1 day Ago By Manohla Dargis
She has become known for baring all (or, at least, a lot). But her work, including her newest film, The Substance , should be understood in a wider context. By the end of the 1990s, after years of giving her all to Hollywood and baring most of her all, too, Demi Moore began her fade-out.
She had been a major film star that decade, complete with huge hits, humbling flops, famous friends, a celebrity marriage and headline-making magazine covers. Like all stars, she put in the work and sold the merch, herself included. And, like a lot of female stars, she made movies with male filmmakers who turned her into a spectacle of desire, a spectacle that she partly sought ownership of via her body.
You see a lot of her body in Moore’s latest movie, The Substance , from French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat. It’s a body-horror freakout that satirically takes aim at the commodification of women, and Moore is ferociously memorable in it as an actress who’s fired when she hits 50. It’s a performance that’s strong enough that you stop thinking about the fact that she’s naked in a lot of the scenes, strong enough to make you stop wondering what her exercise regime is or what work, if any, she’s had done.
By the end, I admired how she had risen above the material; I also hoped she has better movies in her future. She deserves them. Her performance in The Substance is a gaudy, physically demonstrative role that requires her to convey a range of outsize states that dovetail with the movie’s excesses, from her character’s plasticky on-camera smiles to her private despair and boiling rage.
Like some of Moore’s best-known movies, The Substance also requires her to shed her clothing. Even after decades of watching her perform in states of undress, it is startling to see Moore, now 61, stand naked before a mirror as the camera slowly travels across her body. There’s a near-clinical quality to how she looks at herself and, I think, a touch of defiance.
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