Raw (2016)

A girl raised as a vegetarian tastes raw meat for the first time upon entering veterinary college. That single bite awakens something inside her body, and she can never go back to who she was. Julia Ducournau’s feature debut, Raw, foregrounds the provocative subject of cannibalism, but what the film actually deals with is the confusion of one person facing her own desire for the first time. It merely borrows the exterior of a horror film; inside, it’s a fiercely honest coming-of-age tale.

What it’s about — A craving awakened by the first taste of raw meat

Justine (Garance Marillier) enters the veterinary college that both her parents and her sister attended, as a freshman. The school breaks in its freshmen with a brutal hazing ritual. Forced by upperclassmen to swallow a rabbit’s raw liver, Justine soon breaks out in hives all over her body and is simultaneously seized by an appetite she had never known. What began as a craving for raw meat gradually shifts toward more dangerous objects. Her sister Alexia (Ella Rumpf), who walked the same path first, understands the change in her sibling better than anyone, but that understanding does not mean safety.

Direction — A camera that transfers sensation to the skin

Ducournau does not rely on shock for shock’s sake. Her camera tenaciously follows Justine’s body, transferring sensations like itching and hunger onto the audience’s skin. The cold blue lighting of the dormitory and party venues, and the sterile spatial feel unique to a medical school, contrast with Justine’s increasingly heated interior, building tension. In particular, the frenzied crowd scene of the freshman welcome event visually compresses how one individual’s desire twists and bursts out under the pressure of the collective.

Blood and flesh appear, but the film binds them firmly to the characters’ psychology rather than displaying them. So even the most gruesome moments arrive not as mere disgust but as sorrow or bewilderment. It’s a level of control hard to believe is a debut work.

Performance — A face where shame and fascination coexist

Garance Marillier portrays, with astonishing conviction, the process of changing from an ordinary girl into a being she herself cannot control. She expresses with a single face the contradiction of being ashamed of her desire yet finally unable to refuse it. That expression, where fear and fascination are revealed at once, holds up the entire film. Ella Rumpf, as the sister, is a being who is both Justine’s future and her mirror, taut-ly pulling the love-hate and kinship between sisters. The scenes the two actresses share create the most precarious and at the same time most human moments in the film.

What the film says — How to live alongside desire

Raw borrows appetite to speak of sexuality, identity, and the fate called family. The craving Justine confronts is not a simple cannibalistic urge but a collision between the nature inherited from her parents and the restraint society demands. The film does not judge that collision as right or wrong. Instead it says that everyone has an untamed desire, and that becoming an adult is not about eliminating it but about learning to live alongside it. The family secret revealed in the final scene overturns this entire story once more, leaving a long resonance.

Ratings and reception

By OMDb, the IMDb rating is 6.9 out of 10. The Rotten Tomatoes freshness is 92% and the Metacritic score is 81 out of 100, clear critical support. After premiering at Cannes’ Critics’ Week, it drew great attention as an intense debut by a new director, and despite its provocative subject, evaluations highly praising the work’s completeness and thematic awareness dominated.

Verdict

Raw is not an easy film to watch. Some scenes make you turn your eyes away, and some weigh down the heart. But the confusion and craving this film deals with are by no means unfamiliar. Everyone has, at least once, been bewildered by a strange impulse within themselves. In that it pushes that universal emotion to its most extreme form and shows it honestly, a ★4.0 is more than worth it.

Recommended for

• Those who like films that hold a serious theme within a genre exterior
• Those looking for a debut with a clear directorial signature
• Those drawn to a story that unpacks growth and identity in an unconventional way