★★★½
A junior doctor’s stress starts making her literally sweat blood, and start to transform, in Marion Le Corroller’s formally inventive, politically furious debut. Funny, disgusting and bracingly blunt, this is a prime example of the New French Feminist Body Horror – and Le Corroller wants us to know that sometimes capitalism gets under your skin.
Ever since Cannes rightly awarded the Palme d’Or to Julia Ducournau’s Titane, the festival has sought to demonstrate that wasn’t a one-off, leaning into female and non-binary led horror – into body horror especially. This year is no exception, which brings us to Species (French title: Sanguine), the debut feature from Marion Le Corroller, and one of the most spattery first films to play the Croisette in years.
It opens in a fast food joint somewhere in Paris. A French director looking to fast food as a symbol of capitalism’s less appetising qualities is well-trodden territory. But it is a good example of the film’s general approach, blunt and to the point, which is not necessarily a bad thing. How in the nose is this? The menu features the Bloody Burger and the Blue Vein Burger, and we will indeed see a great deal of blood and a number of blue veins later on. A confrontation arises between the cashier and a pair of trashy influencers (I have 187,000 followers!) who are attempting to order a discontinued item, positions both fast food culture and the influencer economy as twin symptoms of the same dehumanised society. The slogans on the wall read Burger Della Morte and Come and taste your death. Eventually the cashier flips out, and kills the influencers and several other patrons. Did I mention Le Corroller is not here to be subtle?
Prologue done, the film takes the deformation, mutilation and objectification of women’s bodies as a metaphor for life under patriarchy and capitalism. We follow Margot (Mara Taquin), a junior doctor at the country’s most competitive emergency room, a place where the pressure to process and perform sits in ugly contrast to the stated purpose of caring for human life. Time pressure is relentless: patients must be seen within targets, consultancy averages driven down, throughput maximised. The ward runs as a competition, twelve junior doctors ranked according to throughput rather than outcomes. For Margot, who brings a human touch to her interactions at the expense of efficiency, this means she quickly sinks to the bottom of the table with a question mark over her future. The other student doctor down there with her is named, in a pleasing nod to French cinema history, Truffaut.
The production design underlines all of this; Le Corroller uses architecture as a reflection of hostile or post-human forces: the claustrophobic medical and student living quarters are decked out in gunmetal grey-green with red lighting, in a brutalist, Corbusian-inflected cod-international style. The building, seen from outside, looms over and almost curls around the people approaching it like a grasping fist. The bedroom windows are fitted with anti-suicide catches that must be broken open to admit any fresh air.
Meanwhile, a strange epidemic of blotchy-skinned, mysteriously bleeding individuals begins spreading across Paris. When Margot identifies what appears to be a syndrome, she is quickly shot down by her supervisor, a typically razor-sharp Karin Viard, but worse follows when she starts noticing the symptoms in herself. The condition is haematidrosis, a real and vanishingly rare medical phenomenon in which extreme psychological stress causes a person to sweat blood. Here it is epidemic, its spread a direct measure of how much stress modern society generates. The condition begins with bleeding from the pores, then progresses through a variety of increasingly alarming manifestations. Keloids form across the body, which Margot attempts to burn off with Phenol 104, leaving her skin riddled with holes that will disturb anyone with trypophobia.
As Margot investigates the illness taking her over, she must simultaneously conceal her symptoms in order to climb the junior doctors’ league table. Her long-sleeved turtleneck sweaters do the job as (conveniently for the plot) her symptoms confine themselves to her torso, leaving her hands and face clear. There is a suggestion the condition can be treated with beta blockers, a pointed commentary on the medicalisation of psychological stress, the idea that symptoms can be pharmacologically managed rather than their root cause addressed.
Margot befriends, and variously romances, two fellow students: a supportive man in the neighbouring room (Sami Outalbali), and a hard-headed, ultra-competitive rival for the top junior doctor position (Kim Higelin). But will personal relationships protect her from the biological ravages of the system? Taquin anchors all of it beautifully, gamely holding the film’s wilder registers together through sheer force of performance.
What makes all this more interesting than simple contagion is that haematidrosis reads as the body’s own radical response to an environment that has become genuinely incompatible with human life. Less affliction than adaptation. As Margot investigates the illness taking her over, she grows increasingly manic, throwing herself into her work. The film is careful not to read this as healthy productivity: it is a symptom of derangement, a loss of control. The phrase “sweating blood,” meaning to give something everything you have, is here literalised. Margot is in serious danger of progressing from hitting her targets to hitting her patients. There’s something specifically generational about all of this, young people confronted with systems that demand they sand off everything inconvenient to the market and get on with it regardless.
This mutant reaction to modernity invites inevitable Cronenberg comparisons, both versions of Crimes of the Future in particular. The film’s vision of a new, post-human biology emerging from the toxic environment of late-stage capitalism brings to mind Videodrome’s “long live the new flesh,” though where Cronenberg’s post-humanism carries a certain dark ambivalence, Le Corroller’s is more straightforwardly a social apocalypse.
It also calls to mind Ducournau’s Alpha, another film in which a malaise spreading through society is rendered in body horror terms as commentary on corrosive social forces; and the body-melt subgenre more broadly: films like Body Melt and Street Trash, about people literally dissolving under pressure.
Species shares those films wackier, high-energy, ultra-stylised quality, tapping into the French comic-genre tradition, from early Besson through the nineties hip action cycle of Dobermann and its ilk, than to any of those grimmer antecedents. Fish-eye lenses and sharp camera angles abound, and a Snorricam keeps Taquin’s face pinned to the frame while she runs through the hospital, the world bouncing chaotically behind her. The violence, when it comes, is hard but also gleefully slapstick, and Le Corroller handles the shift between dread and dark comedy with considerable confidence. The insistent club soundtrack (by “ROB”) drives all of it forward with pace and energy, though it’s likely to test the patience of some.
The tonal shifts ask a lot of the audience too: we go from the torment of a young woman’s mind into some scenes of outright silliness. A scene in which a similarly-diseased patient removes a binder and is suddenly revealed to be enormously pregnant, her distended belly pulsing and rippling from within, plays in the register of any number of schlocky pregnancy horrors, Bad Blood among them. There is even a vagina-cam looking outward from her cervix as she prepares to give birth to something that may or may not be human. But the film’s wild lurches and in-your-face messaging always feel like the productive, playful excesses of a filmmaker swinging for the fences rather than failures of control.
Species is exhilarating, funny and genuinely disturbing by turns, packed with memorable imagery and with something real to say about what happens when the world of work demands more of people than people were built to give. Workers can abandon their own humanity – in some cases, quite literally and gloopily.
As the films builds to its icky, brawling climax, there’s no denying: sometimes, capitalism gets under your skin.
Species (Sanguine) is playing in the Midnight strand of the Cannes Film Festival, before an October theatrical release in selected territories and eventually digital via Paramount+.