Have you ever ever dreamed about being a greater model of your self? Together with her second movie, Coralie Fargeat not solely addresses this query however takes goal at ageism and sexism within the leisure business with a riotous, dreamlike horror-thriller that ends in a delirious symphony of blood, guts and in any other case undefinable viscera. Think about David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive fused in a telepod with David Cronenberg’s Useless Ringers, add the unbelievably dynamic pairing of Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley, course of it by way of the ultra-vivid shade palette that’s Fargeat’s hyper-saturated creativeness, sprinkle a little bit of J.G. Ballard on prime, and you’ve got the right breakout style film of the 12 months.
In case you had “Demi Moore to make a hagsploitation physique horror splatter film” in your 2024 bingo card, you stand to make a fortune, however, come on, it’s not very probably; there’s been nothing in her filmography up to now — not even 2019’s edgy black comedy Company Animals — to counsel that she would ever have a movie like The Substance inside her. However right here we’re, and never solely does she give the furthest-out efficiency this facet of Nicolas Cage — who raised the stakes in Cannes this 12 months by consuming a useless rat in The Surfer — she is all in for the humor and clearly completely in sync with Fargeat’s not-really-very-subtle-at-all feminist agenda.
Moore performs Elisabeth Sparkle, a giant film star within the ’80s who now runs a health present known as Sparkle Your Life on morning tv. Like Jane Fonda, she encourages viewers to really feel the burn, ending her present with a wink and a catchphrase (“Care for your self!”). What she doesn’t know is that the present’s producer (Dennis Quaid), a monstrous vulgarian who could or will not be coincidentally known as Harvey, needs Elisabeth out, mainly for the crime of being over 50. Elisabeth finds this out the exhausting method when she overhears him calling his assistant to discover a alternative. “I need her younger, I need her scorching, and I need her NOW!” he bawls.
Driving residence, Elisabeth is so dejected and distracted that she crashes her automobile. The physician at A&E finds nothing damaged, however his assistant — a good-looking younger man with piercing blue eyes — pays her particular consideration, operating his fingers down her backbone and telling her that she would make “a great candidate.” However for what? Later that day, she finds a flash drive in her coat pocket, and a hand-written notice saying, “It modified my life.”
“It,” in accordance with the promo materials, is The Substance, which, with tubes and syringes and whatnot, will grow to be fairly a course of. However the gist of it, presaged in the beginning of the movie with an egg yolk, is that The Substance will create “a brand new you.” The one catch — which within the spirit of cautionary tales appears so easy and but will show so exhausting to stick to — is that it’s essential to share your time: “One week for you. One week for the brand new you. Seven days every.”
Elisabeth throws the flash drive within the trash, however after seeing her previous job marketed within the newspaper, she pulls it out and calls the quantity. She will get an tackle, seemingly in the course of nowhere, and a key move emblazoned with the quantity 503. Though no cash appears each to alter palms, Elisabeth is up and operating when she takes possession of a cardboard field crammed with liquids and arcane medical ephemera, emblazoned with phrases like “Activate,” “Stabilize” and “Swap.” At residence, she strips off and jacks up a neon-yellow serum.
Which is the place the enjoyable begins.
After a hallucinogenic homage to 2001: A Area Odyssey, Elisabeth provides start to Sue (Qualley), a fairly younger girl who, at first sight, appears a little bit too healthful to fill Elisabeth’s footwear. However after an audition for Harvey’s crew, Sue will get the job and begins breaking scores information with a extremely sexualized new present known as Pump It Up. She begins getting excessive on fame and breaks the seven-day rule of The Substance, which, bodily, takes its toll on Elisabeth. Quickly, the 2 girls are embroiled in a battle of wits that may solely finish in catastrophe. And does.
Fargeat’s first movie, Revenge, was a blood-spattered rape-payback film that, regardless of its far more down-to-earth setting, required an analogous suspension of disbelief. Admirers of that movie will simply see her signature tones right here; after purple, which can ultimately spray-paint all the display, orange is her go-to shade, with a little bit of sky-blue right here and there. As soon as once more, the music confronts you want a rabid sniffer canine, and there’s a fascination for bare human pores and skin that Moore and Qualley fairly selflessly oblige, in methods which might be by no means gratuitous.
It’s attention-grabbing to note that, at 61, Moore is definitely older that each Bette Davis and Joan Crawford had been once they made No matter Occurred to Child Jane?, the movie that kickstarted the hagsploitation cycle of horror movies in 1962 and which casts a protracted shadow over The Substance, particularly when tensions between Elisabeth and Sue boil over. For sure, Moore nonetheless appears to be like superb, however Fargeat’s movie is just not about that, it’s about the way in which Elisabeth permits the male gaze to objectify and belittle her, solely to search out that the supposedly “higher” model of herself has the identical insecurities and extra of ’em, all dialed as much as 11.
It’s a little bit overlong at 140 minutes, nevertheless it does fairly enjoyably lengthen the agony as one begins to surprise what the human price of all this can ultimately grow to be. Fargeat rewards your persistence with a finale that channels the pathos of Lynch’s Elephant Man and the fleshy absurdity of Brian Yuzna’s 1989 squishy cult basic Society. Squeamish viewers ought to steer clear, however, for Cannes audiences at the very least, The Substance ends with essentially the most spectacular demise since Monty Python’s Mr. Creosote ate that last, deadly wafer-thin mint again in 1983.
Title: The Substance
Competition: Cannes (Competitors)
Director-screenwriter: Coralie Fargeat
Forged: Demi Moore, Margaret Qualley, Dennis Quaid
Gross sales agent: Cinetic Media
Working time: 2 hr 20 min
