From bloody hazing rituals, to a bikini wax, and a doctor visit, Raw exemplifies the horror of conformity and how social pressures openly reveal one’s feared differences and ultimately their monstrosity. It, therefore, comes with little surprise that this awakening of appetites emerges after a build-up of scenes emphasizing the fear of being different. In Raw, writer-director Julia Ducournau centers the film’s narrative on the awakening of a young woman’s sexual and cannibalistic appetite, which in its way falls right in line with Creed’s argument. As horror critic Barbara Creed argues in her book, The Monstrous-Feminine, the connection between females and monstrosity is “almost always in relation to her mothering and reproductive functions.” Essentially, the perceived source of a female’s monstrosity is in what makes her different than a male. This notion of women using their sexuality from lesser to larger monstrous and aggressive degrees is still prevalent in stories and media today. For example, tracing back to classic mythology, sirens were known to lure men using their inherent sexuality to devour them.
#Raw film julia ducournau series
The title is a pretty accurate description of how I was feeling by the end.“ Women & Horror” is a four-part series of features on horror films directed by women.Ĭontent warning: This article discusses plot details, which include descriptions of violence and cannibalism.įemale sexuality is often closely linked to monstrosity. Cannibalism becomes Justine’s own initiation into adulthood. And vet school – so apparently innocuous – is a place where you have to get used to the horror of animal flesh. Just as in Abel Ferrara’s vampire horror The Addiction, college is an arena of fear: a sense that your entire sense of self is dissolving as you have to find your way in a new adult world of previously unsuspected menace, unsure if what people are making you do is normal or an outrage. It is with Adrien that she goes to truck stops to eat the kind of glutinous sandwiches she can’t get in the college canteen, and there they meet a sinister livestock haulier – a cameo for the Belgian director and actor Bouli Lanners – who has creepy things to say about the similarity of pig and human flesh. Instead, college and adulthood seems more like a fascistic world of submission and staying in line – or even like some post-apocalyptic society in which these freaky cult rituals have grown up as part of survival.īut she finds friendship and perhaps something more with her roommate Adrien (Rabah Nait Oufella), who has been assigned to her despite her request for a woman he breezily assures her he is gay, which as far as the college authorities are concerned is the same thing. Going to university was an experience which Justine had probably thought would be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to find herself, to express herself, to find her individuality and personality. Students are brutally woken in the middle of the night: humiliated, bullied, assured that not to submit would be to wimp out and let everyone down. The scenes showing the frat-type “hazing” are extraordinary and very convincing – as if studying to be a vet is like joining the Foreign Legion. What is very impressive about Raw is that absolutely everything about it is disquieting, not just the obvious moments of revulsion: there is no let up in the ambient background buzz of fear.
Yet meekly aware of the need to fit in, she does it she suffers a reaction for which the doctor suggests fasting and all this somehow triggers a whole new yearning. So she is horrified by a student initiation ritual in which she has to eat a rabbit kidney. Justine is a virgin, an idealistic person, a believer in animal rights and above all a vegetarian. Justine (Garance Marillier) is a teenager heading off to college to study veterinary science: her sister Alexia (Ella Rumpf) is already there, doing the same course a year ahead, and it becomes clear that her doting, protective parents (played by Laurent Lucas and Joana Preiss) took their own degrees there many years before. And in a society where eating is somehow criminalised, cannibalism is an appropriate fantasy. It’s a film in which the lead character is briefly aware of becoming more attractive by losing weight – not so long after she had participated in a jokey student conversation about monkeys being sexually assaulted and then getting anorexia and having to see a therapist. While it isn’t exactly true to say that cannibalism is just a metaphor for something else, eating human flesh is appropriate for a drama about sexuality, identity, body image and conformity.
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