Oscar 2025 Contenders: The Substance: Beauty, Boobs and No One Follows Instructions

Well, no one can say that a horror/comedy has never been nominated for a best picture award. It’s a familiar tale: aging movie star, now staying on-screen as a TV workout personality, is on the verge of being replaced. But what if you could reclaim your former beauty? What if that new thing that everyone is looking for is just you… just a new version of you, but still you? Would you make that deal?

Everything about this movie is “hyper”: the color palette, the music and sound effects, the extreme close-ups, the camera angles, the shallowness, the cruelty. Within the first few minutes we are subjected to an extreme close up and the eating noises of the aging actress’s gross manager, sloppily eating shrimp cocktail and not giving her his full attention as he fires her and then jumps up to talk to someone across the restaurant. Everything is visual and fast and shallow and sadly for Elizabeth, the former movie star/fitness personality, there is nothing else in her life except for her fading fame.

She ends up in a doctor’s office/emergency room after getting in a traffic accident and a male nurse tells her that she’s a wonderful candidate and slips a card with a phone number that he says that she should call. Alone in her high-rise condo with a bigger than life size picture of herself in her tights and airbrushed smile on the wall, she makes the deal with the devil and calls the number and begins the bizarre bloody body-horror journey.

We already know that this isn’t going to end well. She knows that the game is rigged and there’s no “winning” or that nothing lasts forever. But the question is how is this going to come crashing down?

Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley do an amazing job portraying two sides of a not-fully functional personality. They are perfect, and not just on the surface. There is some physical stunts and drama/comedy that had to be demanding and difficult and the camera was right there probing every inch of their skin and not entirely in a flattering manner. That was amazing.

But it became clear in the third act that the writer/director, in the interest of purposefully “going too far” as a movie statement, dragged out the ending and in the process broke some of the rules of the story that he established in the first act.

***SPOILER ALERT!!!***

If the two versions are the same person, are her, than the two bodies should never be able to be conscious at the same time. That shouldn’t have happened. And if she “killed” the original version, than the clone/new version should have instantly died too. I mean, they kept saying that “THEY ARE ONE.” Then the writer/director went so far just so that he could call back to a cruel joke said by a minor character earlier in the movie and have a large detached breast fall out of the main character’s face in the final sequence.

***SPOILER ALERT ENDED!!!***

It was an amazing story that f-ed the landing and virtually squandered all the effort that went before. Demi Moore did an amazing job, she wasn’t on my list to win best actress, but then neither was Mikey Madison. This was the third movie and second day of my Oscar movie marathon… 👍 three down, five to go!

[Movie viewed on 2025-02-26 at Suncoast Cinemark with Deb].