Raw, film review: You are offal — but I like you!

This relentlessly dark cannibalistic slasher movie explores family relations and sexual politics in a pleasurably gross-out way, says Matthew Norman
Bloodbath: Justine (Garance Marillier) is a vegetarian student who turns cannibal
Matthew Norman21 November 2017

Every movie fan knows which wine goes with a human liver, but what to order with a sister’s finger? The disappointment about Raw is that, having raised the question, it makes no effort to answer it.

My hunch is that even the nicest chianti might be too flimsy, so I’d recommend something butcher like a Barolo. But without Hannibal Lecter on hand in his role as sommelier of human flesh, that’s a stab in the dark.

It is not alone in this Franco-Belgian feminist coming of age/sexual epiphany/anarcho-cannibalistic slasher (yup, another one of those). Raw is relentlessly dark in tone, with an acoustic guitar-heavy score and stark lighting, though it delivers the odd (very odd) laugh. And there are stabs amid all the toothwork, most notably the scissor sisters incident which leaves no one feeling like dancing after it liberates the top half of that index finger from its base.

The gourmet of the piece is Justine (Garance Marillier), a gauche, introverted, mildly weird 16-year-old academic prodigy embarking on the road towards college and womanhood as the film begins. Her parents are driving her to the veterinarian college where they met and where their self-assured, alpha female first born Alexia (Ella Rumpf) is already a resident.

When the three stop at a service station for lunch, we learn of the entire family’s strict vegetarianism from the parental outrage at the chunk of sausage Justine digs out of her mash. Although untouched, this will prove the porky pink tip of a titanically gruesome iceberg. Soon she is ditching the lettuce and fava beans for a bespoke high-protein diet.

The first term at college is stressful for most teenagers, but for this one it is hell. The pastoral care is not good, and Justine embarrassedly finds herself sharing with Adrien (Rabah Nait Oufella), deemed a suitable room-mate because he is gay.

Bleakly concreted and bleaker atmospherically, the campus would mortify a Shawshank lifer. Justine’s days, split between being bullied by senior students (“the Elders”) and slicing up animal corpses, segue miserably into nights as a sporadically groped wallflower when the boomboxes, beers and spliffs come out.

Taste for blood: Justine

As for the initiation rites forced on rookies by the Elders, they make Arizona’s least sissified Navy Seal boot camp look like Sebastian Flyte’s Oxford. After a refreshing cow’s blood shower, Justine declines to eat a raw rabbit’s kidney. But she isn’t a celebrity, and there’s no getting out of it, Alexia tauntingly explains, just because she is vegetarian.

After she succeeds in swallowing this novel form of organic rabbit food, it won’t be long before she adapts her heraldic motto from the late Dick Emery (“Ooh, you are offal … but I like you!”). But in the short-term renal failure would have been the healthier option. Woken by a terrible itch, she draws back the sheet to reveal a livid food poisoning rash all over her stomach and buttocks.

Already, the sublime brilliance of the make-up artistry (peeling skin is as uncannily realistic as the flesh wounds to come) is as well established as Julia Ducournau’s precocious talent as writer and debutant director.

Having laconically set up the black run into horror, Ducournau staggers the descent skilfully enough to avoid burying her subtler themes beneath the avalanche of gore — which reportedly had Toronto Film Festival viewers vomiting and fainting.

Shocking: the film unnerves

In Soho, where historically people tend to be less shockable than in former colonies, no sick bags or smelling salts were required. But fingers covered eyes, and larynxes croaked the groans of the pleasurably grossed-out, as a demonically ravenous Justine progresses from stealing a burger from the canteen, via raiding the fridge for raw chicken, to devouring her own hair. The new diet cures her of the inhibition and does wonders for her libido.

Startlingly, given the competition, the loudest “yeuuuccchs” were saved for the scene in which Alexia gives Justine the most excruciatingly awful Brazilian since David Luiz went Awol from defence against Germany in the 2014 World Cup semi-final. Unassauged by her sister’s smugly De Sade-ish observation that “beauty is pain”, Justine swiftly takes revenge by extending the implications of “finger-lickin’ good” above anything Colonel Sanders had in mind.

If the pathology behind the plague of eating disorders that afflict young women desperate for a form of autonomy in alien, stubbornly macho environments, is one of the themes, the emotional core is the wild undulating of the sisterly relationship as it swings between protective love and murderous loathing.

Ultimately blood (and so much of it) proves thicker, though sadly the fall-out from an unusual midnight feast rules out a heartwarming sequel — a melding of The Silence of the Lambs with All Creatures Great And Small in which the sibling vets share a rural practice a nd have comical adventures eating patients and their owners.

'What makes Raw engrossing is its literally visceral power to realise its primary ambition'

Still, there is enough to admire here to satisfy conventional appetites, not least Marillier’s tightly controlled portrayal of Justine’s metamorphosis from herbivorous virgin into horny mega-carnivore. The pace is unrelenting (if I lost focus for a minute after she ate the blood-dripping finger, it was only because I was fixating on what to have for dinner with the remnants of that bottle of Barolo).

Yet what makes Raw engrossing, and indeed out-grossing, is its literally visceral power to realise its primary ambition. It consistently horrifies.

Without hinting at a fittingly repugnant closing twist with the gamey flavour of a Roald Dahl short story reveal, it symmetrically ends with Justine and her parents once again dining à trois. “Finish your veggies, don’t leave the table till you’re done,” scolds the mother in apparently blissful ignorance that, after one of filmic history’s least forgettable rites of passage, her little girl is all grown up now, and long since self-weaned off the puréed carrot.

Cert 18, 99 mins

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