Demi Moore, 61, stuns at The Substance photocall during return to Cannes Film Festival after 25 years – as the horror receives rave reviews and a 13-minute standing ovation
The guard
Well, the film is ridiculous and a bit unnecessary towards the drawn-out ending, but Moore gets a taste of the postmodern horror of her situation.
In its messiness – and, yes, its refusal of serious content – The Substance should really be released on VHS cassettes and watched at home as a tribute to the great era of home entertainment pulp and video store masterpieces full of strangeness and grossness.
It reminded me of Michael Crichton’s neglected ’80s pulp cooler Looker, with Albert Finney as a sinister plastic surgeon. Fargeat delivers some shocks.
The Telegraph
If that sci-fi premise sounds wild, you haven’t heard the half of it. The Substance is a humdinger of a satirical horror-thriller, alternately hilarious, poignant and breathtakingly grotesque.
It’s exactly the jolt of extravagantly stylized genre energy that the Cannes Film Festival needed halfway through, and Moore, making a mighty comeback, seizes the role as if her life depends on it.
BBC culture
Fargeat’s twisted story is a lot of fun, especially if you like hearing squelched, cracking, and crunching sounds as gruesome things are done to human flesh. (Anyone with a fear of needles should avoid The Substance at all costs.)
The film also features standout roles for all three stars. Moore gives her best big-screen role in decades, being fearless in parodying her public image, Qualley shows a wicked sense of humor as Barbie’s evil twin, and Quaid delivers it joyfully as an obnoxious impresario in a flashy suit.
Hollywood reporter
A gory fantasy that is a twisted cross between the classic films Sunset Blvd. and Freaks, it’s one of the best competition films at Cannes since Titane – and with the right mix of judges, it could lead that film to a major festival prize, if not for the film, then perhaps for Moore.
Indie thread
The Substance is a non-stop, go-until-you-gag epic that builds and builds and builds until it scars everyone in the audience with a deep-seated physiological aversion to the idea that we can ever hope to escape ourselves.
Fargaet’s film escalates with the kind of supremely confident audacity that will have you laughing out loud at images that would otherwise make you scream, and the film simply refuses to end until even Harvey himself is sickened by the way society pressures women to to shape the body.
And so “The Substance,” like any fairy tale worth its unforgettably terrifying special effects, ends with a clear moral you want to believe in: There is more beauty in freedom than freedom in beauty. And it’s absolutely beautiful to see Elisabeth Sparkle and Demi Moore help each other escape into the light of that truth.
Variety
Demi Moore’s performance is nothing short of fearless. She plays a version of herself (once a star at the center of the universe, now old enough to be seen as outdated by sexist Hollywood) in a very abstract way, and her acting is imbued with anger, terror, despair, and revenge.
There’s a lot of full-on nudity in “The Substance,” to the point that the film flirts with building a male gaze into the foundation of its aesthetic. Yet it does this only to pull the rug of voyeurism out from under us. Margaret Qualley makes Sue sharply magnetic in her self-confidence, and the fact that Sue manages to package herself as an ‘object’ is part of the film’s satirical design. She follows the rules and ‘gives the people what they want.’
I think it’s clear that Qualley is going to be a huge star, and you can see why here. She takes on this stylized role and imbues it with an air of mystery. Because ‘The Substance’ is finally a story of dueling egos, with Elisabeth’s real self and her enhanced self battling each other in a war for dominance.