Raw is a great coming-of-age movie that also happens to be about cannibalism
Julia Ducournau’s animalistic body horror is a brutal look at transformation, growing up… and eating people
Raw is a film to be approached with caution. While reports that the dark French cannibal movie is gory enough to make you faint are perhaps a little overblown (even if two viewers did receive medical attention after it screened in Toronto last year), it certainly creates an atmosphere of extreme discomfort that’ll stay with you long after you’ve left the cinema.
What makes this film worth recommending above all its other more bloody traits is its strength as a coming-of-age narrative, though. It presents a strangely relatable vision of “first year at university” experiences, and then delves into body horror, transformative character drama and a series of heartbreaking and traumatic developments.
Written and directed by Julia Ducournau in her feature length debut, the story of Raw follows lifelong vegetarian Justine (Garance Marillier) who is just starting out at veterinary school to attend the same college that her parents went to and that her sister is currently at. During an aggressively carnivorous hazing ritual, she’s made to eat a raw rabbit kidney, encouraged by her sister Alexia (Ella Rumpf). What happens next is essentially the worst case scenario for a vegetarian falling off the wagon. After experiencing a painful rash Justine develops an intense and overwhelming craving for raw meat that eventually leads her to ravenously eat somebody’s finger. This opens the door for her to give in to her desire to consume more human flesh. As you might expect, this is a scary and uncomfortable transition for her on a personal level , and it’s a highly specific atmosphere that the film captures impressively well.
Marillier is utterly captivating in the lead role, holding the weight of the film on her shoulders tremendously well. Ducournau sets out to make us empathise and understand the type of character who would typically be considered a monster. It works, not just in the way that movies about vampires or werewolves try to make us understand monstrous dual personalities within a singular person, but in a way that strives to make us see how a person can transform into something more monstrous while maintaining a sense of themselves. She’s the same shy teenager we see at the start of the film and a hungry cannibal simultaneously, and so much of the reason why it works is Marillier’s tremendous performance.
More than almost anything else, Justine wants to fit in with her peers. She struggles with the experience of being thrown into wild parties and uncomfortable initiations, and is challenged on her views about vegetarianism while being judged harshly as a gifted student but also one whose family has so much connection to this particular school. Not only does she face these obstacles, but she’s harbouring a crush on her gay male roommate and facing up to the reality that she will have trouble denying her insatiable hunger for raw meat. It’s hard not to feel for her and empathise with how tough her situation is.
So when I say Raw is strangely relatable, it’s all about how effective it is as a rather more universal coming-of-age narrative than you might expect. If you ever had to go through the sometimes difficult first few weeks of university or have even just been launched into a new chapter of your life that you never really got to have the opportunity to get prepared for, you’ll see Justine’s experiences and be able to understand what she’s going through. Raw brings us into her perspective wholeheartedly and shows us the bridge between childhood and adulthood in really compelling ways. Justine’s dealing with a newfound sexuality, crippling doubt, emerging fear, and a sense of shame at every step of the way, and her descent into cannibalism acts as a metaphor for her taking her agency as a woman into her hands and transforming into her own person as an adult.
While it would be wrong to classify this as a horror movie, it definitely uses elements of body horror to drive its story. When Justine develops a rash early in the film, Raw works hard to make us feel her pain, uneasiness and and embarrassment. Scenes showing the consumption of flesh are often shot in grissly detail, with a certain matter-of-fact goriness that doesn’t feel like a glorification as much as it does a cold and detached look at bodies and what we’re all made of. It’s an uncomfortable tone that certainly isn’t for everyone, that’s for sure, but it’s all part of a strong and fascinating female-led meditation on the more animal side of being human.
Raw is also evocatively shot with beautiful camerawork, boasting excellent performances from every member of its cast, and a chilling organ-based score from composer Jim Williams. It’s all too easy to write this movie off as a visceral piece of body horror without considering its numerous other strengths, though. It is an uncomfortable cannibalism narrative, but it’s also so much more. As a film directed by a woman and dealing with the story of a girl growing up, you do feel like it’s providing a refreshing, valuable and unique perspective. It grips the audience with very primal human struggles that are conveyed with complexity, eschewing over-explanation in favour of a dark and intriguing tone. It may sound shocking and inaccessible, but Raw is an exceptional coming-of-age movie, and it’s only strengthened by also being about a girl coming to terms with her desire to eat other people.
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