Sex, subterfuge and “The Substance” made Cannes '24 🇫🇷 a cool genre trip
Coralie Fargeat’s cloning horror “The Substance,” starring Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley, helped bring genre thrills to the 77th Cannes Film Festival.
Peter Howell
Movie Critic
CANNES, France — Attending the Cannes Film Festival this year was like parking for 12 days at the world’s classiest drive-in theatre.
With movies about a Cinderella sex worker (“Anora”), a transgender Mexican drug lord (“Emilia Pérez”) and combative Hollywood clones (“The Substance”) generating the most buzz on the Croisette, the fest proved to be a feast for lovers of genre cinema.
These three films dominated the straw polls of critics here in Cannes. They also found favour with the nine-member international jury led by “Barbie” director Greta Gerwig, who awarded the Palme d’Or to “Anora,” the Jury Prize and Best Actress to the women of “Emilia Pérez” (Selena Gomez, Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofía Gascón and Adriana Paz) and Best Screenplay to “The Substance.”
Still unseen at time of writing is “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” by Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof, a late-breaking challenger for the Palme d’Or, the fest’s top prize. Rasoulof is defying his country’s moral and legal authoritarians with his film — word is, it’s a stunner — and by his expected presence at the fest. (Update: The film duly impressed Gerwig’s jury, who gave it a special award.)
In order of preference, here are my 10 favourite films from Cannes ’24, coming soon to a festival and/or theatre near you:
Anora
⭐️⭐️⭐️½ (out of 4)
Sean Baker’s flair for rough-edged characters, as seen in “Tangerine,” “The Florida Project” and “Red Rocket,” pays off handsomely in this high-voltage screwball comedy. Mikey Madison, who played a Manson Family killer in Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” brings seen-it-all chutzpah to the role of Anora (she prefers “Ani”), a potty-mouthed Brooklyn sex worker having a cockeyed Cinderella moment. She meets babyfaced Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), the spoiled son of a wealthy Russian oligarch, and after much partying and spending, the two have a quickie wedding in Vegas. After Vanya’s furious parents dispatch three stooges to bust up the couple, this speedster of a tale takes turns we can’t see coming. Madison keeps us loyal to her character and awestruck at her knack for getting in and out of tough scrapes.
Quick link to story: https://bit.ly/3KwWR7n
The Shrouds
⭐️⭐️⭐️½
How dark are you willing to get and how far would you go to continue a relationship with a loved one who’s died? These are the questions Toronto writer-director David Cronenberg provocatively poses in this stylish and moving addition to his lengthy horror oeuvre, a film partly inspired by the 2017 passing of his wife, Carolyn. Diane Kruger plays the deceased spouse of graveyard owner Karsh (Vincent Cassel), a free-thinking inventor who processes grief in a shockingly tangible way. He’s created a high-tech shroud that allows mourners to watch their loved ones decompose in real time. It’s the next step in Cronenberg’s long fascination with body horror, advanced technology and high paranoia. Simultaneously futuristic, frightening and all-too human, Cronenberg’s most personal film is possibly his best yet.
The Apprentice
⭐️⭐️⭐️½
Shark meets snake in Ali Abbasi’s terrific brothers-in-smarm drama, a Donald Trump origin story showing how New York lawyer Roy Cohn turned Trump into a ruthless power seeker in the 1970s and early 1980s. It’s like a scene out of “Goodfellas” when the two first meet in 1973 and the callow, hungry and 27-year-old Trump (Sebastian Stan) recognizes Cohn as a father figure and mentor. Cohn teaches Trump the three rules of winning — “attack, attack, attack,” “admit nothing, deny everything” and “claim victory and never admit defeat” — slogans that will resonate decades into the future. Abbasi tracks the Faustian deal between the two men while also pulling back the curtain on Trump’s stormy relationship with model Ivana (Maria Bakalova), who soon becomes his wife. It’s hard to know where the facts blend into fiction, but none of it is hard to believe. Convincing lead performances — Stan captures Trump’s cadence and tics; Strong’s Cohn ooze bile and bombast — give “The Apprentice” genuine heft.
Emilia Pérez
⭐️⭐️⭐️½
Can a sex change alter a person’s true nature? This crime musical by Jacques Audiard, whose “Dheepan” won the Palme d’Or in 2015, answers the question with Audiard’s usual urgency. It adds another twist beyond the film’s novel show tunes: a Mexican drug kingpin wants to swap genders while also going straight. Crime boss Manitas del Monte will become social activist Emilia Pérez, with both roles played by trans star Karla Sofia Gascón. Manitas hires change-seeking lawyer Rita Moro Castro, played to perfection by Zoë Saldaña, to arrange for the sex-swap surgery and also to relocate his wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez), and their kids to Switzerland. The plan proceeds like clockwork until ego, ambition and jealousy throw a monkey wrench into the works. Nobody will likely buy the bizarro soundtrack album, but stellar performances make this quirky tale work.
