The Substance

Coralie Fargeat's The Substance won the Best Screenplay prize at Cannes 2024 and went on to win Demi Moore the Golden Globe for Best Actress - Musical or Comedy. Fargeat won the César for Best Director at the 50th César Awards in February 2025, the first French woman to win the directing César since Tonie Marshall's win for Vénus Beauté (Institut) twenty-five years earlier. The film also earned five Academy Award nominations including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay.

Fargeat had previously directed the much smaller Revenge (2017), which had circulated principally in genre festivals; The Substance represented a substantial scale shift, made on a budget of approximately $18 million through Working Title, Universal and a French production base. Demi Moore's casting in the lead role was a deliberate decision by Fargeat to use the central conceit's commentary on Hollywood ageism by working with an actress who had publicly experienced exactly the trajectory the film dramatises; Moore's career was effectively reactivated by the project after a quieter decade.

The supporting cast pairs Moore with Margaret Qualley (continuing her remarkable mid-2020s work after Poor Things and Drive-Away Dolls) and Dennis Quaid. Cinematography is by Benjamin Kračun, who had also shot Emerald Fennell's Saltburn; the score is by Raffertie. The film was shot in France and the U.K. across approximately 110 days. The body-horror prosthetics work (by Pierre-Olivier Persin and Marilyne Scarselli) was the most-discussed individual technical achievement of any film at the 2024 awards season and earned an Oscar nomination for Best Makeup and Hairstyling, which the film won.