Species

A junior doctor falls victim to a mysterious, life-threatening sickness in French writer-director Marion Le Corroller’s debut feature Species, a darkly comic sci-fi body-horror thriller with a deeper allegorical message about workplace burn-out in high-pressure capitalist societies.

A world premiere in the cult-friendly Midnight section in Cannes, Species expands on Le Corroller’s 2020 short, No More God in Doctor, and was partly inspired by her own experiences in a stressful finance job. Though the plotting is sometimes haphazard and the satire very broad, the film’s heady blend of elevated genre elements, superlative visual effects, splatter violence and political subtext should add up to healthy audience appeal. A domestic release is scheduled for October.

Inevitably, Species has been widely compared to other female-directed, feminist-leaning body-horror films that became Cannes sensations: notably Julia Ducournau’s Raw (2016) and Titane (2021), and Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (2024). Le Corroller has been wary of these parallels in her promotional interviews, citing Ari Aster and Yorgos Lanthimos as more direct inspirations, but the similarities are hard to ignore, and will certainly prove helpful as marketing angles. The stand-out body-mutation sequences here are handled by special make-up effects designer Pierre-Olivier Persin, for example, who won an Oscar for The Substance.

Named Sanguine in French – a much better title than its blandly bloodless English alternative – Species sets out its satirical stall early with a lively prologue set in a gaudy fast food restaurant, where an entitled online influencer makes too many diva demands on an already pressurised server, pushing him over the edge from ritual politeness to bludgeoning violence. Just to underscore the Looney Tunes comic tone, the restaurant is called Bloody Burger. This is not a subtle movie.

That said, the central plot is as much psychological character study as genre thriller. It follows Margot (Belgian rising star Mara Taquin), a new recruit to the brutally competitive team of young medical interns staffing a frantically busy hospital emergency room in an unnamed French city. Her boss is Professor Virgile (Karen Viard), a tyrannical ice queen who Margot’s fellow trainee doctors call “the devil”. Indeed, the opening act of Species might have been called The Devil Wears Surgical Scrubs.

But more nightmarish Cronenberg-ian elements soon come to dominate as Margot begins treating patients with unexplained conditions, from grotesque skin lesions to sweating blood. Crucially, this COVID-like pandemic appears to mainly afflict younger people in pressurised, precarious jobs who simply cannot afford to be sick.

The same applies to Margot. When she begins exhibiting similar terrifying symptoms, she initially struggles to conceal them from her co-worker rivals Louis (Sami Outalbali) and Pauline (Kim Higelin), which proves especially difficult as all three share an uneasy, volatile sexual chemistry. Professor Virgile reassures Margot she is merely suffering from hematidrosis, a real condition in which blood floods the sweat glands, typically triggered by extreme stress. But the professor has her own dubious agenda, and her vague diagnosis does not explain the nationwide wave of lethal violence and sudden death that the sickness appears to have unleashed. With her life at risk, Margot becomes a kind of undercover medical detective, frantically seeking answers as her body starts to mutate, transform and disintegrate.

After this suspenseful but slightly incoherent set-up, Species kicks into high gear for the frenzied final act, which features some terrific visual effects and deliciously visceral gore, all climaxing with a bravura high-speed orgy of skin-slashing, blood-pumping guerrilla surgery. Le Corroller’s final satirical punchline, which hints that the sickness could be some kind of evolutionary biological weapon in an inter-generational class war, is an audacious twist but not wholly convincing.

Ultimately, Species never quite hits the same eye-popping, flesh-tearing, pulp-deluxe heights as Titane or The Substance. But this is still an admirably ambitious and mostly satisfying debut driven by a kinetic, all-guns-blazing performance from Taquin. Her compelling depiction of manic meltdown is reinforced by cinematographer Guillame Schiffman’s heavily stylised, reality-bending lenswork and a relentlessly pumping electronic score by French musician Robin Coudert, aka ROB, whose has previously worked with a long list of cult horror directors including Coralie Fargeat.

Director: Marion Le Corroller
Screenwriters: Marion Le Corroller, Thomas Pujol
Cast: Mara Taquin, Karin Viard, Kim Higelin, Sami Outalbali, Stefan Crepon, Sonia Faïdi
Cinematography: Guillame Schiffman
Editing: Jerome Altabet
Production designer: Anne-Sophie Delseries
Music: Rob
Producer: Carole Lambert
Production company: Windy (France)
World sales: WTFilms, Paris
In French
103 minutes