Review by Beatrice On 18-Aug-2023
"...Your tongue is as raw as a butcher's / as red as a thigh"
Justine is 16 years old, a vegetarian, and has just enrolled in veterinary school, which is also attended by her older sister, who is characteristically opposed to her. A victim of bullying, she will begin to discover her body and her innermost urges, and especially her pleasure in meat, human. "Raw-a crude reality-" is a Franco-Belgian production ,and it is now since the days of the extraordinary "À l'intèrieur" by Bustillo/Maury that the best horror cinema is in the skilful hands of the French, and "Grave," this is the film's original title, is yet another confirmation of this. Ducournau plunges the protagonist into an alienating quotidian of bullying and strange initiation rites, where everything is imbued with a disturbed violence that strikes the stomach. There are no witches, zombies, serial killers or killer dolls in this debut feature that shocked the Cannes Film Festival in 2016, "Raw" is a body horror with a geometric and linear mise-en-scene, the dry portrait of a 'teenager grappling with a variety of trials to overcome to become an adult. The emancipation from the family, the relationship with her extroverted sister, the difficult integration into the university world and the acceptance of her nature. "Justine or the Misadventures of the vrtú," this was the title of an 1871 novel by Machese de Sade and Julia Ducournau blatantly quotes it. Also in Sade's work, the protagonist has a sister, Juliette, who is her opposite and just as in the film many will be the trials that will undermine her virtues, although in the film, unlike in the book, Justine will give in to her instincts in the name of becoming aware of her true being. "Raw" is full of evocative moments that constantly relaunch the narrative; it is built on visceral sequences that infect and generate others in a dance of flesh, blood, hair, piss and animal excrement. Julia Ducournau makes the lesson of her compatriots Maury and Bastillo her own and like them makes her first effort a mosaic of realistic, almost documentary-like images, where the narrative is firmly held in check, as is the mise en scene, but what sets the director's cinema apart from that of the Bustillo/Maury duo is the strong psychological characterization of the characters. "Raw" makes half of the horror films released in recent years pale.
"But how cold it is"
18-Aug-2023 by Beatrice
Julia Ducournau movies
TITANE
2022