'The Apprentice', 'The Substance': Cannes under the knife

No monster is ever fully formed. They are created, sometimes lovingly tended to, by our worst impulses.

Astutely, “The Apprentice,” a hypnotically vulgar biopic detailing Donald Trump’s rise to prominence in the tattered Koch-era New York of the 1970s and 1980s, requires no sympathy for the future president. That's a good thing, because this Trump (already an idiot with anger issues played by Sebastian Stan with a prosthetic double chin) is, if not the worst of all the Trumps, then still pretty awful. He's the heartless rent collector who goes door-to-door in his father's slum buildings in Brooklyn, dodging pots of boiling water thrown by tenants. He's the Trump elbowing his way through the cheeseball line at an Atlantic City casino buffet. He's just getting started.

However, by some proper cosmic logic, to summon this creature into existence, the film's director, Ali Abbasi, had to find someone even more horrible to love. He has it in Roy Cohn, the noxious Republican lawyer who watered the seeds of Trump's ambition when the young promoter needed affection (and a little political grease). Jeremy Strong, who, like Kendall Roy in “Succession,” turned ethics-free tools into poetry, finds his Cohn in verbal tics and locked-jaw rigidity. Surprisingly, it is the definitive one, even after Cohn's many performances in “Angels in America,” “Fellow Travelers” and elsewhere.

Shivering with degraded VHS noise, “The Apprentice” has fun evoking a junky real estate empire coming into its own, as debt-doomed hotels go up and gaudy interiors are re-carpeted by Ivana Trump (another preternaturally twist self-possessed by Oscar-nominated Maria Bakalova for “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm”). But Strong is the one who finds an unlikely frequency: tragedy? – for what could have been an “SNL” parody, as Cohn’s roar fades away with AIDS-related illness. There's the slightest flicker of guilt in his eyes as his protégé replaces him, overtaking him with a shamelessness whose depth we haven't yet seen.

On Monday, “The Apprentice” bowed in competition at a Cannes Film Festival that had finally found its appetite. Dark, biting films consumed backyard discussions and online chatter while ceremonial cows like Kevin Costner's confusing three-hour Western, the first part of “Horizon,” quickly sank into irrelevance. You could focus on the nightmarish vision of a tube liposuctioning fat from Trump's distended stomach (we also see his bald scalp being stapled) or, conversely, you could settle for Demi Moore's new comedy, which, however unlikely It seems, it eclipsed even “The Apprentice” for its sick emotions with a bitter aftertaste.

“The Substance” was easily the most Hollywood-centric film of the festival, but don't be fooled into thinking it's all about showbiz people. Universality stalks you. Darkening palm trees sway as Elisabeth Sparkle (Moore), one-time Oscar winner and Walk of Fame star, finds herself ejected from her aerobics show. “At 50, everything stops,” says her callous producer (a wild Dennis Quaid) during a farewell lunch between bites of shrimp. It is a terribly voracious film.

Who will be the next Sparkle? Certainly no one over 30 insists on a want ad. Melting into Norma Desmond's loneliness, Elisabeth won't allow it. She chases a clue down a dark alley, which leads her to a pristine laboratory where her numbered locker contains tubes of white gunk, syringes with a green miracle formula, and some easy-to-read instructions. A new Elisabeth, moist and flexible, will emerge fully developed from her back. All she has to do is share her waking time with him weekly.

Once Margaret Qualley enters the picture, squirming in her regained potency, christening herself Sue and landing Elisabeth's TV fitness show in a matter of days, “The Substance” becomes a frighteningly safe piece of anxiety. French writer-director Coralie Fargeat, latest from the 2017 Time's Up thriller “Revenge,” caresses their bodies in close-up (both actors are fearless, liberated by the best turns of their careers) and you'll catch yourself thinking: What's it like? this, even remotely? OK? (Keep Brian De Palma on a watch list after you see this one; he might start looking for a substance lab himself.)

But Fargeat knows what he's doing. Chasing a commentary on male-imposed (and, more subtly, self-imposed) expectations, his macro lens envelops everything in consumable exuberance. Or at least it is for a while. As you may have guessed, sharing living time proves difficult (that's all that should be addressed), and the art of “The Substance” makes a necessary turn toward the tactile makeup work of Pierre-Olivier Persin, who almost single-handedly offers the most surprising climax of the year.

Vincent Cassel and Diane Kruger in the film “The Shrouds.”

(Cannes Film Festival)

Does a festival like this even need a new David Cronenberg film? (The goo master's 1986 “The Fly” was name-checked by viewers stumbling out of “The Substance.”) Got one. “The Shrouds” is the director’s somber attempt to process the 2017 death of his wife of nearly 40 years, and because Cronenberg does the processing, it comes in the form of a widowed tech inventor, Karsh (Vincent Cassel), who manufactures sinister-looking Coffins with radioactive-activated cameras mounted inside so mourners can watch their beloved spouse's body decompose in real time from any angle.

Cronenberg knows to expect a shudder. Don't repress it. He even dramatizes it in an early (and funny) scene, in which the stern-looking loner Cassel endures a first date that quickly goes sour. But beyond being misunderstood, what does the life of a “corpse voyeur” entail? In its cold style, with music by Howard Shore, “The Shrouds” becomes a mystery, as activists vandalize the tomb and Karsh recruits his hacker brother-in-law, Maury (Guy Pearce), to investigate.

Already in “Videodrome” from 1983, Cronenberg's films have flirted with a touch that is too theoretical: the characters play as ideas; scenarios such as graduate thesis; and Canadian office buildings look like sinister sites of experimentation. (Sometimes that's exactly what they are.) We're lucky to have films so rich with ideas and humor, but “The Shrouds” suffers from its own intoxication.

But then, almost magically, German actress Diane Kruger appears in three incarnations, each a complex mystery, and one understands why the filmmaker needed to express this. She is the twin sister of Karsh's dead wife, she grieves in her own way (and takes care of dogs). Then she is her digital assistant, an AI named Hunny, who keeps her company. Finally, in his dreams, she is the lost Becca, returning to him in bed, her body increasingly diminished by the spread of the cancer. They are ghostly images, dazzling and as emotional as anything Cronenberg has done.

Bodies tell stories. And Cannes was listening, as difficult as it was.