Jim Queen imagines a virus that straightens gay men, then plays it for farce

A plague is loose in gay Paris, and its symptom is heterosexuality. That is the engine of Jim Queen, a raucous French animated comedy in which a fictional virus called Heterosis sweeps the city’s clubs and saunas, quietly turning gay men straight. The premise is a provocation dressed as a cartoon, and the film knows exactly how much discomfort it is mining. It opens loud, stays loud, and treats bad taste as a working method. At the centre stands Jim Parfait, a six-packed influencer and self-styled king of the so-called Gym Queens, worshipped for his abs and his feed. When the infection reaches him, his followers evaporate and his status collapses, and the former Pride royal is left with a single ally: Lucien, a freshly out newcomer with more heart than muscle. Together they set off to find a cure before the community that once idolised Jim disappears entirely.

Jim Queen is the feature debut of Nicolas Athané and Marco Nguyen, two animators who spent years in the trenches of French adult animation before stepping up to direct. Produced by the Paris studio Bobbypills with Belgian partners, the film carries the house style of that world: elastic, hand-drawn character work, acid-bright colour, and a willingness to push an image well past good taste. It premiered in the Midnight Screenings section at Cannes, the slot reserved for titles too rowdy for the main competition, and the pairing marks a graduation for two names long better known inside the industry than outside it. Visually, the film belongs to a lineage of transgressive European animation that treats the medium as a licence rather than a limit. Bodies stretch and bulge, backgrounds throb with neon, and the camera roams from packed dancefloors to cramped apartments with a music-video restlessness. This is animation made for adults, closer in spirit to late-night sketch comedy than to anything family-friendly, and it wears that identity without apology. The satire runs in both directions. By inverting the logic of contagion, Athané and Nguyen turn a familiar cultural anxiety inside out and aim their mockery at gym culture, influencer vanity, and the appearance-first hierarchies that can form inside queer spaces themselves. The quest for a cure, a compound the film christens Chloroqueer, becomes a vehicle for gags about desire, shame, and the codes that govern a scene. It is crude, and it is also pointed. That inversion is what gives the film its charge. A virus that claims to cure homosexuality is not a neutral invention; it rhymes uncomfortably with the real rhetoric of conversion therapy and with the epidemic memory that still shadows queer life. Rather than lecture, Jim Queen lets the absurdity do the arguing, staging a world where straightness is the contagion and solidarity is the only treatment on offer. The joke, repeated and escalated, hardens into an argument about who a community chooses to protect when fear arrives. The French voice cast leans on comic timing. Alex Ramirès plays Jim as a preening idol in freefall, Jérémy Gillet gives Lucien an earnest sweetness, and comedian Shirley Souagnon and musician Philippe Katerine turn up in supporting roles, the latter as a talking prostate that is exactly as absurd as it sounds. Adult-film performer François Sagat lends his voice too, a casting wink the film does not bother to hide. For all its nerve, Jim Queen does not fully reckon with the history its premise borrows from. A disease that erases a community is not neutral comic material, and the decision to play epidemic panic for laughs will not land for every viewer, whatever the film’s affection for its characters. Its resolution is warmer and more wholesome than its setup promises, and that softness blunts some of the provocation. Nor does the picture answer the commercial question hanging over it: an explicit, hand-drawn queer farce is a hard sell beyond festivals and a handful of sympathetic territories. Early audiences have been kind. Reviewers out of Cannes called it super fun and extremely absurd, praising a bouncing electro score and a refusal to collapse into tragedy, and the film went on to play Annecy, Karlovy Vary, and the genre festival Fantasia. The strong early scores logged by the small pool of festival voters who have seen it are a promising, if unproven, signal for a title still hunting a wider release. The reception suggests a cult life ahead, the kind of midnight title that travels on word of mouth rather than marketing spend. Jim Queen opened in French cinemas on 17 June 2026 through distributor The Jokers Films, with a Belgian release following days later, and reaches Spanish screens on 4 September 2026 after a festival stop in Mallorca. No wide English-language theatrical release has been confirmed; for now, English-speaking audiences will most likely meet Jim and Lucien on the festival circuit, where the film continues to screen.

Cast

Photos: The Movie Database (TMDB)

Tags: animation, Alex Ramirès, Jérémy Gillet, Jim Queen, Marco Nguyen, Nicolas Athané