ANATOMY LESSON

Demi Moore's performance in body horror 'The Substance' has won her rave reviews. It's another role that allows the star to subvert her physical form on celluloid, writes Adam White

- Adam White

People have been looking at Demi Moore’s body for more than 40 years. On the cover of Vanity Fair in 1991, nude and seven months pregnant. Rippling with muscles in GI Jane. Under strip club spotlights in Striptease. In her new horror film The Substance – which has become the most talked-about premiere at the Cannes Film Festival – we see her body again. Then again and again. But it’s gnarlier this time. A younger woman hatches out of Moore’s back, leaving behind two macabre flaps of flesh on either side of her spine. Over the course of the film, Moore ages and rots, every crease of her skin filmed with gooey sadism. It may be her shock ticket to an Oscar.

In the film, which received a rapturous 11-minute standing ovation after its Cannes premiere on Sunday night, Moore plays a faded Hollywood superstar, whose yearning for youth leads her to an experimental procedure: once injected with a mysterious fluid, she births an alternate version of herself (played by Margaret Qualley) – someone sparkling with sex appeal and youthful pep, whose body she can only ever inhabit for a total of seven days at a time, before she must revert back to her older self. If these Cinderella conditions aren’t adhered to, things will go awry. Which, naturally, they do.