Lovers of the bizarre have had a great time at the Cannes Festival with Coralie Fargeat’s new proposal: The Substance, a wild madness that has revolutionized the event. After making herself known in 2017 with the feminist revenge thriller Revenge, the French director now brings to the official section an authentic gore feast starring Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley that denounces the tyranny of beauty and youth in the entertainment industry , as well as the patriarchal and sexualizing gaze that promotes them.
The film begins with the image of a plate with a raw egg with a substance injected into the yolk. After a few seconds another bud emerges from it. A procedure that warns the spectator of where the shots are going to go. Demi Moore comes into action as Elisabeth Sparkle, an actress who in her day paraded her star of fame and now hosts an aerobics program, like Eva Nasarre in her day.
Just on his 50th birthday, the boss of the television network, played by an exaggerated Dennis Quaid, invites him to the retreat. She is too old and viewers need young meat to bring up the ratings. So he decides to try The Substance, a kind of treatment that offers an improved version of oneself, more beautiful, younger.
Its perfect version has the face and figure of Margaret Qualley – also starring on the Croisette with Lanthimos’ Kinds of Kindness -, who emerges like an alien from the body of the mature matrix. The story will wander through an orgy of viscera, vomiting, flaps and various deformities that permeate the screen with great detail and close-ups.
Come on, a film more appropriate for Sitges that brings back Demi Moore 100% dedicated to her role and that has put Cannes at her feet. She could even win the award for best actress. “When I read the script I saw it as a challenge in the best sense, because I look for things that take me out of my comfort zone. If something scares me a little, I know there is an opportunity to be a better actress. And in this story I have exposed myself in a very emotionally and physically vulnerable way,” she said at a press conference.
The same Moore who in 1996 underwent surgery to get silicone implants in her chest and star in the failed Striptease, in addition to cosmetic touch-ups on her face, laughs at herself and the slavery of the beauty standards prevailing in Hollywood in a film that “deals with the male perspective of the idealized woman that the whole of society, including women, has bought into,” she has acknowledged.
The substance is pure body horror that walks between Cronenberg’s The Fly and Brian de Palma’s Carrie. Also from the rabid Titane, by Julia Ducournau, winner of the Palme d’Or, without ever being so profound. Those with a delicate stomach will have a hard time.
