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. 

Embattled hip-hop mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs issued an apology Sunday for his 2016 assault of his former girlfriend that was captured on a hotel security video.

The video, released Friday in a CNN report, shows Combs chasing, kicking, dragging and hurling a glass vase at Casandra Ventura, who filed a lawsuit against Combs last year. Ventura, a singer who goes by the name Cassie, settled the suit the day after it was filed in U.S. District Court.

The video matched the details of the incident at the InterContinental Hotel in Century City as described in Ventura’s lawsuit. Combs denied all of the allegations at the time the suit was filed.

But Combs acknowledged his actions in a video posted on Instagram.

“It’s so difficult to reflect on the darkest times in your life, but sometimes you got to do that,” Combs said. “I was f— up — I hit rock bottom — but I make no excuses. My behavior on that video is inexcusable. I take full responsibility for my actions in that video.”

Combs went on to say he sought mental health counseling after the incident. “I got into going to therapy, going to rehab,” he said. “I had to ask God for his mercy and grace. I’m so sorry. But I’m committed to be a better man each and every day. I’m not asking for forgiveness. I’m truly sorry.”

Combs’ apology comes two days after the video first appeared. The Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office have both said they are aware of the video but could not prosecute Combs for his actions as the statute of limitations has passed.

Ventura’s attorney Douglas Wigdor issued a statement Sunday that said the Combs apology was self-serving.

“Combs’ most recent statement is more about himself than the many people he has hurt,” Wigdor said. “When Cassie and multiple other women came forward, he denied everything and suggested that his victims were looking for a payday. That he was only compelled to ‘apologize’ once his repeated denials were proven false shows his pathetic desperation, and no one will be swayed by his disingenuous words.”

Law enforcement sources have told The Times that Combs is the subject of a sweeping inquiry into sex-trafficking allegations that resulted in a federal raid in March at his estates in Los Angeles and Miami. Combs has not been charged with any crime and has denied any wrongdoing.

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.