The Substance’s Scariest Scene Is All About Demi Moore’s Performance

It’s already a rare win for a horror movie to get an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture, especially one as gleefully gross as Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance. It would be rarer still for one to actually win, but Demi Moore’s lead performance has collected at least one hefty early award at the Golden Globes, and she’s now the odds-on favorite for Oscar night. No stranger to baring it all onscreen in previous roles, including Striptease and The Scarlet Letter, Moore’s turn as an aging actress in crisis—and the nudity required for its body-swapping plot—is no longer a cause for moral panic. Instead Moore is celebrated as brave and transgressive, almost to the point of condescension by virtue of her getting naked onscreen in her 60s. 

Yet the scariest part of Elisabeth Sparkles’ descent into self-absorbed madness and monstrosity isn’t during all of those spine-splitting scenes of her giving birth to her younger, “better” half, Sue (a luminous Margaret Qualley, who was unfortunately among the actors snubbed by this year’s Academy). Moore’s physicality as she convulses on her bathroom floor and contorts into an ancient crone is brave, no doubt.  But Elisabeth is most vulnerable, and affecting, in the quiet moments when she looks at herself in the mirror. 

If there’s one scene that encapsulates The Substance, one perfect moment of realness in its glossy, gory satire that makes its audience squirm, it’s directly in the middle.

With her acting prospects declared dead on her 50th birthday, Elisabeth turns to the mysterious Substance to get a new lease on life, thinking nothing about its true cost. But as younger Sue starts to steal vitality from her “matrix” mother, Elisabeth becomes even more obsessed with chasing the high of external validation. She’s lived her life in the public eye; her sex appeal to men is her entire sense of worth. So when Sue is offline, Elisabeth has even less of an identity, a life, than she did before taking the Substance. She has no purpose. Thus she spends all of her time alone, eating in front of the TV. 

Then she remembers Fred, her dorky high school classmate. She wouldn’t have given him the time of day before, but now lost, Elisabeth needs her fix of affirmation and calls the man who still remembers her as “the most beautiful girl in the whole wide world” and asks him to dinner. She sighs in relief when he naturally, excitedly, accepts.

What happens next is devastating. 

You Are One

Demi Moore’s performance in her date night preparation scene is the hinge of The Substance: we are all at war with ourselves. 

Maybe Fred is the thing she can use to fill those empty hours when she’s not Sue. Maybe not. Fargeat plays up Elisabeth’s anxiety with perfectly timed tension. The music gets high-pitched and ominous as Elisabeth tries on outfits, settling on one that does look too sexy and fussy for a casual Italian dinner with an old friend. But, you see, this is her last grasp at playing the bombshell, even if it’s for an audience of one. 

The camera cuts between Elisabeth checking her appearance in the mirror, the ticking clock, the sleeping beauty of Sue in her time-out closet, and the giant, taunting Sue billboard outside her window. The more Elisabeth compares herself to Sue, the more her self-doubt increases, and this is where the physical mastery of Moore’s performance is at its best, in those growing cracks in the perfect Elisabeth mask. 

If there’s a human alive who hasn’t even once looked in the mirror and hated their own reflection, well, they might not be human at all. We’ve all been in Elisabeth’s shoes, trying to hype ourselves up for a big event. But when you’re trapped inside with your own dark thoughts for too long, it’s easy to become your own worst enemy. 

It’s the voice inside your head that makes you try on every outfit in your closet and decide not one single thing looks right. It tells you that your hair is too thin, or it won’t ever sit right. You look tired. You look old. Who are you trying to fool in that get-up? You look ridiculous. No one will want you, not even poor, dorky Fred. 

You’re stupid. You’re worthless. It’s pathetic to even try. You shouldn’t apply for that dream job. You shouldn’t go to that meet-up. Maybe you shouldn’t leave the house at all. Maybe you even get to a point where you can’t leave the house at all. 

Elisabeth’s total desperation builds to an explosion of self-hate and ravaged makeup and she is once again alone, in the dark, staring at Fred’s incoming texts.

Poor, dorky Fred. There was a moment where Fargeat could have shown a crack in Fred’s facade as well. Another “nice guy” turning nasty in the face of female rejection is certainly not unheard of. It would’ve almost been a relief if Fred had called Elisabeth a fucking ugly old bitch for standing him up. Bullet dodged. But Fred’s seemingly genuine concern makes Elisabeth’s inability to leave her apartment even more heartbreaking. The date with Fred was the final off-ramp Elisabeth could have taken. Maybe she could have found enough with him to keep herself from slipping away into Sue and the grotesquerie that soon follows, but Elisabeth couldn’t even let herself try. 

We are all at war with ourselves, and who knows better how to sabotage you than you?

After that aborted attempt, The Substance descends into Requiem for a Dream-levels of unsubtle disaster. Elisabeth Sparkle may be just as deluded and lost as Sarah Goldfarb (played by Ellen Burstyn in another Oscar-nominated performance), but Demi Moore and the pop culture baggage she brings injects Elisabeth with an ironic, gleeful rage that turns The Substance’s final half into an over-the-top bloodbath condemning the unfair, ridiculous industry that’s destroying Elisabeth Sparkle… and could be rewarding Demi Moore with its top prize; Hollywood and its monster, they are one.

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