'Raw' Review: Raw to the core but makes you cringe for more!

9/10

That was 'Raw' to say the least, 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.

The film opens as the young teenager, brought up in a vegetarian family, heads off to college for the first time. Her destination – a (creepy) veterinary school, alma mater of both her parents and the current home of her older sister Alexa (Ella Rumpf), a senior student – in a Frankenstein’s laboratory of horrors: think about floating, detached organs and drugged farm animals.

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.

Our main character’s heady, queasy introduction to student life is portrayed in evocative, oddly nostalgic detail: she endures bullying from older students, who subject the first-year students to a prolonged military-style initiation, and tries to “lose herself” at hedonistic parties.

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 feel both her dual hungers, and secretly relish every sticky, illicit bite (only fucking joking, I was literally sick twice threw this film but I got there in the end). 

When she dances in front of a mirror, newly awake to her own desirability and her own sense of sexual desire, it’s impossible not to identify, while simultaneously cringing at the teenage awkwardness of the whole thing. And as, in the wake of that cruel initiation, she starts to experience a newfound hunger for "Raw" meat, there’s an intoxicating energy to her culinary explorations, coupled with a darkly funny tension. There have been reports of "Raw" inducing fainting in early audiences and causing people to be sick (I know as I am one of them), but, truth be told, you’ll more likely spend less time looking away in revulsion than you will nervously looking, as your stomach knots with suspense (look out for the scene with the finger, you will know what I mean).

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 in some certain cases.

Tellingly, Justine’s first foray into cannibalism comes after a graphic bikini-waxing scene (finger scene) that’ll make you wince. Biting into another human being is a big fat no no, yet this sort of eye-watering beauty ritual feels ostensibly “normal”. Is it any wonder, the film cleverly implies, that Justine  – and we, her captive audience – become a little confused?

For a very low budget movie, I found this film gripping, full of suspense and pact with some great acting, brilliant script and some wicked but rather to realistic, cringeworthy visuals. The film was so good you don't even care that its subtitled therefor I'm giving this fantastic horror/thriller/coming of age movie a 9/10, it is a must see.