Review: Raw

While playing at film festivals last year, the hype over Raw was insane. Writer/director Julia Ducournau’s coming-of-age horror/cannibal drama purportedly caused audience members to faint, to vomit, to leave screenings in distress. These are the sort of stories that help sell a film like a type of dare. Can you sit through it? What’s your threshold? Do you need a puke bag? What are you, a fraidy cat?

Some of this had to be hyperbole. Yet while I watched Raw, I could easily imagine certain moviegoers retching in their seat and itching to leave. Raw can be such a visceral experience, and Ducournau’s most effective moments as a filmmaker involve building the dread into a crescendo and allowing that unease to linger afterwards.

I was on board with so much of Raw that I spent days asking myself how much of my opinion of a movie hinges on the way it ends. To put it another way, how much do I like a movie when I don’t like the ending?

Raw (Grave)
Director: Julia Ducournau
Rating: R
Release Date: March 10, 2017
Country: France/Belgium

Justine (Garance Marillier) is an in-coming freshman at a veterinary college. It’s the same school that her parents attended and where her older sister Alexia (Ella Rumpf) is a current student. She’s a lifelong vegetarian; at a buffet en route to the college, her mom berates a clerk for an errant meatball in Justine’s mashed potatoes. During a hazing ritual at the vet school, Justine gets her first taste of meat when she’s force fed a raw rabbit kidney. That fetid little taste awakens something sexy and dangerous in her.

Raw is set in an off-kilter place where fictional conceits co-mingle with quotidian problems. It’s the location for weird literary short fiction, allowing anything and everything to function as a metaphor or a metaphorical space. There’s the familiar trope of the teenage girl whose sexual maturation is a source of horror for herself and others. Justine is the gawky young woman trying to figure out adulthood and sexiness and desire and how to juggle all of these new cravings she has. But Ducournau avoids many of the simple 1:1 ratios of familiar genre metaphors by complicating her world and its characters. Justine’s taste for flesh is borne of freedom from home, and it becomes a point of sibling rivalry.

I mentioned Ducournau’s knack for the visceral, which is evidenced early in the film during the first hazing ritual. The freshman are forced out of bed and into some on-campus rave. Ducournau’s camera follows Justine through the flashing lights and the throb of the music. First she’s annoyed and alone, but as the scene continues to play out, she and the audience find the exhilaration of the moment, and the underlying emotional current of the scene changes. When Justine gets the shakes like a junkie in withdrawal, Ducournau closes the whole of the world into the hallucinatory nightmare of Justine in fetal position under her sheet.

In what’s sure to be the most talked about scene of the film, a silly, sisterly moment of bonding between Justine and Alexia becomes a squirmy horror set piece for the ages. As it happened, I smiled at the brilliant audacity of the execution. That “brilliant audacity” is what I liked about so much of Raw, and it’s often pulled off throughout the film with casual unexpectedness.

Justine seems to be going mad with her rush of desires, and occasionally some unexpected image would appear on screen and haunt me a bit. A horse on a treadmill or an animal carcass ready for class dissection is full of such fervid, dreamlike weight. Marillier plays fragile Justine and feral Justine so well and of a piece. Any interaction between Justine and her male roommate Adrien (Rabah Nait Oufella) gets loaded with an expectant dread. Will she? Is this hunger? Won’t she? Is this desire? Why not both? The way Justine and Alexia’s antagonisms play out over the course of Raw is fascinating as well, and hints at a longer history. There’s affection tinged with enmity between these sisters.

The fact that so much of Raw works so well may be why I come back to the closing notes of Raw and why they fell so flat for me. So much of the movie is a gut punch filmed with such great craft. Justine is built up and broken and humiliated and I was hoping for one last moment that would linger the same way as so many others. I felt like the movie traded its gut punches for a rote, tepid, expected wind down, and then punctuated it with a flimsy punchline.

And yet that wind down makes sense emotionally, and that punchline opens up this rich, sadly unexplored avenue of the story. That may speak to the promise of Ducournau as filmmaker to watch–that I think there’s something good wrapped up in a sour note, something exciting in the shadow of a disappointing coda.

I guess sometimes even great cuts of meat have a little gristle.