Review: Raw (2016)

[David N. Butterworth]

RAW (2016)
A film review by David N. Butterworth
Copyright 2017 David N. Butterworth

** (out of ****)

My friend Joshua Tanzer passed out during the screening of a movie once.
Don't worry; I'm not publicly humiliating him here--he already made the
papers, so his weak constitution is out there for all to read (see page
six!). The movie was Ki-duk Kim's raw yet beautiful "The Isle" and the
scene which put Josh over the edge involved the consumption of fishhooks.
What happened was, he stepped out for some air following the sequence in
question and collapsed in the doorway on the way out of the theater. "The
New York Post" was there to give him his fifteen minutes of dubious fame
though: "Being a movie critic isn't as easy as you might think," they
wagged.
A word of advice for the founder and editor of OffOffOff.com, "The
guide to alternative New York," who admitted to the "'Post" he has a low
threshold for gore: you might want to give "Raw" a miss.
Julia Ducournau's queasy little shocker is the latest Gallic envelope
pusher to wash up on these distant shores in viscera-red waves aplenty.
"Raw" has a lot more in common with the we-are-what-we-eat ethos of Claire
Denis' "Trouble Every Day" (aka "Cannibal Love") than the torture porn of
Pascal Laugier's brutal "Martyrs," but for some reason torture porn carries
more cred than cannibalism. "Until now...."
Unlike "The Isle," for which there appears to be only one documented
incident of a viewer requiring medical attention, "Raw" has had patrons
dropping like flies, including at last year's Toronto International Film
Festival where paramedics were called in to treat multiple milksops who had
fainted during a midnight screening of the sexy cannibal horror film.
To the credit of the French, they *do* make some meaty splatterfests,
especially lately--the aforementioned "Trouble Every Day" and "Martyrs," as
well as "Inside," "High Tension" (aka "Switchblade Romance"), and the
oddly-punctuated "Frontier(s)." "Artforum"'s James Quandt has labeled this
recent phenom the New French Extremity and describes it this way: "Bava as
much as Bataille, "Salo" no less than Sade seem the determinants of a
cinema suddenly determined to break every taboo, to wade in rivers of
viscera and spumes of sperm, to fill each frame with flesh, nubile or
gnarled, and subject it to all manner of penetration, mutilation, and
defilement."
And this was *before* "Raw" bowed its bloody head late last year.
Justine's family are vegetarians. And veterinarians. Vegetarian
veterinarians. Now it's time for her to enter the prestigious vet school
her parents attended, and where her older sister Alexia is currently
enrolled. Only we don't understand that right away. It's not clear what
this place is, exactly. A hospital? A sanitarium? A military academy or
prison? An educational institution of some sort? Probably the last of
these, since the minute Justine flops down in her dorm room, the door
bursts open and the hazing rituals begin. Hazing, it appears, is big on
campus. The first-year students--rookies they're called--are subjected to
all manner of unpleasant initiations: buckets of blood dumped on their
heads, "Carrie"-style; trotted around on all fours, "Salo"-style; and
forced to consume raw rabbit sweetbreads. It's actually Alexia who goads
her sister into breaking her no-meat vow, but falling off the vegetable
wagon has a profound and disturbing effect on Justine. She develops an
insatiable appetite for flesh--a raw chicken breast straight from the
refrigerator, a kebab from a mini mart, a hamburger pocketed from the
cafeteria. And then, following a Brazilian waxing accident, delicacies of
a more familial nature (finger food never tasted so good!). In addition to
the hazing, there's the anarchic partying, raves upon drunken raves with
little evidence of academic rigor. What kind of professional school *is*
this anyway? Anyway, as expected, things go from liver to wurst and by the
film's conclusion Justine has learned her family's deepest, darkest secret.
While Ducournau's film *is* darkly atmospheric and features a
singularly-committed lead performance from Garance Marillier, the newbie
director's modus is clearly shock first, tell a sympathetic story later.
Both the setup and the setting are more than a little fuzzy and the
characters' motivations rarely make sense. I myself did not drop like a
fly, because I found the whole thing a little too calculated to generate
any personal distress. In fact, I thought it was stupid and preposterous
and I have a pretty high tolerance for absurdity in the genre. But in
order to identify with full-on cannibalism the screenplay's got to have a
little more meat on its bones.
"What are you hungry for?" questions the film's publicity art. I
think I'll go with the fishhooks. "Raw," I'm sorry to say, is just offal.

--
David N. Butterworth
rec.arts.movies.reviews
butterwo...@gmail.com