Raw – first look review

The Gal­lic appetite for raw meat takes on a new mean­ing in Julia Ducournau’s unabashed­ly gory debut, a French cam­pus can­ni­bal hor­ror which had audi­ences rac­ing for the exit in its Crit­ics’ Week Cannes screen­ing. But for those who can stom­ach its gross-out hor­ror, it’s a delec­tably wild and mod­ern fem­i­nist fable.

Jus­tine (a break­out Garance Mar­il­li­er) is a first-year vet­eri­nary stu­dent, con­tin­u­ing a fam­i­ly tra­di­tion by enrolling at the same estab­lish­ment attend­ed by her straight-laced par­ents and spunky old­er sis­ter, Alex­ia (Ella Rumpf). She’s also a mil­i­tant veg­e­tar­i­an but, thanks to rit­u­al­is­tic ​“haz­ings”, she is forced to eat raw meat for the first time. The loss of her veg-ini­ty arous­es some­thing deep with­in her, set­ting in motion a dead­ly and stom­ach-churn­ing descent into more exot­ic dishes.

A scene fea­tur­ing scis­sors and a sev­ered fin­ger is just one of the many unset­tling sights in this bold body hor­ror from writer/​director Ducour­nal. Set in the dank con­fines of a cam­pus away from the city, a lot of cred­it must go to the props depart­ment for the high­ly stylised but real­is­tic ear­ly sequences that even­tu­al­ly give way to a more psy­cho­log­i­cal ter­ror. Fre­quent­ly neon-lit and scored to strains of puls­ing elec­tro (by Ben Wheat­ley reg­u­lar Jim Williams), Raw has more than a dash of Nico­las Wind­ing Refn about it.

Ducour­nal elic­its two stand-out per­for­mances from her young leads, with Mar­il­li­er and Rumpf demon­strat­ing the kind of emo­tion­al short­hand that makes them total­ly con­vinc­ing as on-screen sis­ters. Mar­il­li­er is espe­cial­ly com­mit­ted to the director’s dement­ed vision, and com­par­isons to Sis­sy Spacek’s blood-soaked role in Car­rie are bang on the money.

There’s also a touch of Sam Rai­mi black com­e­dy and the mat­ter-of-fact gris­li­ness of French genre titles like TV’s The Returned. And there’s a time­ly com­men­tary on female sex­u­al­i­ty that shows a film­mak­er will­ing to break the mould – Jus­tine, for one thing, is a fem­i­nist who makes pre-emp­tive strikes on prospec­tive male aggres­sors, with bloody con­se­quences. The blood­lust may grab all the head­lines, but this fright night favourite in the mak­ing has plen­ty to sink your teeth into.