The Substance
⭐️⭐️⭐️½
Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley go to extremes — and screams — to share a perfect Hollywood body in a cautionary tale for the Ozempic era. Using a mysterious drug plan called the Substance, Moore’s aging star, Elisabeth Sparkle, can co-exist with a decades-younger clone of herself, Qualley’s Sue. The catch is they have to follow a strict weekly body-sharing regimen or dire complications will ensue — and do they ever, once Elisabeth and Sue begin sparring for control. This masterful manifestation of cinema grotesque from Coralie Fargeat (“Revenge”) hat-tips and then one-ups David Cronenberg for body horror gross-outs. Midnight movie programmers and fans, start your engines — and just try to get the film’s big reveal out of your minds.
Rumours
⭐️⭐️⭐️
Cate Blanchett, Alicia Vikander and Roy Dupuis star in this wacky horror story about a group of world leaders stranded in a German forest during a G7 summit and global crisis. They’re forced to deal with masturbating zombies, procrastinating bloviators and a huge throbbing brain. It’s the funniest flick yet from Canada’s surreal satirist, Guy Maddin, who gets a huge assist from co-directors Evan and Galen Johnson. It also has the greatest commercial potential for a Maddin movie, which could be the weirdest thing about it. Among the many Canadian jokes are zingers about the Canuck PM, a Trudeau-esque figure played by Dupuis, who offers to make a land claims deal with those circle-jerking zombies. There’s also a sweet shout-out to Neil Young’s famous “better to burn out than fade away” lyric.
Universal Language
⭐️⭐️⭐️
The everyday wonder of late Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami combined with the formal whimsy of Wes Anderson best describes this amusing and affecting second feature from Winnipeg’s Matthew Rankin (“The Twentieth Century”). Set in a resolutely grey and beige place we might call “Tehrannipeg,” it has a mostly Iranian cast living in Winnipeg in a scenario that seems at once totally natural and completely nutso — people work at places called the “Winnipeg Earmuff Authority” and “Kleenex Repository.” There are also strange things happening with turkeys, an ice-encrusted banknote and a Tim Hortons where you can get Iranian tea. Director, co-writer and actor Rankin plays a man who returns home looking for his mom, only to find she’s moved in with another family. This sweet-natured head-scratcher premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar program.
The Surfer
⭐️⭐️⭐️
“Eat the rat!” is destined to become the battle cry of discerning midnight moviegoers and drive-in denizens, once they get a gander at Nicolas Cage’s latest gonzo turn. He plays a dad driven mad by toxic surf punks in Lorcan Finnegan’s tribute to Aussie New Wave, which premiered in the Midnight program. Cage’s tightly wound title character just wants to close a house deal and do some surfing with his son in the beach neighbourhood where he grew up. But a violent group of entitled local surfers, led by a macho self-help guru named Scally (Julian McMahon), consider the returnee an outsider and they’re determined to get between him and the waves. Funny, disturbing and disarming, “The Surfer” is the best thing Cage has done in years.
Kinds of Kindness
⭐️⭐️⭐️
Fresh off his Oscar-winning comedy “Poor Things,” which made his Greek Weird Wave aesthetic more palatable for the masses, Yorgos Lanthimos boldly risks alienating some of his newer fans by reviving dark old impulses. For this three-story saga featuring “Poor Things” stars Emma Stone and Willem Dafoe, along with Jesse Plemons, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau and Joe Alwyn, Lanthimos snaps his “Dogtooth” choppers back in and savages the perverse human desire to always do what’s expected of us, even if that means chopping a finger off and serving it for dinner. If there’s a beating heart in this twisted triptych, somebody would BBQ it. I almost feel guilty for liking it so much.
Bird
⭐️⭐️⭐️
There are distinct Frank Capra vibes in this brilliantly barmy dramedy from Andrea Arnold (“American Honey”), set in a no-hope neighbourhood in England’s North Kent region. Nykiya Adams astounds as 12-year-old Bailey, the centre of every social hurricane. She’s the unhappy daughter of Barry Keoghan’s man-child Bug, who dreams of making it big as a seller of illicit drugs harvested from his pet toad’s psychedelic slime. Bailey’s problems have her in need of a divine assist, and it’s duly supplied when Franz Rogowski’s avian character Bird drops in, just like the guardian angel who helped a troubled George Bailey in Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life.”
