In a few days from now, the Academy Awards will be announced, and Demi Moore is among the Best Actress nominees for her performance in Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance. Not exactly known for her acting prowess, Moore has won almost every major award announced before the Oscars.

The film (five Oscar nominations) has earned equal amounts of praise and criticism for its horror treatment of a satire on women’s fear of ageing, and the desperate measures they (men too, but not as much) take to hold on to their youth. It’s not all vanity, a large part of the blame goes to the society that renders older women invisible.

The casting of Demi Moore was spot on because her many cosmetic surgery procedures have been written about; her career has been based more on her appearance and personal life than on talent. (Her controversial photograph for a magazine cover in which she posed nude while pregnant is still remembered.)

In ‘The Substance,’ she plays Elizabeth Spark, who has an aerobics show on television and is so popular that she has a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame. Then, she turns 50, and the network boss fires her because she is too old — they need someone young and fresh to get higher ratings. Distraught, she has a minor car accident, and in hospital is furtively handed information about a new beauty serum that promises “a better version of yourself – younger, more beautiful, more perfect.”

On the verge of being made redundant in showbusiness, Elizabeth buys into the hype. The procedure is complicated and painful — there are no easy routes to eternal youth — and the conditions state that she will inhabit her new form for seven days and revert to her normal self for seven days. While she is in her young body, the older one has to be fed intravenously to prevent the new body from deteriorating; it has to be injected with a stabiliser extracted from the spinal fluid of the original body. There has to be no deviation from this routine, or else…This ‘or else’ is what the film is about, and it is stomach-churning.

The new body emerges from a split down Elizabeth’s spine, as she writhes in pain on her bathroom floor, splattered with blood. And the woman (Margaret Qualley) is dazzlingly beautiful and perfect. Calling herself Sue, she replaces Elizabeth on her show. Inevitably, the admiration for her beauty leads to Sue being lax about the stringent conditions of the procedure. Much to her dismay, Elizabeth in her own body ages faster and starts looking grotesque.

There have been other films about the evils of ageing, from Sunset Boulevard (1950) and All About Eve (1950) to Death Becomes Her (1992), and body horror is an established Hollywood genre, but the all-out use of blood, gore and gross visuals give Fargeat's film a nightmarish look, without restraint or nuance.

Not just her, other women directors like Julia Ducournau (Titane), Rose Glass (Love Lies Bleeding), and Laura Moss (Birth/Rebirth) have outdone the body horror conventions set by cult filmmaker David Cronenberg.

Critic Katie Rife, quoted in a bbc.co.uk piece by Miriam Balanescu, describes the movement as "a nascent wave of aggressive, stylized women genre directors" who deal in "in-your-face feminist metaphor," adding, “I personally get a kick out of that kind of aggressive, hyper-stylisation, but I would say that there are people who don't particularly like being pummelled with excessive style."

The Substance liberally uses nudity, pandering to the male gaze, while pretending to subvert endemic showbiz sexism. Can it be labelled a feminist film? It does make a facile comment about the way older women are treated in a youth-obsessed society, but it also uses a stereotypical portrayal of an ageing woman, who is to be feared and hated for her unattractiveness.

Hollywood has actually found labels for such films that portray older women as psychotic — psycho-biddy or hagsploitation cinema. This builds on the way older women are seen as evil witches in children’s fairy tales.

The women, both Elizabeth and Sue, are reduced to caricatures, lacking agency or depth; both passively accept the role men have assigned to them.

Hannah Strong’s review in lwlies.com states, “In regurgitating old talking points about Hollywood’s obsession with beauty and its fear of ageing, The Substance becomes a sterile facsimile of Hollywood itself, refusing to add anything new to the conversation before going for broke in a third act it hasn’t come close to earning.

Yet more than anything, it feels deeply depressing — a reminder of how society denigrates anyone who challenges the standards pushed by pop culture. But replicating images doesn’t make them implicitly subversive, and The Substance’s presentation is as shallow as the very thing it’s critiquing. There’s no compassion and certainly no catharsis — just more hagsploitation and a sense of déjà vu.”

The film owes a debt to the Oscar Wilde classic, The Picture Of Dorian Gray, in which the protagonist sells his soul so that he remains young and handsome, while his portrait, hidden away, ages and gets hideous, recording Dorian’s sins. There is always a price to pay for messing with nature.

Deepa Gahlot is a Mumbai-based columnist, critic and author