Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance—the exhilarating, batshit body horror which just premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, and would be my current pick to win the Palme d’Or—begins with two arresting images. The first is of a fried egg being injected with a mysterious liquid. Suddenly, the yolk splits into two and a second egg emerges from it. This, in a nutshell, illustrates the medical procedure at the center of this mind-bending sci-fi thriller. Then, there’s an image of a Hollywood Walk of Fame star being laid for the movie legend Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore); it attracts floods of visitors, until it doesn’t, and then lays cracked and forgotten.
It’s a confident opening which sets the tone for a film that is never afraid to go there—it’s heavy-handed and often repetitive in its imagery and language, but never dull, taking you on a wild ride that left me with my mouth hanging open for much of the third act.
It all begins with us meeting Elisabeth, now in her 50s and the host of a Jane Fonda-style fitness show, except her cartoonishly misogynistic boss (a hilarious Dennis Quaid) is on the hunt for a younger replacement. She’s soon let go, and watches as her smiling face is ripped from a billboard—taking her eyes off the road just as another car pummels into her. It’s a shocking sequence, and sends her to the hospital, where she meets a man who might be able to offer a solution to her problems: something called “The Substance,” a liquid that promises to create a better, younger, more beautiful version of yourself.
Elisabeth is game: she places an order and receives a box with instructions. Injecting the fluid will release her better self; then, her actual body must be pumped with fluids to sustain it. After seven days, she must switch back for another week before the cycle continues.
When she begins the process, it unleashes a kind of Cronenbergian horror: her spine splits open and out of it emerges a woman (Margaret Qualley) who’s ready to take on the world. Calling this radiant, younger version of herself Sue, she gets the job to replace herself on the fitness show and is, initially, elated. But when the time comes to return to her real body, a kind of depression descends. Slowly, the two sides of her begin to lash out at each other—Sue at Elisabeth for her incessant binge-eating and mindless TV watching, which leaves their apartment a mess, and Elisabeth at Sue for making her feel so utterly inadequate. It’s then that Sue begins to bend the rules of the procedure, remaining in her younger form for longer than instructed. When Elisabeth returns, she finds that she’s beginning to age at a more rapid pace as a result.
Where the film goes from here has to be seen to be believed—it’s a gonzo, breathless descent into the abyss which, in the early screening I attended, had viewers gasping, shrieking, laughing, and cheering all the way through. What plays out on screen may seem far-fetched—and certainly, it’s wise to leave any regard for logic at the door, especially for the film’s final set piece—but in a world where people are pumping their bodies with Ozempic; one where Linda Evangelista, persuaded by ads which asked her if she liked what she saw in the mirror, submitted to a CoolSculpting treatment which she says left her “unrecognizable,” it also feels oddly prescient.
There’s a scene about halfway through where Elisabeth, in her own, older body, is preparing to go on a date. Haunted by the image of Sue on a billboard outside her window, she keeps changing her outfit and make-up, perpetually dissatisfied with her own reflection. In the end, she scrubs it all off her face in a rage. In a film where Moore does many more outlandish things, it was this moment that most stuck with me—tragically relatable and expertly acted, a scene which could conceivably show up in an Oscar reel come 2025. It is, without doubt, the performance of her career.
Qualley, too, is excellent—peppy and sweet, and then flinty and terrifying—and the film’s aesthetics equally glorious: bright block colors reminiscent of Fargeat’s first film, 2017’s Matilda Lutz-led survival saga Revenge, another story of a woman pushed to her breaking point by the demands and expectations of a patriarchal society. In this sophomore effort, the effect is somewhere between The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Shining—gorgeous, yet terrifying—and heightened by the director’s tendency to shoot things in extreme, visceral close-ups, including the abundant, occasionally nauseating gore.
The result is something that isn’t subtle in any sense, but nor, you could argue, are many of the pressures placed upon women. It’s undeniably imperfect—with some late scenes that could’ve done with trimming, and a handful of supporting performances that are far too on-the-nose—but it’s also easily the most exciting release to have debuted on the Croisette so far. Considering this is the festival which, in recent years, has awarded the likes of Titane and Triangle of Sadness, I’m hoping that this audacious piece of filmmaking can join its predecessors in leaving with the top prize, too.