The Substance Is an Extremely Gnarly Body-Horror Movie—And a Darkly Funny Riff on Demi Moore’s Legacy

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Some of Demi Moore’s many famous co-stars have, over the past years and decades, decided to revisit some of their signature characters. Tom Cruise, Moore’s not-quite love interest in A Few Good Men, famously saved cinema by bringing back Maverick for a Top Gun sequel. Michael Douglas, Moore’s opponent in Disclosure, revived Gordon Gekko for Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps back in 2010. And while Moore’s Indecent Proposal benefactor Robert Redford hasn’t done a long-gap sequel, The Old Man and the Gun is certainly a send-off for a certain type of wily, charming Redford rogue. Yet Moore herself—despite a major run of massive hits in the first half of the ’90s and a high level of name recognition that stretches far beyond her career peak—has no equivalent character she could be expected to bring back. For all the adventurousness of her work, her public image feels like herself—and, conversely, that self feels more like an image than a clearly defined persona. It’s both an enviable and precarious position for a performer to find herself in. And in a roundabout way, that’s the subject of her new movie The Substance.

Moore’s character, the improbably-named Elisabeth Sparkle, is a deliberately era-blurring avatar of general-purpose celebrity. She’s presented as an ebullient exercise-video host, sort of like Jane Fonda in the 1980s, and—although it’s established in a fixed-camera passage-of-time montage that she has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame—appears to be more of a “personality” than an actress. Despite being physically fit in a way that many younger people would envy, Elisabeth is still a solidly middle-aged woman who knows her body can only be commodified for so long; soon enough, her celebrity and her self-worth will slip further away. So when she’s presented with the opportunity to try a shadowy new drug known only as “the Substance”—an injectable capable of unlocking her ideal and most beautiful self—she agrees, setting in motion a sci-fi/horror parable in which her dependence on this substance ends up hastening her downfall instead of holding it off.

It’s hard to pinpoint a “downfall” moment in Moore’s real-life career. She was in the aforementioned massive hits, has worked steadily in film and television, wrote a well-liked memoir, and remains quite famous to this day. But her peak commercial period didn’t outlast the ‘90s, and ended, oddly, with a one-two punch of solo star vehicles, as if audiences and press were punishing her for standing on her own. For the 1996 comedy Striptease, she became the highest-paid actress to that point, receiving a salary of $12 million to play a beleaguered single mother who becomes an exotic dancer, hoping to make enough money to win back custody of her young daughter. Then there was the 1997 drama G.I. Jane, a passion project she produced and successfully recruited Ridley Scott to direct. It’s the movie she cites in her book as her greatest point of pride in a 40-year career. Back in the ’90s, though, Striptease flopped, G.I. Jane underwhelmed, and that was that. Moore never led a big-studio movie again.

Unfair as the press may have been, it’s not hard to understand why neither movie was a hit. On purely cinematic terms, they are not satisfying. Her earnest Striptease character clashes with the sloppily translated zany crime-comedy tone of the Carl Hiaasen adaptation, while she blends in all too well in the generic G.I. Jane, which is basically Top Gun with a feminist-but-not-too-feminist overlay. It’s all very late ’90s. But both movies are, if anything, more interesting in 2024, for reasons that Roger Ebert was keen enough to cite in his positive G.I. Jane review back in 1997: “All of these women,” he wrote, referring to multiple Moore characters and the actress herself, “test the tension between a woman’s body and a woman’s ambition and will.” Moore was, indeed, known for her body as much as her body of work, in part because of what she did in between Ghost in 1990 and A Few Good Men in 1992. Her biggest cultural hit in 1991 wasn’t a movie—Nothing But Trouble, Mortal Thoughts and The Butcher’s Wife all stumbled at the box office that year. No, it was her controversial, much-discussed and much-parodied August 1991 Vanity Fair cover, where she appeared both extremely pregnant and extremely naked—and in true blockbuster fashion, that cover even spawned a sequel a year later.