Not lengthy into Coralie Fargeat’s campy physique horror The Substance, Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) is unceremoniously fired from her gig because the superstar host of a daytime train program. The previous actress’ credentials — an Academy Award, a distinguished place on the Hollywood Stroll of Fame — aren’t sufficient to save lots of her Zumba-meets-Jillian-Michaels-style present, fittingly referred to as Sparkle Your Life. Her producer, an oily persona conspicuously named Harvey (Dennis Quaid), needs to exchange Elisabeth with a youthful, extra lovely star. In his phrases: “That is community TV, not charity.” 

The Substance, which premiered at Cannes in competitors, is Fargeat’s second function. It builds on the director’s curiosity within the disposability of ladies in a sexist society, a theme she first explored in her hyper-stylized and gory 2017 thriller Revenge. She gave that movie a subversive feminist bent by turning the trophy girlfriend — a sunny blonde who’s raped and murdered — right into a vengeance-seeking hunter.

In The Substance, a girl additionally takes destiny into her personal fingers and combats underestimation, solely this time she’s at conflict with herself, too. Fargeat combines sci-fi components (as in her early quick Actuality+) with physique horror and satire to indicate how ladies are trapped by the twin forces of sexism and ageism. Magnificence and youth are the targets on the coronary heart of this movie, however the director additionally takes intention at Hollywood’s ghoulish machinations and the compulsive bodily and psychological intrusiveness of cisgender heterosexual males. 

Fargeat flaunts an thrilling hyperactive type. Extremely wide-angle photographs, close-ups and a bubble-gum colour palette contribute to the movie’s surreal — and at occasions uncanny — visible language. The British composer Raffertie’s thunderous rating provides an appropriately ominous contact, particularly throughout moments of corporeal mutilation. 

There’s so much happening in The Substance, and whereas the ambition is admirable, not all the things works. The skinny plotting strains below the load of its 2 hour 20 minute runtime; there are scenes, particularly in the course of the movie, that land as leaden repetition as a substitute of intelligent mirroring. However robust performances — particularly from Moore and Quaid — assist maintain momentum by the movie’s triumphantly amusing finish.

Throughout his last assembly with Elisabeth, Harvey doubles down on his offensiveness. By the point ladies attain the age of fifty, he suggests to Elisabeth whereas stuffing his mouth with shrimp, it’s over for them. Fargeat heightens the perversity of Harvey’s blunt evaluation with photographs of his mouth masticating on shellfish bits. As he crushes the coral-colored creatures along with his molars, Elisabeth stares at him with a faint disgust bordering on hatred. Quaid’s character lives within the extra satirical notes of The Substance, and the actor responds with an appropriately mocking efficiency.

Harvey’s phrases, coupled with the clean stares Elisabeth now receives from passersby, drive the actress to hunt an answer. She reaches out to the nameless purveyors of The Substance, a program that permits individuals to primarily clone a youthful model of themselves. Whereas Fargeat’s screenplay leaves a lot to be desired in relation to conveying the corporate’s scale of operations or how they perform in her model of Los Angeles, the principles of the experiment are simple. After people spawn their duplicates, it’s important they preserve a balanced life. Each 7 days one in every of them enters a coma, stored alive by a feeding tube, whereas the opposite roams free. Then they swap. The catch, after all, is the habit of youth. 

Elisabeth and her youthful self (Margaret Qualley), Sue, comply with this system guidelines for a bit. The center of The Substance is filled with scenes underscoring the distinction in therapy they obtain. Whereas Sue blossoms, profitable the love of Harvey and getting her personal train present, Elisabeth languishes within the shadow of her invisibility.

Moore imbues her character with a visceral desperation, one which enriches the unsettling undercurrents of Fargeat’s movie. She performs a girl who can’t give up the habit of getting youth at her fingertips regardless of its lacerating impact on her psyche. In a single notably robust scene, Elisabeth, haunted by an enormous billboard of Sue exterior her window, struggles to depart the home for a date. She tirelessly redoes her make-up and every try reveals the layers of anguish behind the actress’s pristine facade. 

Moore leans into the bodily necessities of her function later within the movie. Elisabeth finally learns that upsetting the steadiness of the experiment reduces her vitality. Sue, greedier for extra time exterior the coma, turns into a type of vampire, and Elisabeth wilts. Moore’s sluggish stroll and hunched shoulders add to the sense of her character’s struggling. Particular make-up results by Pierre-Olivier Persin render Elisabeth’s withering much more startling and persuasive.  

Qualley doesn’t have as meaty a task as Moore. Her character capabilities as Elisabeth’s foil, seeming to exist solely to assist us perceive the perversion of Hollywood’s gaze on the starlet. That’s a disgrace, as a result of The Substance’s sensible premise and route promise extra revelatory confrontations between Elisabeth and Sue than the one we’re provided.

The truth of this experiment is that it traps each characters in the identical poisonous, self-hating cycle because the requirements imposed by society. Essentially the most compelling components of The Substance take care of how social conventions flip ladies towards themselves. A stronger model of the movie may need dug into the complexities of that reality, as a substitute of merely arranging itself round it.