The Substance Review

Fargeat shoots this like an advertisement gone wrong, all wide lenses, saturated primaries and tiled bathrooms lit like operating rooms, and the sound design attacks. It is a formally aggressive film that knows exactly what it is doing with every frame. Demi Moore gives the performance of her career and the casting is part of the text, a star whose treatment by this industry the film is directly about, playing a woman who agrees to be replaced by herself.

The scene at the mirror before the date hurts more than anything the prosthetics achieve later. Margaret Qualley matches her by playing hunger rather than youth. Where critics divide is the middle. The satire has one idea, states it with total clarity inside forty minutes, then repeats it at rising volume for another hour before an ending that abandons restraint entirely and is either the boldest or the silliest choice of its year. Both readings are defensible. What nobody disputes is the craft, the commitment, and the fact that the film keeps its nerve where a safer version would have looked away.