Format: DVD from Wilmington Public Library through interlibrary loan on gigantic television.
Julia Ducournau is really early in her directorial career in terms of the number of films she has made. I think, for me, she’s going to be a director whose work I seek out, but only watch once. That’s definitely the case for Titane, which I think is a masterpiece. It’s equally true of Raw. (Grave in the French, which translates to “serious.” It would be Brute if we wanted the French to be the same as the English.) This is an important film and one I’m happy to have finally seen, but I’m not going to watch it again any time soon.
Let’s get the main points of this out in the open before we dive in: Raw is a film about cannibalism. This is not a zombie film, nor a film that pretends to be an ethnography and is actually just poorly-disguised racism. No, this is about people living in the modern world, in Western society, with inexplicable, terrible, monstrous cravings. And, importantly, it’s not clear that this is what the film is about until we’re a good distance in and already invested in the story, one of the realities that makes this such a masterful piece of cinema.
Justine (Garance Mirillier) is a lifelong vegetarian on her way to veterinarian school where her sister Alexia (Ella Rumpf) is already studying. In her first night at school, she is subjected to a hazing ritual with the rest of the new students. As a part of the hazing ritual, Justine is forced to eat raw rabbit kidney. The next day, she awakens with a terrible rash.
It’s soon evident that there is a reason that her parents kept her away from meat. Justine begins craving meat, trying to steal hamburger patties from the school cafeteria and eventually using her gay roommate (although possible much closer to bisexual roommate) Adrien (Rabah Naït Oufella) to go with her to a local gas station to find meat to eat. This progresses into Justine eating raw chicken. In what seems like an unrelated event, Alexia attempts to give Justine a bikini wax. When there is a problem and Alexia attempts to cut the wax off with scissors, Justine kicks her away and Alexia slices off a couple of knuckles on one of her fingers. When she passes out, Justine can no longer resist, and snacks on the finger.
From here, Justine’s journey into her desire for human flesh becomes unstoppable, and it’s something her sister clearly shares—Alexia causes a car accident and begins feeding on the one of the passengers, essentially to teach Justine how she should now live. Justine, in addition to craving human flesh, also becomes more and more aroused in general, specifically by Adrien, and during sex, rather than biting her Adrien, she instead bites herself hard enough to draw blood.
I’m not going to mince words here—there’s a lot in Raw that is very upsetting, but that’s exactly what is expected of Julia Ducournau’s films. There’s a lot of blood, and while we’re not going to get a lot of graphic scenes of flesh eating a la zombie movie, there’s a great deal of it implied throughout the film. It’s an uncomfortable viewing experience, and that’s entirely the point.
Ducournau’s films are unpleasant by design. As I said at the top, it’s not a movie I want to see a second time. It feels like watching her films is necessary, both as a horror fan and as a fan of film in general, but the experience is not one I want a second time. But I feel like they are films that need to be seen.
The genius of Raw isn’t that it’s disgusting, because it would be very easy to make it much more graphic. There’s a lot more upsetting footage in all of Romero’s Dead movies, and even most of the French extremity films. The issue is that we in the audience are forced to sit with what is happening to Justine, to see what she is experiencing and know exactly what isn’t being shown to us.
Raw is almost impossible to recommend, and yet it is a film that needs to be seen.
Why to watch Raw: French Extremity films are the cutting edge of horror.
Why not to watch: You won’t want to eat for a few days.
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