‘The Substance’ Review: Demi Moore And Margaret Qualley Pair Up For The Year’s Smartest, Goriest Horror Breakout – Cannes Film Festival

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Have you ever dreamed about being a better version of yourself? With her second film, Coralie Fargeat not only addresses this question but takes aim at ageism and sexism in the entertainment industry with a riotous, dreamlike horror-thriller that ends in a delirious symphony of blood, guts and otherwise undefinable viscera.

Imagine David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive fused in a telepod with David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers, add the unbelievably dynamic pairing of Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley, process it through the ultra-vivid color palette that is Fargeat’s hyper-saturated imagination, sprinkle a bit of J.G.

Ballard on top, and you have the perfect breakout genre movie of the year. If you had “Demi Moore to make a hagsploitation body horror splatter movie” on your 2024 bingo card, you stand to make a fortune, but, come on, it’s not very likely; there’s been nothing in her filmography so far — not even 2019’s edgy black comedy Corporate Animals — to suggest that she would ever have a film like The Substance inside her.

But here we are, and not only does she give the furthest-out performance this side of Nicolas Cage — who raised the stakes in Cannes this year by eating a dead rat in The Surfer — she is all in for the humor and clearly totally in sync with Fargeat’s not-really-very-subtle-at-all feminist agenda.