The Substance is allegedly the feminist horror movie of the year. I hated it.

When I read back in the spring that Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance was the most divisive movie at Cannes—it got the festival’s longest standing ovation and the award for best screenplay, while also occasioning multiple midscreening walkouts—I thought I knew which side of the divide I would fall on. The fleshly transmogrifications the viewer witnesses, again and again, as Moore’s Elisabeth Sparkle injects herself with the glowing yellow-green “substance” for her weekly identity swap with Sue grow more and more abjectly disgusting as both women’s physical and moral conditions degrade. Elisabeth, once a celebrity big enough to earn a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, fears getting old so much that she signs on to an obviously Faustian bargain proposed by a mysterious smooth-faced stranger: For seven days of every 14, she will continue to live in her own less than youthful but still fit and gorgeous body, in the glamorous high-rise apartment paid for by her lengthy career as America’s official Hot Girl. Moore’s lived experience of fame is far more interesting than that of the hazily defined superstar she’s playing, and in the few scenes where Elisabeth gets more to do than react with horror to her latest mutation, Moore explores the bottomless anxiety of a woman whose self-worth depends on maintaining a flawless exterior.