The Cannes winner for Best Screenplay that shook audiences to their core with its uncompromising vision and biting satire that asks: have you ever dreamt of a better version of yourself?
Taking sharp aim at the celebrity industrial complex, body image, addiction, and complex power relations, Coralie Fargeat's body horror-meets-satiric comedy follows a fading celebrity (Demi Moore) as she takes a black-market drug: a cell-replicating substance that temporarily creates a younger, better version of herself (Margaret Qualley). [141 min; horror, comedy; English]
"An immensely, unstoppably, ecstatically demented fairy tale about female self-hatred, Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance will stop at nothing—and I mean nothing—to explode the ruthless beauty standards that society has inflicted upon women." — David Ehrlich, IndieWire
"Fargeat’s movie can be called many things: a body-horror buffet, a feminist cri de coeur, an evisceration of the sunny, surface-obsessed Los Angeles where it unfolds. It’s also a movie of process, deliberately paced, exactingly observed, and no less gripping for its sometimes grueling repetitions." — Justin Chang, The New Yorker
"Fargeat delivers a macabre, funny, tragic, absurd and grotesque Grand Guignol of butts and guts; a bonkers and brutal 'beauty horror' that elevates the genre to hysterically unprecedented heights." — Katie Walsh, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
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