The Substance, BBC 3, BBC 2, BBC iPlayer, writer and director Coralie Fargeat

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m00327nr/the-substance

I don’t know if there is a word ‘hokumy’ but somehow watchable? Algorithms are pushers. You’ll end up bleeding from the nose like a writer/director on a cocaine binge or Sue (Margaret Qualley) after watching The Substance. Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) plays an aging Hollywood actress and fitness guru that had me thinking that looks like Demi Moore, but I’d never seen her in those Bratpack movies of the eighties so naked. I don’t mean metaphorically. She spends a lot of time looking at herself in the mirror. We spend a lot of time looking at her looking in the mirror. During the seventies, you had to go up the town to watch something like that with titles such as Confessions of a Window Cleaner and wear a special dark jacket with deep pockets to wiggle your change at regular intervals.

But here it is. Not just a snatch. But the snatch. No bucket and scrim needed. No soapy sponge. No Robin Askwith almost falling off his ladder and getting slightly demented.  Demi Moore nude. Demi Moore feeling her breasts and bum. Wow. Wow. Wow.  

Demi Moore’s in a quandary. Her absolutely fab breast and bum are not fabulous enough. If she’d any backbone, she’d give birth to a new and younger self.   

Here she is. Sue. Naked. Naked. Naked. Naked. Younger and even more pert.

There’s a storyline happening somewhere outside this house of mirrors.  

Aging American actresses never have free will. It’s a stacked deck, whether Demi Moore will take the Substance and give birth to super sexy Sue, now or later. We all know, having watched Dr Who as child and having read Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray that worshiping at the fountain of youth and beauty is a wholly bad thing. That a naked, naked, naked (and very beautiful) Demi Moore will metamorphose into a pink Donald J. Trump lookalike. Can the horror get any worse than The President invading El  Salvador?  Making a deal with Putin (those early snaps the Russian President may, or may not have taken coming in handy here) over invading a European country or plain, country rape. And now the monster has taken over Demi Moore’s body? Lots of plastic covering needed. Cover your eyes! Wilde has warned you!

Demi Moore’s Law as an upgrade on Gordon Moore's Law—the hypothesis made by Gordon Moore in 1965 that the number of transistors on a microchip would roughly double at regular intervals, leading to exponential increases in computing power and decreases in cost. It became a shorthand for the idea of relentless technological improvement—but applied to aging and beauty.  

Or just plain hokumy? You decide?