Raw (2017)
IMDB Rating 7.5/10 (as on 26.04.2017)
R | 1h 39min | Drama, Horror
When a young vegetarian undergoes a carnivorous hazing
ritual at vet school, an unbidden taste for meat begins to grow in her.
Director: Julia Ducournau
Writers: Julia Ducournau (dialogue), Julia Ducournau
(screenplay)
Stars: Garance Marillier, Ella Rumpf, Rabah Nait Oufella
Movie rating 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
A cannibal movie that will make you relish every
sticky, illicit bite
Rebecca Hawkes
Raw, the debut feature film of
French director Julia Ducournau, is both a cannibal horror movie and a
coming-of-age movie, one in which the sexual awakening of its young protagonist
Justine (Garance Marillier) sits alongside the birth of a more destructive, if
similarly all-consuming kind of hunger.
Justine’s career path may have
been motivated by a desire to help animals: early on, she says, with
evangelical seriousness, that she sees no difference between “a raped woman”
and a “raped monkey”. But the practical callousness of her fellow students, and
the way in which animal flesh is casually reduced to meat, belies the humanity
of their chosen profession. You can’t become a vet, the film suggests, without
getting your hands bloody and, as Justine discovers during a grim hazing
ritual, the rest of you too.
Crucially, though, the film
never suggests that Justine’s flesh-eating antics are a direct result of her
burgeoning sexuality. Nor does it present her cannibalism as a clumsy metaphor
for her other “carnal” desires. Instead, its power – its shuddering, relentless
intensity – lies in the way it makes you vicariously feel both her dual
hungers, and surreptitiously relish every sticky, illicit bite.
Bodies, in this film, are never
far away: there’s always just a little too much skin on screen. But, alongside
the slow eroticism, Ducournau also shows a keen sense of just how warped our
relationships with our own physical selves have become.
Tellingly, Justine’s first
foray into cannibalism comes after a graphic bikini-waxing scene that’ll make
you wince. Biting into another human being is a big no no, yet this sort of
eye-watering beauty ritual is ostensibly “normal”. Is it any wonder, the film
cleverly implies, that Justine – and we,
her captive audience – becomes a little confused.
Read full review at Telegraph
Give a
Student Some Offal, and You’ll Regret It in ‘Raw’
JEANNETTE CATSOULISm
“Raw,” Julia Ducournau’s jangly
opera of sexual and dietary awakening, is an exceptionally classy-looking movie
about deeply horrifying behavior. Infusing each scene with a cold, unwelcoming
beauty, the Belgian cinematographer Ruben Impens makes his camera complicit in
the trashy goings-on. Sneaking beneath bedsheets and sliding over young flesh,
his lens takes us places we may not want to go.
That repulsion is soon replaced
by a craving that will drive Justine closer to her sister and fellow student
(Ella Rumpf, terrific) and further from her classmates. Her transformation
suffuses the film with animalistic energy — like a cat, she chews on her hair,
then vomits it up — and her isolation produces a melancholy that permeates even
her erotic encounters, where the connection between sex and sustenance is
presented with nerve-twanging literalness.
Like Jorge Michel Grau’s
social-decay fable, “We Are What We Are,” “Raw” is an astonishingly bold debut
feature that embeds cannibalism in a framework of environmental chaos and
familial dysfunction. There’s no love here, and no comfort; yet the movie’s
genius is to make us feel for Justine. Ultimately, she’s just a scared teenager
with the world’s worst eating disorder.
Read full review at New yorktimes
Many horror movies are content to make an audience jump, and little else. The best accomplish something more than that.
“Raw,”
from French writer-director Julia Ducournau, is a terrific horror film, one
that sets a serious premise — cannibalism as a metaphor for sexual desire — and
follows it, through madness and its tragic consequences, to a grim, strange
conclusion. Few films are both genuinely erotic and off-putting enough to
inspire the occasional walkout. “Raw” succeeds at both.
