Not long into Coralie Fargeat’s campy body horror The Substance, Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) is unceremoniously fired from her gig as the celebrity host of a daytime exercise program. The former actress’ credentials — an Academy Award, a prominent place on the Hollywood Walk of Fame — aren’t enough to save her Zumba-meets-Jillian-Michaels-style show, fittingly called Sparkle Your Life. Her producer, an oily personality conspicuously named Harvey (Dennis Quaid), wants to replace Elisabeth with a younger, more beautiful star. In his words: “This is network TV, not charity.” 

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

In The Substance, a woman also takes fate into her own hands and combats underestimation, only this time she’s at war with herself, too. Fargeat combines sci-fi elements (as in her early short Reality+) with body horror and satire to show how women are trapped by the dual forces of sexism and ageism. Beauty and youth are the targets at the heart of this film, but the director also takes aim at Hollywood’s ghoulish machinations and the compulsive physical and psychological intrusiveness of cisgender heterosexual men. 

Fargeat flaunts an exciting hyperactive style. Ultra wide-angle shots, close-ups and a bubble-gum color palette contribute to the film’s surreal — and at times uncanny — visual language. The British composer Raffertie’s thunderous score adds an appropriately ominous touch, especially during moments of corporeal mutilation. 

There’s a lot going on in The Substance, and while the ambition is admirable, not everything works. The thin plotting strains under the weight of its 2 hour 20 minute runtime; there are scenes, especially in the middle of the film, that land as leaden repetition instead of clever mirroring. But strong performances — especially from Moore and Quaid — help sustain momentum through the film’s triumphantly amusing end.

During his final meeting with Elisabeth, Harvey doubles down on his offensiveness. By the time women reach the age of 50, he suggests to Elisabeth while stuffing his mouth with shrimp, it’s over for them. Fargeat heightens the perversity of Harvey’s blunt assessment with shots of his mouth masticating on shellfish bits. As he crushes the coral-colored creatures with his molars, Elisabeth stares at him with a faint disgust bordering on hatred. Quaid’s character lives in the more satirical notes of The Substance, and the actor responds with an appropriately mocking performance.

Harvey’s words, coupled with the blank stares Elisabeth now receives from passersby, drive the actress to seek a solution. She reaches out to the anonymous purveyors of The Substance, a program that allows people to essentially clone a younger version of themselves. While Fargeat’s screenplay leaves much to be desired when it comes to conveying the company’s scale of operations or how they function in her version of Los Angeles, the rules of the experiment are straightforward. After individuals spawn their duplicates, it’s critical they maintain a balanced life. Every 7 days one of them enters a coma, kept alive through a feeding tube, while the other roams free. Then they switch. The catch, of course, is the addiction of youth. 

Elisabeth and her younger self (Margaret Qualley), Sue, follow the program rules for a bit. The middle of The Substance is packed with scenes underscoring the difference in treatment they receive. While Sue blossoms, winning the affection of Harvey and getting her own exercise show, Elisabeth languishes in the shadow of her invisibility.

Moore imbues her character with a visceral desperation, one that enriches the unsettling undercurrents of Fargeat’s film. She plays a woman who can’t quit the addiction of having youth at her fingertips despite its lacerating effect on her psyche. In one particularly strong scene, Elisabeth, haunted by a giant billboard of Sue outside her window, struggles to leave the house for a date. She tirelessly redoes her makeup and each attempt reveals the layers of anguish behind the actress’s pristine facade. 

Moore leans into the physical requirements of her role later in the film. Elisabeth eventually learns that upsetting the balance of the experiment reduces her vitality. Sue, greedier for more time outside the coma, becomes a kind of vampire, and Elisabeth wilts. Moore’s slow walk and hunched shoulders add to the sense of her character’s suffering. Special makeup effects by Pierre-Olivier Persin render Elisabeth’s withering even more startling and persuasive.  

Qualley does not have as meaty a role as Moore. Her character functions as Elisabeth’s foil, seeming to exist only to help us understand the perversion of Hollywood’s gaze on the starlet. That’s a shame, because The Substance’s smart premise and direction promise more revelatory confrontations between Elisabeth and Sue than the one we are offered.

The reality of this experiment is that it traps both characters in the same toxic, self-hating cycle as the standards imposed by society. The most compelling parts of The Substance deal with how social conventions turn women against themselves. A stronger version of the film might have dug into the complexities of that truth, instead of simply arranging itself around it. 

World leaders at a G7 conference politely bicker, copulate in the bushes and work on wafty, content-free speeches while a worldwide apocalypse commences — politicians, they’re just like us! — in collaborating Canadian directors Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson’s frequently hilarious latest feature.

