The Substance Nominated for 5 Oscars

Coralie Fargeat’s body horror thriller The Substance has received five Oscar nominations, including best picture.

It was also nominated for best original screenplay for Fargeat, best actress for Demi Moore, best makeup and hairstyling and best director for Fargeat.

The film, which leans mostly on practical effects, follows Moore’s character, Elisabeth Sparkle, a fading celebrity, as she takes a black-market drug that creates a temporary younger version of herself named Sue (played by Margaret Qualley) and then must grapple with the fallout.

Dennis Quaid also stars in the film, which premiered in May at the Cannes Film Festival.

“Moore imbues her character with a visceral desperation, one that enriches the unsettling undercurrents of Fargeat’s film. She plays a woman who can’t quit the addiction of having youth at her fingertips despite its lacerating effect on her psyche,” wrote The Hollywood Reporter‘s Lovia Gyarkye in her review.

“Moore imbues her character with a visceral desperation, one that enriches the unsettling undercurrents of Fargeat’s film. She plays a woman who can’t quit the addiction of having youth at her fingertips despite its lacerating effect on her psyche,” wrote The Hollywood Reporter‘s Lovia Gyarkye in her review.

Moore won a Golden Globe for best actress at the Golden Globes earlier this month, where she delivered an impassioned speech about what the recognition meant for her at this stage in her career, saying she was at “a low point” when The Substance came along.

“I had a woman say to me, ‘Just know you will never be enough, but you can know the value of your worth if you just put down the measuring stick,’” she said. “And so today I celebrate this as a marker of my wholeness and of the love that is driving me, and for the gift of doing something I love, and being reminded that I do belong.”