Deadline’s Learn the Screenplay collection spotlighting scripts from the 12 months’s most talked-about films continues with The Substance, Mubi’s satirical horror from writer-director Coralie Fargeat. Demi Moore stars as Elisabeth Sparkle, a as soon as well-known actress and now a fading health movie star who decides to make use of a black market drug that creates a younger, higher model of herself.
The Substance had a splashy premiere on the Cannes Movie Pageant, the place it received the Greatest Screenplay award and scored a 13-minute standing ovation, establishing it as one of many 12 months’s buzziest horror movies. It hit U.S. theaters in September and has grossed $56.1 million globally 12 months up to now.
Within the pic, Elisabeth unintentionally discovers her destiny whereas sitting in a males’s restroom stall the place she overhears Harvey, the odious community government, declaring on the urinal, “We’d like her younger, we want her scorching, we want her now.” Shortly after, Elisabeth is fired, and following a automobile accident she is introduced with a chance to affix an unique experiment.
Fargeat’s script is a biting critique of Hollywood’s obsession with youth and sweetness. The movie opens with a stark juxtaposition: the glamorous unveiling of Elisabeth’s star on the Stroll of Fame, adopted by a time-lapse of its gradual decay. The visible metaphor mirrors the trade’s relentless obsolescence cycle, a stark reminder of how fame is fleeting and everyone seems to be replaceable.
The movie additionally tackles the problems of ageism and unrealistic magnificence requirements, as skilled by two generations of girls: the getting older Elisabeth and her youthful model, the aspirational Sue (Margaret Qualley).
The occasions after injecting the substance flip right into a battleground as Elisabeth’s disregard for the foundations governing her and Sue’s shared physique required to coexist results in her deterioration. Fargeat’s visionary third act is a grotesque showdown not for the faint of coronary heart, full with a blood-soaked finale that may depart an enduring impression — it was a singular expertise shared with the viewers within the movie show.
Fargeat’s homage to basic physique horror, from the transformation of the monster in Cronenberg’s The Fly and John Carpenter’s The Factor to inspiration from Brian Yuzna’s Society and Brian De Palma’s Carrie is clear within the The Substance‘s Kubrickian-inspired manufacturing design and shade palette.
Learn her script beneath.
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