TIFF highlights films about body image, aging. So why are there so few roles for women over 40?

Society's treatment of women as they age has emerged as a major theme at this year's Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), including a horror about an age-reversing beauty treatment and a dark comedy about a new mother who turns into a feral dog.

But even as these films bring up age-old conversations about women in Hollywood, the numbers show women over 40 are still being left behind in big-budget films that do well at the box office. 

Amy Adams, who stars in Nightbitch, says she's happy these conversations are happening at TIFF.

"I feel like we've been building to it, and I hope that momentum continues," she told CBC's Eli Glasner. "I'm grateful my daughter gets to be here and gets to hear these stories of women. It's really important to me."

Nightbitch is a horror-comedy about an artist who pauses her career to be a stay-at-home mom, and whose life takes a surreal turn when she starts transforming into a dog.

Jamie Lee Curtis, who stars alongside Pamela Anderson in The Last Showgirl, a film about a performer who has to plan her future after her show's 30-year run abruptly ends, is also glad to see films bringing women's issues to the forefront.

"I'm happy that we're talking about it as a cultural confusion — that this cosmeceutical industrial complex, which is feeding all of us every day through advertising that we are not enough, is being explored in all these different art forms," Curtis told CBC.

In The Substance, Demi Moore plays the host of an aerobics show who is fired on her 50th birthday, before a laboratory offers her a substance that promises to transform her into a younger version of herself.

Shell, another film with a coincidentally similar plot, is a dark comedy about an actress played by Elisabeth Moss who is losing roles because of her age — until she undertakes a questionable youth revitalizing treatment from a beauty product CEO played by Kate Hudson.

"I feel like there has been a wake up to a demographic that is deserving of being served," Moore told The Associated Press. "I think you're starting to see a lot more stories that are reflecting that audience, and it's nice."

Moore, 61, says The Substance will please horror fans but is also for anyone interested in a unique way of delving into the subjects of aging and the pursuit of perfection.

"It's really about accepting yourself as you are," she said. 

Toronto-based film critic Rachel Ho says she found The Substance and its portrayals of the ways a body changes with age particularly impactful.

She notes these discussions feel especially topical in an era when a generation of actors who "were kind of 'it' people" in the 80s and 90s are taking roles that look back on their beauty and aging in a different way.