Reticent Justine, a veterinary student, is suitably shocked by strange, gory rituals at her vet school in Belgium that older students use to humiliate newbies.
But they also ensure a previously undiscovered lust for meat in the 16-year-old, which has already taken hold of others around her. Justine’s sister Alexia even feasts on human flesh. And that’s not quite legal to get…
Anyone expecting a dull splatter film hasn’t heard of the French wave of body horror films, which also have feminist accents (see “In My Skin” from 2002 by Maria de Van or “Swallow ’ by Carlo Mirabella-Davis from 2019), and possibly not thought about the philosophical tendencies behind the taboo subject of cannibalism.
We’re all just animals
Screenwriter and director Julia Ducournau, who by the way is the daughter of a doctor, has sought for her unsettling and at the same time incredibly attractively staged film, the tableau of young people’s search for identity, together with their grotesque fear of growing up, in order to tell a quiet, raw story that has only one goal : To hit the viewer in the core.
The inspirations for this are almost obvious: French fairy tales by Perrault, stories by Angela Carter, Claire Denis’ “Trouble Every Day”, pretty much every film by David Cronenberg and even “The Elephant Man” by David Lynch. Because behind the psycho fable, which disguises itself as a horror film, there is also a humanistic message that is reversed: don’t forget, you are just an animal too.
Ducournau was successful in the critics’ section at the Cannes Film Festival with her first feature film, which was laden with symbols and which was difficult to finance due to the subject matter. In 2021 she won the Palme d’Or on the Croisette with her fantasy grotesque “Titane”, which was also based on Cronenberg.
Tele 5 shows “Raw” on Wednesday (May 18) at 10:10 p.m., which was shown in Germany at the Fantasy Film Festival but was never released in cinemas.