“There is a refreshing teen spirit pumping through the veins of the film.”

Sanguine is a French adjective with a double meaning: it can either refer to the blood (“une orange sanguine” is a blood orange, for instance), or to someone who is hotheaded. As the first feature film by Marion Le Corroller is among the Midnight Screenings at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, it will be no surprise to anyone that she makes good use of both senses of the word in the narrative and aesthetics of this movie. The director takes the same premise as with her short film No More God in Doctor – in which a young ER intern starts sweating blood from her skin, all over her body, uncontrollably and without being physically injured. The cause is the extreme stress she is experiencing at work, in a hyperbolic take on a real medical condition called hematidrosis. In Sanguine, it starts to happen to Margot (Mara Taquin), as well as to several young patients in the hospital emergency department where she just started her internship. Higher irritability with sudden fits of rage (one of which is depicted in all its brutality in the cold open of the film) accompanies this physical symptom, making every infected person truly ‘sanguine’, both internally and externally.

As its story progresses, Sanguine fully commits to the body horror genre (which in France is becoming more and more a matriarchal subculture, something to be quite happy about), to the point where it becomes a kind of Frankenstein Monster. Having started in the vicinity of Julia Ducournau’s Raw – the blood, the flesh wounds, the med school, the epidemic lurking – it eventually and unapologetically shifts to visions of bodies ripped from the inside out, as in the full gory glory of Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance. For good measure, Le Corroller throws in a bit (or rather, human bits and pieces) of the series The Pitt, with emergency open surgeries shot with an outrageous level of graphic medical imagery, permitted by the combination of the film’s genre and its main character’s growing frenzy. It is in part through this frenzy that, like the Frankenstein Monster, Sanguine manages to exist on its own terms rather than to be crushed by all its references. There is a refreshing teen spirit pumping through the veins of the film, which manifests in several ways – the energy (and its excess, the savagery) as well as the candor, a quality present at all levels of Sanguine.

Le Corroller stays true to an honest and straightforward line of conduct, that keeps the film from the pitfalls of being vain in its use of cinematographic references, or dismissive towards her characters – in this respect, her movie is the opposite of The Substance, as it does not act like physically torturing your protagonists automatically goes hand in hand with belittling them, but instead draws a clear line between the two. The film never feels arrogant or entitled, Le Corroller’s attitude resembling that of a debutante still humbly filled with wonder at the might of cinema and the chance to use it herself. Alongside all the gory or shocking moments, a frantic nightclub sequence also feels like the director believes she is the first one to ever direct such a scene, and therefore puts all her energy into it, which is seldom a bad way to proceed.

Finally, the direct connection between Sanguine and the youth is also channeled through the film’s allegory. While it might deserve a deeper delve, the message as it stands is already quite strong: that of the younger generation being pressured and exploited by the self-appointed ‘adults’ who cling to their positions of power, and feeling pushed to the edge by a performance and profitability obsessed society. This constant mental strain has clear physical effects, and the body horror genre is a perfect medium to express them, and the rage they cause in return, in an equally violent manner.