What is in the mysterious green liquid at the heart of The Substance? The movie never reveals its precise chemical makeup, but its essence as a film is far easier to grasp. Director Coralie Fargeat weaves a bizarre mix of sci-fi, fairytale, and a biting critique of Hollywood's treatment of aging women. The film is troubled, though The Substance premiered in 1996. It remains both cautionary tale and scabrous comedy of the entertainment industry. "Dem Moore plays Elisabeth Sparkle, 50, whose Hollywood star has faded to black. It has a parallel that is surfacing in real life as women who are aging in Hollywood.".

The opening sequence of the movie sets the stage by focusing on Moore's character as her name gleams on the Walk of Fame, only to descend into chaos with the arrival of a mess of foot traffic and ketchup—a fitting metaphor for the fading attention that often accompanies aging in Hollywood. Elisabeth does a fitness show, her life a far cry from the glory days. The job is a concession to dignity; when she's fired on her 50th birthday by the casual cruelty of a producer (Dennis Quaid), there is momentary humiliation with a hint of cruel reasonableness-it's just not your time anymore. This has been her reality for women in the industry.

Pour this green, alien-looking medicine into Elisabeth's system: radical prescriptive fodder promising transformation for her but only at the cost of a grotesque metamorphosis.

In one gruesome literal display of body horror, the younger version of Elisabeth bursts gruesomely out of the older of her, two eyeballs fighting in a socket for room. Instead, Fargeat chooses an older Margaret Qualley for the role of Elisabeth's younger avatar and comes a fight between both avatars of the character. With her younger self now usurping her life, Elisabeth's career is rejuvenated as Qualley's take on the character usurps her place on TV. The film immerses itself in a visual feast of sallow flesh and grotesque transformation, drawing upon classics such as The Picture of Dorian Gray, Seconds, and Requiem for a Dream, and lending to body horror in the ways of David Cronenberg.

Already in her 2017 debut Revenge, Fargeat had taken a searing indignation at male violence and turned it into frenetic B-movie mode.

The Substance keeps that fire alive and flares up flashes of kaleidoscope visual bravery as it catalogues Hollywood's toxic obsession with youth. The villains are clear enough—the beastly corporate powers driving beauty standards—but the film is at its sharpest when probing, disturbingly intimate explorations of the internalized misogyny that Elisabeth is grappling with. The war that Moore and Qualley's characters Wage is both more than a battle between old and young, but also the mode through which the corporeality of Elisabeth's self-hatred comes to life. Casting Moore is pure genius, what with all the parallels between her character and her own life as once-bankable star whose visibility dulled with age. It's not just Moore, however, who shines: Qualley proves herself in a role of immense bravery, especially considering how sharply the film critiques Hollywood's treatment of women.

Despite these strengths, The Substance never quite manages to capitalize on promising set-ups. The more one sees of the film, the more its attempts at profundity start to feel shrill, spelling out its points with an unwanted heaviness. The film invites its viewer to be both horrified that society demands women be anything less than 19 ever again and to be repelled by the aging female body-which is an uncomfortable, contradictory mandate that finally undermines the potential of the work.

For others, the stance on aging comes off as insulting, even patronizing, especially if one's experience is of older days.

For a younger viewer, this also becomes no less troubling. An 18-year-old viewer shrugged after watching Fargeat's film, declaring that the satire of the male gaze often seems to resemble the very thing it seems to critique, complete with scenes of young women twerking. It's a valid point worth keeping in mind as Fargeat's film seems to dance on that thin line between critique and complicity. And yet in the end, it might be left to the younger generation: the outcome is a film that is, at best, visually arresting and fantastically ambitious thematically, but too frequently less than its best self.

Still, beneath its impressive surface, The Substance is an interesting study of both the physical and psychic cost of aging in a business that celebrates youth. Star Elisabeth Sparkle reminds us of the cruel realities of Hollywood stardom, as Demi Moore, an actress relatively unknown outside of America, surrendered her senses to the film's epic events. It is in Fargeat's direction that we find a sharp, if flawed, examination of the industry's obsession with perfection.