So, this is Coralie Fargeat, the same person who directed the short Reality+, and boy can you tell. It’s exploring the same basic premise — there’s a semi-licit medical device that can make you more physically attractive, but which still requires you to spend time as your normal “ugly” self — and follows some of the same story beats.

But one awkward thing for the premise here is that while the protagonist of the short was a kinda schlubby guy, the “ugly” person who starts the movie off is Demi Moore, and Demi Moore is in fact extremely attractive. Yes, okay, she’s 63 (though the movie seemed to imply that her character was 50, and she looks a lot closer to that age), and the movie was really playing up the age aspect; I’m willing to believe that her character would look at herself and see only the ways in which she’s aged, so the premise isn’t nonsensical… but still, c’mon.

The youth-forward premise has a lot of feminist anger underlying it, but some of it feels anachronistic. Like, the cartoonishly evil exec who fires Moore’s character from her TV show talks about how women are washed up and unattractive when they turn fifty, right. This is a plausible depiction of an older Hollywood, but it’s not at all obvious that it’s true of the industry anymore — Moore is nominated for this role in competition with Fernanda Torres (59) and Karla Sofía Gascón (who won’t win, but not because she’s 52); Cynthia Erivo (38) is younger, but only Mikey Madison (25) is in the 18-30 range that this fictional exec wants to hire.

So to some extent, this was feeling at first like a lightly-unnecessary reprise of a decent short, and it wasn’t clear that the changes to it — beefing up some of the narrative, going really hard at the body horror — were to its advantage. But then it got to the ending. I don’t want to spoil things, but whereas Reality+ had an implausible and obvious too-sweet ending, this… doesn’t. This goes in an extremely different, much bolder direction; by the time it was done, I had moved my estimation of the movie up a notch.

In the end, I think it’s probably more useful to think of this from the body horror angle than the social satire angle — it’s not a feminist movie that happens to have some body horror in it, it’s a horror movie that happens to have a feminist angle to it. And in that sense, it’s reasonably successful, and ultimately is an improvement on the short.