Ducournau’s
masterstroke is to conflate Justine’s incipient cannibalism with more benign
growing pains. There are scenes that one will recognize from many college
movies: Justine walking in on her roommate (Rabah Nait Oufella) having sex, or
Alexia schooling her sister — with brutal honesty — on how to make herself more
attractive. But when Justine starts hooking up with someone, and she’s overcome
by the need to do more than nibble, Marillier’s reaction to her desire looks
like a mix of curiosity and fear.
“Raw” is a constant negotiation of that
contradictory mix. Justine’s cannibalism, the film argues, is a craving like
any other, albeit a more exaggerated version of one, not to mention one that
comes with its own unique dilemma. How can Justine want to devour the very
people to whom she feels an emotional connection? In the tradition of films
from “Frankenstein” onward, “Raw” recognizes the monster as a tragic figure.
Coupled
with the veterinary school setting, the sex-crazed students lend the film a
heightened sense of corporeal realism. There is frequent nudity, with sweaty
bodies glistening seemingly at every turn, and the characters all handle
animals with ease. (One scene features Alexia with her entire arm inside a live
cow.) At first, this milieu seems like just another riff on the theme of
collegiate experimentation. But the perspective of “Raw” — seen through
Justine’s eyes, in which her classmates are also her dinner menu — imbues every
conversation, every touch, with an acute unease. Ducournau never opts for the
predictable payoff or Hannibal Lecteresque pun: “You’re so cute I could eat you
up.”
Instead,
“Raw” focuses on Marillier’s carefully modulated performance, underscored by
Ducournau’s color palette — veering from unflattering yellow interior light to
the sumptuous reds of a party scene — that acts as a barometer for Justine’s
insatiable hunger. The third act shows us a deepening of Justine’s yearning,
with cannibalism becoming a metaphor for something more than sexual desire.
“Raw”
marks Ducournau’s feature debut. Like Lucky McKee’s criminally underrated 2002
horror debut “May,” it could signal the arrival of a major talent. “Raw” never
admonishes its antiheroine or recoils in judgment from what she wants. Its
command of tone is constant, even in the film’s darkly droll final moments,
during which you may not know whether to laugh or gag
Read full review at washington post
Impressive directorial debut by Julia Ducournau
Jordan Mintzer
Everyone but vegetarians will
feast their eyes on Raw (Grave), a cleverly written, impressively made and
incredibly gory tale of one young woman's awakening to the pleasures of the
flesh — in all senses of the term. Marking the feature debut of French director
Julia Ducournau, who leads a terrific young cast into a maelstrom of blood,
guts and unfettered sexual awakening, this Cannes Critics' Week selection
should become a hot potato (or is that a meatball?) at the market while
propelling its talented creator into the spotlight.
Picture Cannibal Holocaust as
an emotionally driven coming-of-age movie set within a Gallic veterinarian
college, and you'll get an idea of what Ducournau (who also wrote the script)
has come up with here. But while such concepts are often easier to imagine than
to make, the assured storytelling and direction, including some of the goriest
makeup effects this side of Rob Zombie, turn Raw into the kind of crossover
film that takes the horror genre into another domain.
Following in the footsteps of
her parents (Joanna Preiss, Laurent Lucas) and older sister, Alexia (Ella
Rumpf), the shy, bright-eyed Justine (Garance Marillier) shows up for her first
year of vet school at a place that looks more like a set piece for The Hunger
Games than an actual medical institution. Indeed, before she can even unpack
her bags and get acquainted with her thuggish gay roommate (Rabah Nait
Oufella), Justine is forced into a vicious hazing process by the older
students, who ridicule and insult the freshmen while forcing them to party
hearty on the first night.
In the middle of the drunken
bacchanal, Justine reunites with Alexia, a fiery brunette who only half helps
her younger sister to learn the ropes — which include getting bathed in animal
blood and eating raw liver upon request (perhaps Leonardo DiCaprio should
enroll there). The problem is that, like the rest of her family, Justine is a
devout vegetarian, so making it out of freshman hell will mean she has to start
doing the impossible — or rather the inedible — and become a carnivore herself.
The catch, of course, is that
Justine likes it. In fact, she likes it so much that her appetite for uncooked
meat begins to take hold of the young woman — who, we eventually learn, is also
a virgin — in some highly unsavory ways, driving her to commit acts of
increasing savagery that will cause the film's ketchup-count to reach
exponential numbers.
