Seven years went from the time when director Coralie Fargeat made her feature directorial debut with a very cool revenge movie that was appropriately titled Revenge – you can read our 8/10 review of the film at THIS LINK – and when she came back with an “explosive feminist take on body horror” called The Substance, which stars Demi Moore (Ghost) and Margaret Qualley (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood). Fargeat’s second movie was worth the wait (you can read our 9/10 review HERE), and has been streaming on the MUBI service since Halloween. Qualley wore some major prosthetic makeup for some sequences in the film – and during a new interview on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, she revealed that it took a year for her skin to recover from the irritation caused by those prosthetics.

The film is gory, but also humorous, and it’s quite a wild ride. Here’s the official synopsis: It generates another you. A new, younger, more beautiful, more perfect you. And there’s only one rule: You share time. One week for you. One week for the new you. Seven days each. A perfect balance. Easy. Right? If you respect the balance… what could possibly go wrong? The Substance has been rated R for strong bloody violent content, gore, graphic nudity and language.

A press release provides more information: Demi Moore gives a career best performance as Elisabeth Sparkle, a former A-lister past her prime and suddenly fired from her fitness TV show by repellent studio head Harvey. She is then drawn to the opportunity presented by a mysterious new drug: THE SUBSTANCE. All it takes is one injection and she is reborn – temporarily – as the gorgeous, twentysomething Sue (Margaret Qualley). The only rule? Time needs to be split: exactly one week in one body, then one week in the other. No exceptions. A perfect balance. What could go wrong? Deliriously entertaining and ruthlessly satirical, Coralie Fargeat’s Cannes sensation turns toxic beauty culture inside out with a be-careful-what-you-wish-for fable for the ages. Explosive, provocative and twisted, THE SUBSTANCE marks the arrival of a thrillingly visionary filmmaker.

Moore and Qualley are joined in the cast by Dennis Quaid (Lawmen: Bass Reeves), who plays the studio head Harvey. At one point, Ray Liotta was attached to appear in the film as well, but he passed away soon after his casting was announced. He was replaced by Quaid, who dedicated his performance to Liotta.

Eric Fellner and Tim Bevan produced The Substance for the company Working Title. Alexandra Loewy of Working Title and Nicolas Royer of A Good Story serve as executive producers.

Qualley told Happy Sad Confused (with thanks to Variety for the transcription) that Fargeat had to avoid showing her face in some scenes because her skin was so irritated. “At the end, when they’re shooting up my skirt in the beginning credits, and it’s like the palm trees all around and they have all these long lenses from the bottom, that’s just because my face was so f*cked up. They couldn’t shoot my face anymore. … It took me probably a year to recover physically from all of it.” From The Substance, Qualley went on to work on Yorgos Lanthimos’s Kinds of Kindness, where the acne caused by the The Substance prosthetics was left uncovered for one of the four characters she played. “So, you know the character that has all that acne? That was just my acne from the prosthetics. And I was like, ‘Oh this is kind of perfect. I’m playing all these different characters. For one of them, we’ll use all my crazy prosthetic acne.’“

If you’d like to catch The Substance on the big screen, you’ll have another chance soon, as the film is returning to US theatres this Friday, January 17th. Are you a fan of this film, and of Margaret Qualley’s work in it? Let us know by leaving a comment below.

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