Review of Raw (2017) by Davey K — 05 Feb 2018

Who am I. What is the human body. Justine, 16 years old and following a legacy of vegetable eating veterinarians, gives us some tentative answers. Not only does she teach us a valuable lesson about repressing our deepest and most secret desires but she shows us that sickness and death believe it or not America can still be super sexy. Justine is a hungry mouth. And the human body is a dangling mouse.

You know that feeling when you're in love and touching your partner's body is no longer enough, when you become itchy dreaming about being inside their rib cage, when you can't rid yourself of the cold bath you'd like to take inside their veins, or the warm bed that you'd make if only you could shrink to the size in which you'd climb the ladder of their spine and curl up behind their brain stem, RAW will dig through you just the same.

RAW-like so many vampire movies in an age of processed meat worship-sharpens its teeth against the cattle gun that slices through all the bullshit tissue and reveals that the skull of consumerism and slaughter is nothing but sex and domination. To satisfy your tastes you literally suck the life out of another being and if you suck the life out of another being while they are distressed you just might become addicted to tasting their pain.

We all know that when we eat a chicken it's because we're bigger and better looking than a chicken and of course with a chicken we can get oily and spicy inside it's rib cage and suck our fingers in the restaurant without being too transgressive. There's a part in us all that at some point or another might need a bit more. A bit more than this finger licking in the restaurant. Kathy Acker once wrote that war was the great mirror of our sexuality, but the tide has come in and it is now I believe no longer war but the meat industry, oh meat industry you mirror of our sexuality. This is a film for that part in us all that can't get enough, that will never get enough.