It's the cannibal movie that caused people to faint at a film festival.
TRAILER
This is what people talk about when they talk about Raw, the extraordinary body-horror parable from French director Julia Ducournau. The incident, which happened at last year's Toronto International Film Festival, might cause folks to view this as some sort of cinematic dare, a splatter shocker designed to test the limits of the scary-movie marine corps. Consider this a disclaimer, and a reclamation: The story of a young woman (Garance Marillier) who develops a taste for certain off-the-menu delicacies is indeed intense. It's also after much bigger game than merely thrilling folks who've studied Fangoria photo spreads with Talmudic-scholar fervor. Smelling salts are not required, but the ability to recognize a near-perfect movie when you see it most certainly is. If Get Out reminds folks that you can smuggle intelligent social commentary and timely conversation-starters in to theaters via explosive genre packages, then Ducournau's feature debut doubles down on the notion. In terms of the female-body politic, it's an art-horror dirty bomb.
Flesh of any kind is initially carne non grata for Marillier's
Justine, a college student who comes from a long line of militant
vegetarians; Mom freaks out when a morsel of beef makes its way into
some mashed potatoes. But at the veterinary school where she's enrolling
as a freshman – and where her older sister, Alexia (Ella Rumpf), is a
long-established alpha – the young woman discovers that no one cares
about her culinary ideology. After a hazing ritual involving newbies
being covered in animal blood (paging Carrie White), Justine is forced
to eat a duck kidney. Instant nausea leads to a gnarly rash; soon, she's
going in to town and stress-gnoshing on kabobs with her gay roommate
Adrien (Rabah Nait Oufella) at a Gas 'n' Sip. Then an accident causes
her sister to lose a digit. While waiting for the paramedics, Justine
impulsively explores the notion of literal finger food. And now the
craving starts.
To say
that things begin to take on an even stronger metaphorical resonance
once our heroine indulges in her newfound gourmet obsession would be
grossly understating the point; the fact that this coincides with
Justine's sexual awakening, made implicit via solo dress-up grinding in
front of a mirror then explicit by her ecstatically biting her own arm
during sex, isn't coincidental. College is when you try on numerous
identities and experiment with new ideas before your in-flux personality
calcifies into an adult-shaped mold – so, the film suggests
tongue-in-chomped-cheek, why wouldn't anthropophagy be on the docket as well? (Nor is she potentially the only cannibal on campus.)
Ducournau has referred
to her movie as a coming-of-age story, and you can see this waifish
character go from awkwardly tottering in high heels (a shot that spells
out the movie's ideas on femininity drag; don't even ask about the
Brazilian waxing sequence) to aggressively asserting herself over 99
blood-flecked minutes. Girl, you'll be a man-eating woman soon, and
though references to bulimia and trichophagia suggest control issues run
psychologically amuck, Justine also discovers a sense of empowerment in
this taboo line-crossing. She begins to take ownership of her body by
consuming others'.
None of which should suggest that Raw is
simply a grad-school term paper smothered in gore. Ducournau knows how
to make the vocabulary of horror filmmaking either finesse or bludgeon
with a frightening degree of facility. Few movies have used pacing and
composition to such an effective degree in the name of XX-centric dread
(the film owes as much to Roman Polanski's Repulsion as it does
to the cinema of repulsion), or understood how to employ color so
effectively – from a seven-minutes-in-heaven encounter involving blue
and yellow paint to the crimson drop on a white lab coat that signals a
Type-O deluge. There's a hallucinogenic quality to the deadpan scenes of
Justine coming to grips with this personal channeling of passion and
perversity, and a shocking aspect to the carnage that feels invasive in a
way most shock artists can't conjure. You never get the sense that
you're not watching a master at work, regardless of how scant
Ducournau's filmography is. She is the real thing.
You could say
the same for her partner-in-crime Marillier, who lets viewers join her
heroine's journey of carnal knowledge through carnivorous free-fall. A
dead ringer for the fictional future offspring of Paul Dano and Saoirse
Ronan, the 19-year-old actor can radiate innocence, depravity or
bewilderment in a glance, and toggle between humiliated and
animalistically hungry on a dime. It takes a certain type of performer
to pull off the abandonment of embracing one's dark side and barking
like a dog when her sister forces her into a drunken canine act at a
party, and Marillier instinctively knows where the do-not-cross line is –
then fearlessly hops over it. Ducournau is the one who gives this
cunning exploration of crossing the no-man's-land between girlhood and
womanhood its transgressive bite; her young star is the one who gives it
a recognizable humanity amidst the amuse-bouche arterial spurt.
They both allow the film to get under your skin in more ways than one.
Your semiotic meal is served. Your appetite for smart, savvy,
sick-as-fuck horror will be sated.