Although they’ve kept busy with a steady stream of shorts, the trio haven’t made a feature with actors since the fantastical The Forbidden Room from 2015. With a proper beginning, middle and end, and barely any tributes to silent cinema or interactive tricksiness, Rumours may arguably be Maddin’s most conventional film ever, or at least since The Saddest Music in the World (2003). That is, if you can call a film conventional that’s got furiously masturbating bog zombies, a giant brain the size of a hatchback, and an AI chatbot that catfishes pedophiles. All the same, it’s a hoot, even if the energy flags in the middle.

For those who like to keep score on these sort of things, this is also the first film directed by Maddin, let alone brothers Evan and Galen Johnson, that’s been programmed in Cannes’ official selection. Apart from the fact that it’s a welcome rib-tickler that breaks up this year’s festival’s monotonous procession of poverty porn and disappointments by fading auteurs, Rumours’ path to the Croisette was almost certainly smoothed by the presence of major names in the cast including Cate Blanchett, Alicia Vikander, Charles Dance and French star Denis Ménochet (Beau Is Afraid, Peter von Kant). That cast and the festival showcase won’t do any harm to the film’s commercial prospects. Bleecker Street recently announced they’ve acquired the rights for U.S. distribution.

The satire here isn’t necessarily aimed at any specific politician given that the characters are all clearly living in a fictional world, one where ideology barely seems to matter. Nevertheless, there’s a distinct sharpness in the way the script, credited to Evan Johnson but based on a story by all three directors, pokes the bears. Pointedly it lampoons the airy, non-committal language of world summits, the promises that mean nothing, and the outcomes that achieve little in a world that, while admittedly always in crisis, really is on the verge of burning up thanks to climate change.

The film’s most consistent running joke — worked so hard it goes from guffaw-inducing to stale to weirdly suddenly hilarious again, as if through attrition — concerns how seriously the seven world leaders take the process of drafting a joint statement full of platitudes, corporate-speak, psychobabble and song lyrics as they sit in a little woodland gazebo. So absorbed are they in their work, broken up into subgroups like high-schoolers assigned a class project, that they don’t even notice that their aides and servers have all mysteriously disappeared, leaving them alone in the woods.

In other ways, the leaders resemble middle-managers enjoying their annual conference with its catering, photo opportunities and time off from troublesome spouses — a particular concern for Canada’s prime minister Maxime Laplace (The Forbidden Room’s Roy Dupuis, rocking a man bun with an undercut like an aging pop star). Broad hints are dropped that Maxime had a fling with the United Kingdom’s otherwise goal-directed prime minister Cardosa Dewindt (Nikki Amuka-Bird). This year he’s caught the thirsty eye of host-country Germany’s elegant Chancellor Hilda Ortmann (Blanchett, showing off strong comedy chops, even in the way she Germanicizes her vowel sounds).

The United States’ President Edison Wolcott (Charles Dance, slyly self-parodying) is more interested in getting some sleep and keeps nodding off, a gag that may be sheer coincidence but weirdly parallels what’s going on at the minute with Donald Trump at his criminal hush money trial. Another cute gag has the film never explaining why the American president has such a plummy British accent, and the one time he’s about to share why gets interrupted.

Rounding out the democratic world powers, Ménochet’s French President Sylvain Broulez is a grandiloquent blowhard who probably talks more than Japan’s reticent Tatsuro Iwasaki (Takehiro Hira) and Italy’s bumbling beta-male Antonio Lamorte (Rolando Ravello) combined. Both of the latter two, however, are aces as slow burns and understated reaction shots, especially Ravello.

Alicia Vikander, speaking only in her native Swedish for a change, shows up halfway through the film as the president of the European Commission, Celestine Sproul, when Maxime stumbles across her in the woods with the aforementioned giant brain, which you’ll have to watch the film to understand.

Not that understanding is really the point here. Rumours operates on a surrealist plane of its own, making up the rules of its universe as it goes along. Shall we have millennia-old boneless bog people who come to life and menace the guests, it asks itself, and the answer is yes, why not? What if the non-source music swells and bursts like the melodramatic score of a soap opera at times? Sure!

The whole thing sometimes feels like a skit show that just barely holds together until the filmmakers and cast bring it all home for a terrific climactic closure, in which all the buzzwords and banalities get to be rolled up into one triumphant speech shouted into the void as world burns. Like the best comic fantasies, Rumours has more than a grain of tragic truth to it.

