The Substance, Starring Demi Moore & Dennis Quaid

A lot of people might want to be like Dorian Gray, but few would care to be the portrait. Yet, a fading celebrity accepts a Faustian bargain that functions quite similarly. She is the “primary,” but her “better self” gets to have all the fun in director-screenwriter Coralie Forgeat’s The Substance, which opens this Friday in New York.

Elizabeth Sparkle is sort of like Jane Fonda, if she never stopped doing aerobics videos. At one point, she was a top actress, but for many years, she paid her bills hosting a daytime exercise show. Unfortunately, the odious network executive Harvey (whose Weinstein-ish name cannot be a coincidence) fired her for being insufficiently young and hot. While recovering from a subsequent minor fender-bender, a dodgy orderly slips her a card for a mysterious service that promises to bring out her best self, through the injection of a “substance.”

The titular substance produces what it promises quite literally, when her more alluring shadow self emerges from Sparkle’s back. She and “Sue” as her offspring calls herself, must scrupulously respect their symbiotic relationship. To maintain balance, each gets seven days out in the world, while the other remains in stasis, before they switch. Without a timely switch, Sparkle cannot safely generate the spinal fluid Sue needs to sustain herself.

Of course, Sue quickly replaces Sparkle on her former show, immediately igniting the ratings. Predictably, she resents the time she must concede to Sparkle, so she starts to cheat. When that causes Sparkle irreversible physical damage, it launches a cold war between the two linked selves.

To a large extent, the first hour of The Substance plays like a better episode of Black Mirror, but the closing half-hour is a relentlessly gory assault on the senses (and some would say good taste). Weirdly, the film revisits some themes of Fargeat’s less extreme short Reality+, in which a chip allowed users to project an idealized image of themselves for twelve hours, but she completely immerses her latest feature in grisly body-horror.

Corporate Animals: Demi Moore is the Boss

Is there anything worse than team-building exercises? Sure, cannibalism and getting trapped in confined spaces are bad too, but faux empowerment really takes the cake. Unfortunately, the employees of Incredible Edibles will have to endure all these things, plus their boss’s usual bullying in Patrick Brice’s Corporate Animals, which opens this Friday in New York.

Lucy Vanderton’s mean streak is only surpassed by her vanity. She really believes all her dressing-down sessions are for her employees’ own good—not that she cares about them. Regrettably, her business acumen is not as considerable. With rumors of insolvency swirling around the company, she packs up her staff for a mandatory outward bound-style outing. It gives her the opportunity to preen and show off her calculated wokeness, but her survival skills are not that hot either.

Of course, Vanderton insists they all engage in some high-risk spelunking, but when their guide dies through misadventure, they are trapped without food—and nobody will come looking for them anytime soon. Things get ugly as workplace resentments boil over. Before long, they must resort to Donner Party tactics to survive.

There are no revelations in Corporate Animals, but Brice and screenwriter Sam Bain keep it consistently brisk and amusing. There is no doubt Demi Moore is the film’s no-to-secret weapon shamelessly chewing the scenery as Vanderton. It is a claws-out, all-in performance that has no use for subtlety, but it is very funny.

The supporting cast get their digs in as well, particularly Isiah Whitlock Jr. and Dan Bakkedahl as the kind of employees who just radiate discontent. Jessica Williams and Karan Soni develop some nice rapport as Jess and Freddie, the two supposed protégés, whom Vanderton has been playing-off against themselves. Jennifer Kim (so memorable in Female Pervert) again shows off her remarkable facility for dead-pan humor, but she really should have had more screen time. Likewise, Ed Helms’ necessarily brief appearance as Brandon, the ill-fated guide, was probably considered a gag in its own right.

The laughs in Corporate mostly constitute dark comedy, but the cannibalism business never approaches the in-your-face discomfort of Raw. It really functions better as a zeitgeisty Serial-style satire than a horror or midnight movie. In fact, a high percentage of the jokes lampooning self-helpy business-and-success double talk land on target (Jonathan Swift might approve). Recommended for rude laughs, Corporate Animals opens this Friday (9/20) in New York, at the Village East.