Review of Raw (2017) by Travis W — 08 Jan 2018

We all have our appetites. Each year, privileged young people newly escape their parents' reach to test those appetites on the proving grounds of college campuses the world over. They skit the line between socially acceptable and taboo to find just the right amount of adjusted restraint suitable to their friend groups, family circles, and career paths. Drinking, sex, drugs, the ratio of partying to studying, of all-nighters to hangovers-it's all part of an education in limits and conformity.

Justine (Garance Marillier) has her appetites like any other, but her most gnawing desires unfortunately involve chewing human flesh. Raised a vegetarian, now at college and beyond the impositions of her parents, she savors nothing more than a little blood sluicing down her gullet.

What seems the set up to a horror film of the vampiric variety opts for stark matter-of-factness instead. No ghouls and jump scares. Rather, Raw traffics in the genre of body horror. You'll cringe, squirm, avert your eyes, maybe lose your lunch, but it's not just the eww-factor of cannibalism that will get you. An itchy rash and a Brazilian wax come across just as visceral and nervy under Julia Ducournau's unflinching direction.

Yet, two things temper all this unwholesome display, making Raw not only a bearable experience but even an engaging and thrilling one. Firstly, this isn't a horror film. These aren't monsters. The characters are adolescents trying to find their way in the world, struggling with being awkward, shy, anxious, and unsure of the selves they're growing into. Raw, however improbably, successfully manages to couch cannibalistic urges as just one facet in the everyday dread that is adolescent self-consciousness and fear of humiliation.

Secondly, horror movies don't have images like these. Not typically. Ducournau's direction maneuvers through the intimate, the painterly, the dreamy, and the gritty. Her images set the tone as much as the subject matter, and her facility in execution gives the film a hypnotic, propulsive charge.