Written and Directed by Julia Ducournau
Starring Garance Marillier, Ella Rumpy and Laurent Lucas
France/Belgium
Previously a vegetarian, a teenage prodigy discovers an insatiable desire for raw meat, eventually including human flesh, as she makes her way through initiation week as a new student at veterinary school.
RAW has been on my list of movies to watch for a while, and I figured now’s as good a time as any since writer/director Julia Ducournau’s new flick, TITANE, just came out. Why not see both in one night? Make it a body horror double feature!
Turns out, everyone’s right: this movie’s good. It ends up playing as a sort of coming of age story, with the raw meat/cannibalism thing standing in for any number of scary changes that might happen to you as you go through puberty or move away from home for the first time or enter into your first sexual relationship, or whatever the case may be.
Of course, you might say, yes, but there’s nothing wrong with any of those things, but eating raw meat is harmful to yourself and eating people is frowned upon. And to that, I say, you’re right! But sometimes you can make the best points by super exaggerating, especially in fiction. And sometimes the way something feels is more important than the reality of the situation. Sometimes, a perfectly normal thing that you’re going through might cause you to feel shame or feel like you’re out of control or like you’re being drawn to something dangerous, even if you shouldn’t feel that way. But when you’re a teenager you don’t really have a lot of first hand experience with things, other than what others have told you you’re “supposed” to feel, and if you’re not feeling that, then what’s wrong with you? Probably nothing. Probably…
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