experimental procedure: once injected with a mysterious fluid, she births an alternate version of herself (played by Margaret Qualley) – someone sparkling with sex appeal and youthful pep, whose body she can only ever inhabit for a total of seven days at a time, before she must revert back to her older self. If these Cinderella conditions aren’t adhered to, things will go awry. Which, naturally, they do.
The film, from the French director Coralie Fargeat, has proven divisive already, with some critics calling it “an audacious masterpiece”, and others calling it tired hagsploitation with little to actually say about women, age or Hollywood. Regardless, Moore is earning the best reviews of her career. “Moore has never really taken a risk of this nature before,” wrote IndieWire’s David Ehrlich. “The places that risk takes her in the movie’s absolutely bonkers final act will have your jaw on the floor, if it’s even still attached to your body.” “Ripping into her best big-screen role in decades, Moore is fearless,” raved the BBC. “Extraordinary,” added The Telegraph, with Variety remarking that Moore’s performance “is rippled with anger, terror, despair, and vengeance”. There have been suggestions she could surprise-win the Best Actress prize at Cannes, which would then thrust her straight to the top of prediction lists for next year’s Oscars.
Moore doesn’t typically generate this kind of conversation. Why bother discussing her performances when there are her famous ex-husbands Bruce Willis and Ashton Kutcher to talk about? Or nude scenes or massive salaries? (Her demand for pay parity with the male movie stars of the Nineties didn’t earn her media respect back then, but a snarky nickname: “Gimme Moore”). Wipe away the gossip and she is one of our most underrated character actors, though, a woman who has always altered, subverted and exploited her physical form to tell stories. Think of her not as a Nineties bombshell, but more the female Christian Bale.
Just look back on some of her most famous roles. Indecent Proposal, in 1993, saw her place a figure on her own body: a million dollars for a single night with it, sex as a strictly transactional endeavour. The sexual harassment thriller Disclosure, released a year later, depicted her mere presence in a workplace as an act of violence: she is so sexually confident, so brazenly unemotional when it comes to matters of the heart, that men are rendered helpless. Striptease and GI Jane were two notorious Moore flops – in 1996 and 1997, respectively – but both saw her push her body to its limits. In the former, her character turns to exotic dance to pay the bills; Moore’s nudity and her sculpted, toned physique made up the entirety of the film’s marketing campaign. For the latter, Moore bulked up and shaved her head to play a female Navy Seal.