What would you say to your younger self? Two films explore this question

What would you say if you could talk to your younger self? Would you warn them about 9/11, or just tell them to buy stock in Netflix and Zoom? How disappointing must it be to meet your older self and get a first glimpse of how your wildest dreams inevitably fade into normal life? In a funny coincidence of the moviegoing calendar, two recent film festival favorites on the subject are coming to theaters in the Greater Boston area this weekend.

Writer-director Megan Park's mild-mannered Sundance hit “My Old Ass” is about a recent high school graduate (played by Maisy Stella of TV's “Nashville”) who, while on a magic mushroom trip, hallucinates a visit from her 39-year-old self (Aubrey Plaza). At the risqué end of the spectrum is Coralie Fargeat's zesty Cannes sensation “The Substance,” in which an unemployed actress in her 50s (Demi Moore) gives birth to a younger, hotter, and meaner version of herself (Margaret Qualley) thanks to an experimental cosmetic serum. One film offers harmless life lessons, the other ends in a fight to the death. I quite liked the gross, violent part.

In a year filled with terrible titles like “Good One” and “Daddio,” the trophy for worst goes to “My Old Ass,” a name that not only suggests a raunchy comedy that doesn't fit the film's Hallmark Channel temperament at all, but also caused countless headaches for the poor PR agent who had to ask me, “Have you seen 'My Old Ass' yet?” Misleadingly marketed as an Aubrey Plaza vehicle — she only appears in two scenes — the film sticks with Maisy Stella's Elliott, a sweet 18-year-old lesbian desperate to escape her family's cranberry farm and move to the bright lights of Toronto. But all of Elliott's grand plans and preconceived notions about her sexuality are challenged when she falls in love with a posh young farmhand named Chad (Percy Hynes White), despite her older self's persistent warnings to stay away from boys named Chad.

“My Old Ass” tries to poke fun at the fact that the two actresses playing Elliott don’t look anything alike physically. When our young protagonist points out her older counterpart’s gapped teeth, Plaza replies, “Fuck you, wear your retainer.” But the discrepancy goes deeper than dentistry. Stella delivers one of those insufferable showbiz kid performances, her nervous, pleasing energy the exact opposite of Plaza’s typical callousness. It’s simply impossible to believe that these two could ever be the same person. (Stella appears to be auditioning for “The JoJo Siwa Story,” while the obvious choice for a younger Aubrey Plaza would be Jenna Ortega, who actually starred in director Parks’ first film, “The Fallout,” but was arguably too busy making the “Beetlejuice” sequel for this movie.)

The film isn't particularly interested in exploring its central con — I'm not sure whether to be annoyed or grateful that it doesn't try to explain how these two are able to text each other — and most of “My Old Ass” is content to be a cheesy teen love story between a boring young man with no flaws and an annoying girl with bad priorities who ignores advice from the future. It's like Francis Ford Coppola's “Peggy Sue Got Married,” only without the wisdom. MGM's new owners at Amazon have been merciless in moving their movies straight to streaming, so it's a surprise to see “My Old Ass” in theaters, especially since it comes with all the production value and visual sophistication of a very special episode of “Dawson's Creek.” I wish my older self had shown up and warned me to skip it.

After being dropped by original distributor Universal Studios, The Substance is being given an unusually wide release by up-and-coming arthouse mavens at MUBI. Watching the film, you can understand why a major studio chickened out, because this is not a film for the timid. Director Fargeat's 2017 Revenge was one of the most over-the-top and gross-out debuts we've seen in a long time, with so much blood spilled in the closing sequence that characters kept slipping on it and injuring themselves further. The Substance is even grosser, its grand finale brimming with such copious amounts of gurgling viscera that even the most squeamish viewers might giggle at the sheer outrageousness. But the film is gross in a productive way, using outlandish body horror techniques to address the cruelty of contemporary beauty standards and the self-loathing that simmers in our appearance-obsessed age. It can be a little silly at times and is vastly overlong at 140 minutes, but The Substance packs a punch and is lively.

Demi Moore plays Elisabeth Sparkle, once an Oscar winner but now best known as a fitness guru. Fargeat deftly conveys Elisabeth's declining fortunes in the opening credits by showing her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame decaying. Fired from her popular morning exercise routine by a swinish producer aptly named “Harvey” (a miscast Dennis Quaid, pulling merciless faces), Elisabeth devises a plan to stay in the spotlight by injecting herself with a black-market beauty product that causes a fresh-faced doppelgänger (Qualley) to crawl out of her spine. The instructions require the two to live separate, symbiotic lives, switching places week after week while the other lies motionless in the closet like a Botoxed Dorian Gray. But Elisabeth has never been one to share the spotlight.

Moore's performance could rightly be called fearless, and not just because the 61-year-old actress spends so much of the film naked. She's never made a secret of how much work it takes to look the way she does. In the past, she's caused minor scandals by being open about her breast augmentations and posing naked for magazine covers while pregnant. Moore's laborious physical transformations for films like Striptease and G.I. Jane garnered more attention than the movies themselves. In many ways, the role of Elizabeth can be seen as the culmination of a career that was obsessed with the way we view women, which is especially poignant since Hollywood doesn't seem to need her anymore. I mean, when was the last time you saw a Demi Moore movie?

In an age when people regularly inject their foreheads with botulism to freeze their faces, the brutal grotesquerie of The Substance isn't as far-fetched as it sounds, taking the ugly things we do to be beautiful to illogical extremes. But Fargeat insists on labeling it an allegory anyway, with the highly stylized production full of impossibly long hallways and interiors the size of football fields. She loves to film with a distorted fisheye lens, with the male characters leaning too close to the camera to look as repulsive as possible. Women's bodies are stared at and fetishized, cut up into close-ups of individual body parts, and there are so many shots of Qualley's backside that I think we see it more than her face. (Funny that this isn't the movie premiering this week called “My Old Ass.”) Also notable is that the younger actress has been digitally enlarged in certain places to match Moore's pneumatic proportions, which gives the film's theme of objectification a whole different perspective.

Moore shows a wounded humanity amid the mounting humiliations, photographed in a way that accentuates her lip fillers and other changes. She's always had such a confident, Teflon-like screen presence, I don't think I've ever seen her so vulnerable on screen. The most heartbreaking scene is when Elisabeth gets ready for a date, looking elegant and beautiful but feeling less beautiful, taunted by a billboard of Qualley and the lost glory of her earlier years. On the way out of the apartment, she keeps stopping to put on some more makeup, adjust her outfit to dress a little more provocatively, trying to overcompensate until she ends up looking like a gargoyle. That's the story of the film. It's the story of our entire corrupt culture.

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“My Old Ass” and “The Substance” are in theaters now.