New French Extremity is being supplied with new blood as emerging talent Marion Le Corroller showcases her first feature film, the body horror Species. Coming on the heels of Julia Ducournau (Titane) and Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, Le Corroller joins the female gang of extremists with a statement to make.
Species, co-written by the director and Thomas Pujol, opens with a bizarre prologue set in a burger joint. When an annoying TikToker continues to demand a burger that is no longer on the menu, the cashier taking his order, with a cultish appearance, starts getting facial tics. As the entitled customer escalates his demands and the cashier’s supervisor counts down the seconds he has to serve the customer into his earpiece, the spat reaches a boiling point as the server jumps the counter and beats the customer into a bloody pulp.
Le Corroller then cuts to young medical student Margot (Mara Taquin), who is arriving at a hospital to get her first hands-on experience in the ER. Under the supervision of a strict and demanding doctor, Professor Virgile (Karen Viard), Margot learns she is supposed to treat 25 patients each day. Her youthful idealism soon hits the disillusionment of practice, as it seems almost impossible to hit the number while maintaining sane decision-making under pressure and retaining some humane contact with patients.
Margot first seems unable to find her footing in what feels like a hospital version of a car factory production line. She is a bit awkward when socializing with her colleagues but manages to make friends with a fellow student next door, Louis (Sami Outalbali). While being last on Professor Virgile’s performance ladder and on the verge of being kicked out for low performance, a strange thing happens.
As she treats a young pregnant stock trader, Lili (Sonia Faïdi), suffering from insomnia and an odd rash on her back, she finds the symptoms odd. Lili vanishes from the hospital when Margot returns to her. Margot herself, however, starts showing strange symptoms. First, it starts with ugly rashes and scabs on her body and then continues with Margot literally sweating blood. She confides in Louis, who thinks it might be hematidrosis caused by stress.
Despite the gory prelude at Bloody Burger, Le Corroller opens her debut as a rite of passage within a coming-of-age story. The set-up remains pretty minimalistic, with the protagonist Margot, her neighbor Louis and another doctor-in-apprenticeship and their peer, Pauline (Kim Higelin), a privileged kid from a doctor family at the top of Professor Virgile’s leaderboard. While they share a fluid sexual chemistry between them, all they have in common besides wanting to become doctors is the huge weight of stress and pressure caused by their studies and medical practice.
Margot continues to meet more young people afflicted with the strange ailment causing horrid rashes, skin lacerations and severe bleeding. The young doctors start finding similar patterns, gradually uncovering a sort of plague inflicting the young generation. Moreover, her own symptoms grow worse and worse each day, and she soon learns that the disease is a ticking time bomb. While treating patients during the day, she is on the brink of uncovering a strange generational phenomenon, as if exposing a conspiracy.
Species is The Substance for Gen Z, a social satire wrapped in a body-horror thriller about an overworked and underslept generation taunted to push through, toughen it up and not self-destruct. Le Corroller avoids overt moralizing, as the message is wedged finely between the body-horror shenanigans and the thrill(er) of finding out about the mysterious ailment striking young adults and taking its bloody toll.
While Species is a rather minimalist endeavor, Le Corroller gets on the genre side of social satire in the great tradition of George A. Romero’s … of the Dead series. She even seems to incorporate a chapeau moment to Romero when, as the boiling point is reached in the young generation, they turn feral in a zombie-like mode. In this regard, Species is a mix between young and old generations of genre cinema, basically a crossover of The Substance and Dawn of the Dead.
However, Species, being minimalist in space and cast, overcompensates for this in style. The DoP Guillaume Schiffman, of Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist, heavily articulates the claustrophobic feeling to emphasize the pressure-cooker situation with close shots, while also enjoying occasional odd angles with intriguing compositions, especially from above in Margot’s tiny room.
Art direction under the leadership of Anne-Sophie Delseries (Yves) emphasizes the pastel colors in the corridors with an overstylized The Substance flair. The team even hired special make-up effects designer Pierre-Olivier Persin, who won an Oscar for The Substance, and included a The Substance nod with a gory cracked-back callback. Species actually is a tiny The Substance reunion. In addition to Persin, other The Substance transplants on the Species team are editor Jérôme Eltabet and sound designers Valérie Deloof and Victor Fleurant, signaling a belonging to the French fare of socially engaged body horror.
Species is a nice fit for a Midnight Cinema slot. With fast pacing, chic overstylization and hyperbole, Le Corroller delivers the generational statement loud and clear and with a punch, without sliding into overt moralization, while having fun alongside it. One of the most memorable scenes is when Margot goes into god mode and executes a complicated surgery with her bare hands in a rib cage, to the disbelief of Professor Virgile. Species thus enters the ranks of the new generation of French Extremity: New Femme Extremity.
The film screened at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival.