Demi Moore may not have been born to play her astonishing role in The Substance, but she could certainly have been christened with it in mind. The has-been actress she plays, one Elisabeth Sparkle, uses a serum injection to split herself in two, aiming to resurrect her career as a younger, more beautiful clone (Margaret Qualley). Christened “Sue”, this latter literally crawls out of Elisabeth’s spine; but though they were meant to co-exist happily, Sue’s narcissism threatens to make Elisabeth, like the portrait in the attic, wither away.
If that science-fictional premise sounds wild, you haven’t heard the half of it. The Substance is a humdinger of a satirical horror-thriller, by turns hilarious, affecting and jaw-droppingly grotesque. It’s exactly the jolt of extravagantly stylised genre energy the Cannes Film Festival needed at this midway point, and Moore, making a mighty comeback, seizes the role as if her life depended on it.
Masterminding this eerily Day-Glo nightmare is the French writer-director Coralie Fargeat, almost certain to take home a major prize. Her vision is so savagely excessive that it has a hallucinatory, how-is-this-even-happening quality. The themes aren’t subtle: impossible beauty standards, fear of ageing, internalised misogyny (and the straightforward kind). In Fargeat’s heightened parody of Los Angeles, the male characters are piggy slimeballs, and the perfect body a tyrannical icon.
Elisabeth refuses to be put out to pasture. She has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, which, in Fargeat’s bravura opening, we see being implanted, then trampled on across the decades. She even won an Oscar once, though no one remembers which film it was for. Now past 50, she’s let go by a sulphurous TV exec (Dennis Quaid, gleefully horrible) from her dance workout show, Sparkle Your Life, because he wants to reignite the ratings with a fresh face.