Julia Ducournau is a 33-year-old first-time feature director who makes her worryingly brilliant debut with this saturnalia of arthouse horror. At the Toronto film festival, it had audiences dry-heaving and indeed wet-heaving in the aisles and the cinema lavatories. This is the sort of film which pundits are often keen to label “black comedy” as a way of re-establishing their own sang-froid. In the same tongue-in-cheek spirit, it has been called coming-of-age drama. There is a grain of truth in both of these labels. It is a film about cannibalism, and has clearly been influenced by Jorge Michel Grau’s We Are What We Are, John Fawcett’s Ginger Snaps, and perhaps especially Marina de Van’s body shocker In My Skin – which incidentally featured a young Laurent Lucas, a veteran of extreme French cinema who also turns up here.
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. 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. And in a society where eating is somehow criminalised, cannibalism is an appropriate fantasy.
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. Justine is a virgin, an idealistic person, a believer in animal rights and above all a vegetarian. So she is horrified by a student initiation ritual in which she has to eat a rabbit kidney. 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.
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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
But 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. 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.
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. And vet school – so apparently innocuous – is a place where you have to get used to the horror of animal flesh. To swallow it, in fact. Cannibalism becomes Justine’s own initiation into adulthood. The title is a pretty accurate description of how I was feeling by the end.
• Raw screens at the London film festival on 10, 11 and 12 October
