The Wildest Movie at Cannes Is Also the One That Got the Longest Ovation

This year’s Cannes started off exceedingly strange, with a string of over-the-top but underwhelming movies whose excesses added up to much less than meets the eye. Where Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis—a phantasmagorical fable set in a cross between New York and old Rome whose hero is a visionary architect with the power to stop time—would have been, weirdness-ly speaking, the crowning jewel of many other years, its relatively taut 138-minute length felt like a mere amuse-bouche for some of the festival’s more generously proportioned indulgences. Kinds of Kindness reunites Emma Stone with her Poor Things director Yorgos Lanthimos for a warped three-part (and nearly three-hour) anthology whose tales include group sex, self-mutilation, and the immortal line “There, dogs were in charge.” Jacques Audiard’s musical Emilia Pérez stars Zoe Saldaña as a Mexico City lawyer tasked with helping a cartel drug lord transition her gender, leading to a rousing number in which a chorus of clinic nurses sings the word “vaginoplasty.” Not to be outdone by the staggeringly gorgeous restoration of Abel Gance’s seven-hour silent epic Napoléon, whose 3-hour-and-40-minute first half opened the festival, Kevin Costner debuted the first part of a planned four-film series called Horizon: An American Saga, a sprawling 181 minutes that introduces more characters than an entire season of Game of Thrones. Even David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds, a somber, self-contained meditation on grief and the body inspired by the death of his wife, features a subplot suggesting that the Chinese government may be using our bones to spy on us. Cannes, in short, was not having a normal one.

So perhaps it’s fitting that Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, the most extreme movie in a festival bursting with extremities, is one of the few things resembling a consensus hit that Cannes has produced thus far. (Its only competition is Sean Baker’s Anora, a sexy screwball comedy that stretches out its antics to the point where it starts to become a tad grueling.) The movie stars Demi Moore as Elisabeth Sparkle, an Oscar-winning actress whose second career as a televised exercise host comes to an abrupt end when a leering network executive (Dennis Quaid) tells her she’s being replaced with a younger model. As she drives home from their meeting, still reeling from the news—and possibly the way Quaid’s producer, pointedly named Harvey, slurps down his mayonnaise-spattered shrimp—she gets into a car accident, and although her body is unharmed, an eerily youthful nurse takes the opportunity to turn her on to the Substance, a mysterious program that will allow her to unleash “the best version of yourself.” That “best version” turns out to be Sue, played by Margaret Qualley, a taut, long-limbed goddess whose mere presence turns straight men into drooling cartoons. It only takes one leering glance at Sue for Harvey to hand her Elisabeth’s old job, and she’s an instant sensation, thanks in part to a sparkly bodysuit that, unlike Elisabeth’s more functional leotard, barely covers her orifices.

The catch behind the Substance is that Elisabeth and Sue can’t exist in the world at the same time. Although the ominous male voice that lays out the rules for its use tells Elisabeth that she and Sue “are one,” they’re forced to trade places on a seven-day schedule, the other’s body lying, naked and unconscious, on the floor of Elisabeth’s blinding white bathroom. Sue, who’s getting her first taste of existence as well as success, resents having to cede space to an older woman she’s never met, so she starts bending the rules, doping herself with Elisabeth’s spinal fluid in order to prolong her time in the sun. But their split self—literally split, as Sue emerges from a torn-open gash down Elisabeth’s spine—is a delicately balanced equation, and overdrawing on either side produces increasingly gory and unsettling forms of decay. Sue spouts blood from her nose, and Elisabeth withers, her skin mottling and her joints stiffening until merely straightening her leg produces a horrifying snap.

The Substance isn’t subtle, and it doesn’t mean to be. Fargeat wears her influences on her sleeve: Elisabeth’s white-on-white bathroom evokes the spaceship from 2001; Sue’s exercise show has the porny glow of Brian De Palma at his most lurid; and as Sue extends her stretches of consciousness further and further beyond the allotted week, John Carpenter’s The Thing becomes the lodestar for the film’s final act. (The stunning makeup effects are by Pierre Olivier Persin.) She even drops in a snatch of the Vertigo score at a particularly opportune moment. And like Fargeat’s reference points, the movie’s politics are mostly frozen circa the 1960s and ’70s, a second-wave vision in which men run the world and women are victimized by it. But it’s as if those ideas have been left to rot in the sun for the intervening decades, or mutated past the point of grotesquerie.

As a satire, The Substance is both gonzo and generic: Harvey works for “the studio,” and Sue is hired to host “the morning show.” Although Moore brings the weight of an icon to the role of a onetime sex symbol, the movie leans away from riffing directly on her past; the character’s backstory is closer to Jane Fonda’s than it is to Moore’s. But Moore still finds a way to make the role personal, digging deeper than she has in years, if not ever. (Although the academy is particularly deaf to the work women do in horror movies, there’s at least a faint chance playing the washed-up winner of an Oscar could give Moore her first shot at one.) In any case, the inner workings of the entertainment industry aren’t where Fargeat’s interests lie. The relationship that interests her is the one between Elisabeth and Sue, or rather between each woman and the idea of her other self. The Substance’s rules make it impossible for them to interact, but after they navigate the long, curved hallway that leads out of the bathroom, the first thing each is confronted with is the other’s image: a photo of Elisabeth at her fitness-influencer peak that fills one wall of her apartment, and, after Sue hits it big, a massive billboard that sits just outside the apartment’s window, touting her latest success. Neither knows what the other has been doing during her week of slumber, and they don’t attempt to communicate with one another, let alone join forces in sisterly solidarity. They can’t exist without each other, but they hate what that bond makes inescapable: the idea that Elisabeth is old, and Sue will be. It’s telling, if a little rigged, that Elisabeth prominently displays a giant glamour photo of herself but her Oscar is nowhere in sight. All she can see is what her body used to be, and not what the spirit that still inhabits hers has accomplished.

The Substance is as much comedy as it is horror, with a comically overwrought finale and a punchline that drew post-midnight cheers in the Debussy. (According to Vulture’s tracker, it has earned the festival’s longest standing ovation, at 11 minutes.) But there’s something sad and a little ugly at its core. I don’t think that’s a flaw, although the sheer excess makes it harder to perceive the movie’s subtleties. (Fargeat could cut the film significantly without losing its sense of off-kilter lunacy. Even its excesses are excessive.) It’s a gas to watch, but it also leaves you a little unsettled, especially if you’ve begun to acquire a sense of your own body’s fragility. You walk out energized but also a little exposed, more in the world but more aware of what it can do to you.