“Raw,”
Julia Ducournau’s jangly opera of sexual and dietary awakening, is an
exceptionally classy-looking movie about deeply horrifying behavior.
Infusing each scene with a cold, unwelcoming beauty, the Belgian
cinematographer Ruben Impens makes his camera complicit in the trashy
goings-on. Sneaking beneath bedsheets and sliding over young flesh, his
lens takes us places we may not want to go.
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| Hasn't this movie been made already? |
Unfolding
during rush week in a nightmarish veterinary school, where freshmen are
relentlessly hazed, and every night is a bacchanal, the movie clings
nervously to the virginal Justine . . . . A jumpy faun in a
concrete jungle, Justine is a legacy student and lifelong vegetarian.
So when a hazing ritual requires her to swallow raw offal, the angry
crimson rash that flares on her body seems a physical manifestation of
her extreme disgust.
That
repulsion is soon replaced by a craving that will drive Justine closer
to her sister and fellow student . . . and further from
her classmates. Her transformation suffuses the film with animalistic
energy — like a cat, she chews on her hair, then vomits it up — and her
isolation produces a melancholy that permeates even her erotic
encounters, where the connection between sex and sustenance is presented
with nerve-twanging literalness.
Like Jorge Michel Grau’s social-decay fable, “We Are What We Are,”
“Raw” is an astonishingly bold debut feature that embeds cannibalism in
a framework of environmental chaos and familial dysfunction. . . .
– The New York Times, March 10, 2017
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