Movie Review: Raw

Horror films don’t have to be good to earn notoriety. They just have to be gross.

Debut feature filmmaker Julia Ducournau can breathe a sigh of relief knowing her movie, Raw, is both good and gross, meaning it can live up to its reputation as The Flick That Keeps Making People Pass Out or Vomit and still stand up to actual artistic scrutiny.

Then again, anyone brazen enough to shoot a coming-of-age cannibal drama that includes a sequence where a Brazilian wax goes spectacularly wrong (for the waxer, in a novel twist) probably doesn’t give a fig what anyone else thinks. Raw is a feat of ‘F you-ousness’.

Ducournau tells a classic tale here, just in a fresh, squirm-inducing way. Excellent newcomer Garance Marillier plays Justine, a quiet, uncannily intelligent young woman whose induction to a French veterinary college plays havoc with her nervous system, and later, her digestion.

A devoted vegetarian and animal lover, Justine is bullied into scoffing down a rabbit kidney during the school’s vicious hazing ceremony. Her older sister, Alexia (Ella Rumpf), has little sympathy for Justine’s sacrifice, even after it results in an all-over rash straight from David Cronenberg’s medical manual. That itch builds to a frenzied craving for more meat, preferably, human. Life comes at you fast when you’re a teenager. Cannibalism, even faster.

Raw easily fits within France’s 21st century spate of gut-churning horror flicks; it’s perhaps even the most daring addition to the nation’s exceedingly grotesque game of ‘gross-out chicken’, following High Tension, Inside and Martyrs. Undeniably, it’s for viewers with strong stomachs. But Raw is much more than its occasional blood-splattering set pieces.

Eating flesh, we discover, is just the half of Justine’s troubles. The other half is living in it. Even before the rash emerges, she’s clearly uncomfortable in her own skin. With her wiry, diminutive frame, Justine is accused of being anorexic and using her vegetarianism to disguise an eating disorder. “Beauty is pain,” Alexia tells Justine before administering a Brazilian wax in extreme close-up. Eventually, Justine’s cannibalism coincides with an increasing cannibalisation of Alexia’s extroverted, promiscuous personality. With a woman behind the camera, Raw does what other projects with more exploitative male directors can’t: examine feminine bonding, imitation and feminism, warts (and boils) and all.

Ducournau’s film (photographed by cinematographer Ruben Impens) is not as frantic as those of her frantic contemporaries in the New French Extremity movement, such as Xavier Gens or Pascal Laugier. Hers is more dreamlike, like that of a less-baroque Brian De Palma (whose bloody Carrie must have been an influence) or Stanley Kubrick (who gets an explicit shout-out during a demonic red light party, where we slowly pan into a deranged-looking Justine as she stares down the camera's barrel, not unlike Alex in A Clockwork Orange; composer Jim Williams even mimics the electric organ score). And yet, Raw is exceedingly unique and uncommon.

And most unlike those other ‘extreme’ pictures, it’s not the chomping down on human viscera in Raw that’ll disturb viewers most. It’ll be the insight into the mistreatment and corruption of youthful innocence that comes with that first taste of independence; it’ll be the ‘shaming’ video of our heroine that’s shared; it’ll be the ritualistic abuse of freshers in a strange environment.

After this and The Tribe, the chilling Ukrainian drama about a boarding school for the deaf, there's officially nothing scarier in cinema than the European school system.

4/5

In cinemas April 20. Rated R18+ for high impact blood and gore.

Photo: Monster Pictures