'The Substance' W/Demi Moore/Margaret Qualley: What To Know

This year’s Cannes film festival was typically full of polarizing fare including Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis and Kevin Costner’s Horizon, but no film at this year’s splashiest festival was as gasp-inducing as The Substance.

This body horror/fantasy/parable serves as the sophomore directing turn by Coralie Fargeat (Revenge) and is being held out as “explosive” by distributor MUBI. What can we expect from this outwardly outrageous movie?

Plot

At its core, The Substance is a savage Cinderella story with feminist overtones revolving around the professional downgrading of Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), an aerobics sensation whose wardrobe remains straight out of the 1980s. The industry would love to send her off to a proverbial farm in upstate New York, but a laboratory comes knocking with a mysterious injectable drug that promises to turn her into a younger, more gorgeous version of herself. This transforms her into “Sue,” although the warring versions can only inhabit Elisabeth’s body for a week at a time. (Will there be a pumpkin on display somewhere?) Nudity will be plentiful, as will gore.

Reviews of the movie include The New Yorker‘s Justin Chang calling this a film with an “outlandish premise,” but “there’s no doubting the ferocity of the two leads, Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley, or Fargeat’s sheer filmmaking verve as she pushes her ideas to their sanguinary conclusions.” Hollywood Reporter‘s Lovia Gyarkye singles out the 140-minute runtime as a weak point while noting that “strong performances… help sustain momentum through the film’s triumphantly amusing end.” And Collider’s Caleb Hammond sees the internal battle as “a savvy read on how the capitalism rat race functions to deflect from the real enemies” while concluding that Fargeat will soon “have a legion of new horror fans” looking forward to her third feature film.

The film might have an excessive runtime, but the selling point stays brief:

Have you ever dreamt of a better version of yourself?
You. Only better in every way.
You’ve got to try this new product.
It changed my life.

THE SUBSTANCE.

A cryptic clip follows the same line of thinking:

Cast

In addition to Demi Moore as Elisabeth and Margaret Qualley as Sue, Dennis Quaid (who replaced the late Ray Liotta) portrays a TV executive named Harvey, whose misogynistic airs in the trailer are not unlike those of Harvey Weinstein. The cast further includes Hugo Diego Garcia and Gore Abrams.