What a wild ride of a thing. Coralie Fargeat’s pitch-black horror-comedy has in it, appropriately, the DNA of a half-dozen things you might’ve seen before — off the top of my head, there’s the “seemingly arbitrary rules that will inevitably be broken, and woe betide those who do so” of GREMLINS and the central bargain for youth and beauty very much reminds me of Robert Zemeckis’s DEATH BECOMES HER — and hell, I’ve never even seen the flick, but the ending has me going, “CARRIE, right?” But this whole stew of riffs and ideas is in service of one central thesis: ladies, holding yourself to patriarchal standards of youth and beauty is a losing game. The only winners are the leering perverts who prop this whole system up, who, no matter what you do, WILL invariably start looking the other way in search of fresh meat. This is what happens to actress and TV fitness star Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore, who spends probably two thirds of the movie in a state of visceral rage and/or horror, and has been getting some well-deserved kudos for it), cast out of her long-running TV program by the World’s Grossest TV Executive (Dennis Quaid, hamming it up magnificently as someone you’d REALLY like to see suffer some consequences at the end). The sight of her own face coming down off a billboard (not even for the show, it’s a TOOTHPASTE AD) so distracts her that she gets in a car accident, and while she’s getting a clean bill of health, a suspiciously handsome nurse (I literally said to myself before anything happened, “hold on, that man is TOO HANDSOME”) slips a USB drive in her pocket. On it is a video advertisement for the titular Substance. Once she breaks down and buys in, the deal is this: Elisabeth injects herself with this green stuff and a second person cooked up by her own DNA, uh, *emerges* (in a weird, gross way — there’s lots of things in this movie that can be described as “weird” and “gross”): younger, prettier, “more perfect,” but still tethered to the original “her” in multiple ways. Like, it seems clear this is very similar to (weirdly) how the last Doctor Who regeneration worked — both remember everything up to the point this process happened, but then they’re going about their own lives.
