When I read back in the spring that Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance was the most divisive movie at Cannes—it got the festival’s longest standing ovation (11 minutes) and the award for best screenplay, while also occasioning multiple midscreening walkouts—I thought I knew which side of the divide I would fall on. An over-the-top body-horror thriller about an injectable drug that allows a fading star to swap bodies with a younger, hotter woman who is almost but not quite her? With gnarly special effects achieved mainly via prostheses and makeup rather than CGI? Directed by a middle-aged woman? Lay it on me, especially if it stars Demi Moore, the Brat Packer turned Hollywood fixture of my cinematic youth, in what everyone is saying is the role of a lifetime.
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