Demi Moore’s gruesome new horror movie The Substance is sparking walkouts at screenings from fans who can’t handle the film’s shockingly graphic nature.
The Hollywood star, 61, has made a bloody splash in her big screen comeback, with Metro.co.uk’s reviewer branding it ‘the most disgusting film I have ever seen’.
It was lauded by gleefully grossed-out critics as ‘demented’ and ‘an instant classic’ when it premiered at Cannes back in May, revealing its enthusiasm for splattering the audience with blood, gore and organs as it embraces being a very literal body horror.
And it’s this aspect that many fans can’t get over, regaling their followers on social media with grossed-out reactions in cinemas across the UK and US to the film.
‘Went to see The Substance last night and we had to walk out for the last hour. Just too gory for me!’ admitted @mattagertz on X.
‘Never in my life seen so many people walk out of a theatre lmao [sic]’, posted @dmgurei, as he claimed that fans weren’t walking out because it was ‘that bad’ but ‘for, uh, other reasons’.
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The film follows fading A-list actress Elisabeth Sparkle (Moore) who, after being axed from her exercise segment on a morning show by Dennis Quaid’s hideous TV exec Harvey, takes an experimental substance that ‘generates a new, younger, more beautiful, more perfect, you’.
This new, shiny version of Elisabeth, played by Margaret Qualley, then bursts forth from Moore’s body in just the start of the movie’s descent into monstrous grotesqueness.
Both are then able to continue their glossy Hollywood lives, one week each at a time, for while they don’t share a body their bodies feed off each other’s. And there’s one big rule – never, ever go over your allotted seven days…
‘The final 20mins of #TheSubstance saw my screening literally screaming with one woman having to leave as it was too much!’ revealed actor Sam McInnerny, who described himself as ‘so nauseated throughout’.
‘When credits rolled I saw her in the foyer with a glass of water doing deep breathing haha!’ he added.
‘I just got out of the theatre and I’m sort of shellshocked,’ shared Adam Ellis on social media. ‘Two different people in my theatre walked out during the last half hour. It was incredible.’
One fan also reported a mass walkout from a showing in central London, telling MailOnline: ‘At least 20 people walked out of my screening in Leicester Square before the end. It was brutal.’
While recalling that ‘most people watched it through their hands’, they emphasised: ‘It was the most graphic film I’ve ever seen.’
‘The Substance is the film that other movies say that watching will make you ill but this one actually will,’ promised @sterlz_r.
‘The Substance was the most upsetting and deranged thing I’ve ever seen. I cried; I thought I was going to be sick. I got laughed at by my friends for crying and gagging. I don’t know how to feel,’ admitted @ProfessorDabs.
Metro.co.uk’s review warned ‘the finish of the film becomes genuinely so nauseating that it could drive fans to throw up, faint or shocked laughter – or even a combination of all three’.
However, for all of the movie’s fans, directed by Coralie Fargeat, there has also been backlash to the movie’s so-called feminist slant, which ‘misses the mark’.
The movie, which boasts a 90% fresh rating on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes was picked up for having ‘numerous problems’ by The Boston Globe – despite its ‘delightful yuck factor’.
The Times branded it ‘puerile, pointless and intellectually specious’, while Little White Lies described its execution and message as ‘shallow’ in its ‘stab’ at feminism.
The Substance is in cinemas now.
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