Species (Sanguine) had its world première at a Midnight screening for Cannes 2026, 14 May
There are two prologues to Marion Le Corroller’s debut feature Species. The first shows images of what appears to be red biological matter slowly taking over its white background, all to the auditory accompaniment of a disgustingly squelchy sound. The second shows a fast food restaurant where the young man (Edouard Ducamp) taking orders is faced with an unreasonably demanding customer. As his earpiece rings with commands and threats from his manager, the server’s forced smile falters, his eyes become bloodshot, and he goes postal, violently attacking the customer and several other people, before repeatedly, bloodily smashing his own face into the counter.
It will take viewers some time to recognise the precise relevance of these two sequences to everything that follows, but what is clear, even now, is that this film is capturing that transformative, Hulk-like moment when someone under great stress suddenly sees red and snaps. We see red too, as it is the film’s dominant colour, painted all over the interiors of the modernist hospital complex where most of the events unfold, and also lighting the quarters where the younger residents are staying. Even the film’s original French title, Sanguine, alludes to the colour of blood, and blood too will come to feature heavily here. For the protagonist Margot (Mara Taquin), a new intern still struggling to find herself, will soon, like her namesake in Patrice Chéreau’s La Reine Margot (1994), be covered head to toe in the stuff.
Like the fast food restaurant from the opening scene, the hospital is a high-pressure environment. Hélène Vergile (Karin Viard), the experienced doctor in charge of the resident novices, is described by Margot’s fellow intern Louis (Sami Outalbali) as ‘the devil’, both for her extremely exacting attitude and for the way that she plays the interns off against one another. Here life-and-death decisions must be made with accuracy and at speed – and Margot, whose mother died owing to a faulty hospital diagnosis and who, unlike her colleague Pauline (Kim Higelin), was not born into a medical career, is soon crumbling under the pressure.
Louis too had suffered a mental breakdown in medical college, and even confident-seeming Pauline feels pressure to live up to the previous six generations of doctors in her family. Meanwhile other young patients whom Margot encounters – like Clement (Stefan Crepon) who is striving to make it as a journalist in this economy, or the stockmarket trader Lili (Sonia Faïdi) who works ridiculously long hours and has to conceal her pregnancy from her firm – are similarly coming apart at the seams in their hostile work environments.
Something has to give, and all these pressures will articulate themselves through the language of body horror, as Margot finds herself haemorrhaging without any obvious wounds, acquiring strange growths and lesions, and beginning herself to incarnate the Cronenbergian concept of ‘new flesh’. It is a metamorphosis, or at least a mutation, restricted to Gen Z and expressive of their particular problems as an overworked, underpaid precariat who came of age with Covid, have few prospects without support from the bank of Mum and Dad, are readily exploited by their seniors, and suffer more mental illness than any previous generation.
Although its thematic preoccupations are different, Species comes very much in the wake of Julia Ducournau’s bloody student rite de passage Raw (Crude, 2016) and Coralie Fargeat’s beauty myth body horror The Substance (2024) – and it shares with Fargeat’s film a baroquely hyperbolic stylisation. For Le Corroller and her DP Guillaume Schiffman let no opportunity pass to cant every angle, and to deploy disorienting POV shots, SnorriCam, and even – in one particularly grotesque scene focused precisely on the functionality of genitalia – VaginaCam (in shades of Frank Henenlotter’s Bad Biology, 2008).
Species is tasteless and often repellent (which is to say, horror) – but then, Le Corroller’s film is foregrounding and embodying the very sickness that it diagnoses in our society. For it is capturing a generational propensity to stress, self-harm, suicide, and burnout of the most literal – even terminal – kind. You can recoil from – or revel in – the film’s cartoonish excess, but this is merely an exaggerated, genre-fied picture of today’s alienating, cutthroat workplace for Zoomers, where the adaptation and evolution required for people like Margot to survive can be soul-destroying.
strap: Post(al) feminism: Marion Le Corroller’s feature debut metamorphoses the stresses of Gen Z’s work environments into body horror
© Anton Bitel
