You’ve never seen the great Demi Moore like this. In the horror satire The Substance, which is in competition at Cannes, she undergoes a bizarre transformation.
The bloodiest film to date at this year’s Cannes Festival is called The Substance. Hollywood star Elizabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) has by no means reached the end of her tether, but the men in power stamp her with an expiration date. Faced with a wall of stupidly grinning sexism, Elizabeth resorts to the new rejuvenation therapy “The Substance” – and sets off a brilliant duel between two stars who fight each other to the death.
The Substance in Cannes: Demi Moore versus Margaret Qualley
The Substance is something like an anti-ageing cooking box that is collected from a futuristic packing station and used alone at home. It’s pretty smartly designed, even if some usability problems are immediately apparent.
When Elizabeth injects herself with the drug, a younger, more perfect version mutates from her spine, tears her skin open lengthwise and rolls across the cold bathroom tiles. Elizabeth survives the ordeal, but from now on she shares her lifetime with Sue (Margaret Qualley). Every seven days, one of them sinks into sleep while the other “lives.”
Sue rises to stardom with her own fitness show and becomes the suit’s cash cow. But what happens when one of them asks for more time?
(The Substance)
The consequences exceed all expectations of gore and body horror in the new film by Coralie Fargeat. In 2017, the French director celebrated her breakthrough with the rape and revenge thriller Revenge, eight years later she sets Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley against each other in a reckoning with the youth craze.
More from Cannes:
New Nicolas Cage thriller plunges straight into madness of thirst and humiliation
Almost 3-hour psycho trip with Emma Stone in Cannes: So sick that you can only laugh
Kevin Costner bursts into tears at Cannes premiere
The Substance turns into a horror fairytale
The Substance is presented from the outset as an overdrawn, squeaky-colorful satire. You only have to look at the grimacing Dennis Quaid as the network boss to see that. Quiet tones are left to Demi Moore. She shines with an empathetic portrayal of a woman who has toiled for decades for an industry and is simply thrown aside. Bitterness, sadness and self-doubt are mixed into her largely wordless performance.
The longer the “treatment” lasts, the more grotesque Demi Moore’s performance becomes, but the wounded, longing-for-love core of the woman shines through to the last gooey second.
Opposite her, Margaret Qualley brims with youthful naivety, even if Sue comes across more as a portrait of unattainable aspirations for women than as a real person. Qualley’s magnetic screen presence fills in the gaps in a script that would be better served not asking questions about the deeper workings of the substance or the mental connection between Sue and Elizabeth. The Substance follows the logic of a fairy tale rather than a science fiction movie.
(Margaret Qualley in The Substance)
In the end, The Substance impresses more as an extremely entertaining experience than as an original examination of Hollywood’s images of beauty, their construction and the mechanisms of their maintenance.
The fact that Coralie Fargeat gave Demi Moore her own Death Suits Her well deserves a round of applause. At the press screening in Cannes, the audience applauded and cheered extensively. The audience really deserved it, as much as they had moaned beforehand at the hearty horror interludes. Even fitness queen Jane Fonda knew: No pain, no gain
