Writer-director Coralie Fargeat’s long and lurid cautionary tale — anything so laden with body horror must surely be cautionary, right? — very much wants to have its cheesecake and eat it, too. Which is to say, the film treats the Awful Truth that camera-based showbiz (both the people who make it and the people who consume it) worships youth and is mildly horrified by aging, while at the same time slavering over that selfsame youth and jabbing that mild horror with a needle full of nightmare juice. The story concerns Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore, who seems to have watched Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard and declared, “Hold my beer”), an actress who won an Oscar in her youth, grew famous enough to rate a star on the Walk of Fame, and then aged gracefully into a gig doing a fitness show on TV. (Paging Miss Fonda?) But now she’s turning 50, and surprise, surprise, the network brass wants someone younger. Somehow, our heroine is shocked – she never thought it would happen to her, even though that’s been the story since forever. Live by the body, die by the body. But hey now, here’s an underground lab that’s offering — free of charge, for some reason — a solution: a substance that will allow Sparkle to shine again: seven days as herself, seven days as ingenue Sue (Margaret Qualley, in a turn that screams “star” much louder than it does “actress”). She cheerfully sets out to replace herself, but even though both parties are constantly reminded that “You are One,” it gets hard for them not to resent each other. The story feels like it’s headed somewhere harrowing and haunting, but then it takes a hard left into insane violence. It’s not that the turn doesn’t make sense, it’s just that it turns a tragedy into a spectacle. All the wince-inducing stuff that came before — the merciless close-ups on aging flesh, the needles plunging into thinning skin, the accelerating moral and physical decay — gets drowned in a sea of arterial spray. (2024) — Matthew Lickona
This movie is not currently in theaters.