There are more surprises to be
found in Ducournau's well-paced and perceptive screenplay, which pays homage to
classics like Carrie and Night of the Living Dead as it transforms Justine's
unquenched sexual urges into an appetite for flesh, whether animal or human.
But the real interest of Raw is how the director handles the sticky
relationship between Justine and her elder sis — a relationship complicated by
a major plot twist in the second act that gives new meaning to the name Scissor
Sisters.
t's rare to see such confidence
in a first feature, yet Ducournau seems to know where she's going at all times,
keeping the narrative lean and mean while utilizing an array of stylistic
techniques — slow-motion, sequence shots and tons of onscreen prosthetics —
that never let up until the witty, and inevitably grisly, final scene. Previous
foreign movies, including Claire Denis' Trouble Every Day and Jorge Michel
Grau's We Are What We Are, have attempted similar feats by combining B-grade
genre tropes like cannibalism with more upscale filmmaking, though Raw both
does that and adds a welcome layer of Hollywood-style polish straight out of
Craven or Carpenter.
Performances from relative
newcomers Marillier and Rumpf are captivating and imposingly physical,
especially during what may be the most painful sequence of feminine hygiene
education ever shot, as well as a sisterly catfight of a rare and disturbing
brutality. Tech credits are top-notch throughout a sharply edited 98 minutes,
with much kudos due to French FX maestro Olivier Afonso (Inside), who makes all
the gore look so realistic you can practically taste it.
Movie rating 🌟🌟🌟🌟☆
I didn't faint in classy cannibal horror – but I didn't
much fancy lunch
Peter Bradshaw
Julia Ducournau is a
33-year-old first-time feature director who makes her worryingly brilliant
debut with this saturnalia of arthouse horror. At the Toronto film festival, it
had audiences dry-heaving and indeed wet-heaving in the aisles and the cinema
lavatories. This is the sort of film which pundits are often keen to label
“black comedy” as a way of re-establishing their own sang-froid. In the same
tongue-in-cheek spirit, it has been called coming-of-age drama. There is a
grain of truth in both of these labels. It is a film about cannibalism, and has
clearly been influenced by Jorge Michel Grau’s We Are What We Are, John
Fawcett’s Ginger Snaps, and perhaps especially Marina de Van’s body shocker In
My Skin – which incidentally featured a young Laurent Lucas, a veteran of
extreme French cinema who also turns up here.
Read moreWhile it isn’t exactly
true to say that cannibalism is just a metaphor for something else, eating
human flesh is appropriate for a drama about sexuality, identity, body image
and conformity. It’s a film in which the lead character is briefly aware of
becoming more attractive by losing weight – not so long after she had
participated in a jokey student conversation about monkeys being sexually
assaulted and then getting anorexia and having to see a therapist. And in a
society where eating is somehow criminalised, cannibalism is an appropriate
fantasy.
What is very impressive about
Raw is that absolutely everything about it is disquieting, not just the obvious
moments of revulsion: there is no let up in the ambient background buzz of
fear. The scenes showing the frat-type “hazing” are extraordinary and very
convincing – as if studying to be a vet is like joining the Foreign Legion.
Students are brutally woken in the middle of the night: humiliated, bullied,
assured that not to submit would be to wimp out and let everyone down. Going to
university was an experience which Justine had probably thought would be a
once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to find herself, to express herself, to find her
individuality and personality. Instead, college and adulthood seems more like a
fascistic world of submission and staying in line – or even like some
post-apocalyptic society in which these freaky cult rituals have grown up as
part of survival.
Just as in Abel Ferrara’s
vampire horror The Addiction, college is an arena of fear: a sense that your
entire sense of self is dissolving as you have to find your way in a new adult
world of previously unsuspected menace, unsure if what people are making you do
is normal or an outrage. And vet school – so apparently innocuous – is a place
where you have to get used to the horror of animal flesh. To swallow it, in
fact. Cannibalism becomes Justine’s own initiation into adulthood. The title is
a pretty accurate description of how I was feeling by the end.
Read full review at The Guardian
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