It’s become something of a movie fashion to forestall the title credits until well after an establishing sequence, if not deeper into the film. But when the title appears onscreen in Blue Sun Palace, at the half-hour point, there’s nothing self-consciously stylish about it: It marks a dramatic, ground-shifting change in perspective, a gut-punch of a narrative fracture, and one that writer-director Constance Tsang executes with assurance.

At the helm of her first feature, Tsang has made a sharp and tender story about dislocation, centering on a trio of hardworking Chinese immigrants in New York. In the movie’s first 30 minutes, Tsang draws us into the intimate orbit of her expatriate characters: a construction company employee and two colleagues at a massage parlor. Then, the sudden absence of one of them sets everything askew. Absence is the current that drives the narrative: absence from family, from homeland, from purpose. The world these characters inhabit, within an enclave of Flushing, Queens, is a place of in-between, captured in the evocative half-light of Norm Li’s cinematography, suggesting the cool-hot glow of the title’s blue sun. The poignant chords of Sami Jano’s elegantly lean score further fuel the angsty mood.

The Blue Sun Palace is a restaurant outside the movie’s main New York setting, making its appearance late in the proceedings. It’s in another, unnamed restaurant that the film kicks off, without ceremony, in a remarkable sequence. The eatery itself is barely seen, Li’s camera moving between Hunan native Didi (Xu Haipeng) and Cheung (Lee Kang Sheng), from Taiwan, holding them close as they dig into spicy chicken and fall into each other’s gaze.

It will be a while before we know their names, or who they are to each other. There’s a sense of established emotional intimacy between them, but at the same time they’re still getting to know each other. Eventually, the likely deduction is that he’s been a client of hers at the massage parlor she runs. When he speaks of his loneliness, his words are muted and restrained, and her eyes well with compassion, the play of feeling on Xu’s face breathtaking. This is not your standard first date. But it is a turning point, the infatuation deepening during an entranced karaoke duet. Didi and Cheung’s morning-after pillow talk is a beautifully played depiction of awakening and connection, mischievous and light even as it delves into the weightier territory of hopes and dreams, a conversational turn sparked by a calendar photo on Didi’s wall.

For Didi, some of those dreams involve Amy (Wu Ke-Xi), her closest friend at the massage parlor and the third key character. Amy is a gifted cook, and she and Didi talk of opening a restaurant together. In the meantime, they, along with Josie (Murielle Hsieh) and Fei (Zheng Lisha), spend their days and nights massaging the bodies of their male customers. A sign on the front door warns, “No Sexual Services,” but exceptions are made — sometimes grudgingly. And, as one tense scene demonstrates, not every client is respectful, to put it mildly.

As to the business’ unseen proprietor — it’s unlikely that the four women have ownership stakes — the movie offers no information or hints. There are a couple of other instances where Tsang could have made the narrative details less hazy, although these lingering questions don’t unmoor the story or lessen its impact.

What is clear is the bond among the parlor’s four women, the sisterly humor that gets them through the workaday hours and helps them withstand the overall sense of displacement. In ways both obvious and offhand, they nurture one another. The feast Amy prepares for Lunar New Year evokes fond and tearful memories of home for Josie. In the here and now, Didi’s maternal warmth is the glue holding everything together. But things break apart, and, as one character notes, “It’s funny how quickly the people you love become strangers.”

Picking up the story after a specific cataclysm and an unspecified length of time, Tsang turns her focus to the question of how to go on, and whether devotedness can devolve into clinging to what’s gone. Amy, obsessed with repairing a ceiling leak, worries it like a wound. Cheung, who has only one friend at work (Leo Chen), fields mirthless calls from his wife and daughter in Taiwan that are always about money, nothing else. When he takes Amy to the restaurant from the opening scene, you might call it a dramatic version of an Annie Hall joke, the bit where Alvy’s attempt to duplicate the romantic hilarity of a lobster dinner with Annie falls numbingly flat with another woman. Cheung’s disappointment aside, for Amy the fraught dinner gives way to the simplest and most difficult realization of all: “I just need to change something.”

While Xu’s compelling vibrancy suffuses Blue Sun Palace, her co-stars offer thornier portrayals. Playing in an unpredictable register, Wu (Nina Wu) gives pulsing life to Amy’s wary brittleness and its eventual melting. Lee, the longtime muse of Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-liang, carries Cheung’s yearning and joy, his guilt and sorrow, in a performance that’s all the more gripping for being measured and contained.

As to the resolution of these characters’ story, it remains an open question in the subtly moving final scenes. In massage parlor reception areas and backrooms, working-class restaurants and karaoke bars, Tsang and her strong cast, with superb contributions from production designer Evaline Wu Huang, have captured something evanescent and life-giving, and grounded it in kitchen clatter and workplace chatter, the gritty day-to-day.