Writer/director Julia Ducournau’s spectacular debut movie, Raw, will get lumped in with a genre known as body horror, which is where gross stuff happens to someone’s body. That’s too bad...
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at http://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2017/03/14/best-thing-youll-see-month-raw/
Hey, playing at the Music Box. I think I’ll take a break from working myself to death and check it out this weekend.
Prevenge may not be very good, but at least Alice Lowe is always interesting to watch.
Agreed. The best parts of Prevenge are watching her interact with the other actors. Especially the douchebag DJ guy who thinks she’s overweight. That bit is so over-the-top and funny that it would work as a standalone skit, especially with its dark ending.
-Tom
Loved it. Had the dumb idea of drinking bloody marys while I watched. Haven’t been this physically affected by a film since, well, I dunno?, the hospital scene in The Exorcist?
This is very very bizarre. And French.
Isn’t this just a goof, overall? I kept thinking how incredibly tolerant Europeans must be of… er… everything? OK, fine, there’s some kind of vet school hazing that kinda masks the aberrant behavior, I guess?
My favorite part was the dad asking the daughter if she smokes. Because of course she does, and of course he gives her a cigarette … if you’re French.
This movie leaves Netflix April 4, so everyone make sure you watch it before then. I did last night, and it was phenomenal.
If you liked Raw, the director’s latest movie is out now and it’s amazing. Titane will be getting its own thread soon, but it’s worth bumping the Raw thread until then.
-Tom
I was looking for a thread on this, but “Raw” doesn’t have enough letters for Discourse search. It’s on Netflix these days.
I guess the statute of limitations on spoilers is over? The Netflix description kind of spoils it, but I’ll stay somewhat vague. I went in basically blind because the brief description seemed sort of interesting, and ended up really liking it.
The whole thing has this tremendously unsettling grimy sheen over the top of it. It’s French-ness felt so foreign that I couldn’t tell exactly how menacing or how normal things were supposed to be. It’s really well written, with elements sort of slowly revealing themselves and really kind of making sense by the end. There are some fairly facile CinemaSins style objections (i.e. “plot holes” but ones that aren’t actually important to what the movie is doing) that occur as the movie progresses, but even those are actually kind of resolved by the final scene. It’s overall a clever and atmospheric take on a classic horror premise (like, both monster-wise, and metaphor-wise).
A lot of what I have to say is in relation to Titane, so I’m holding off on some of it until tomorrow. Suffice it to say, Raw and Titane have a lot in common. Some of which is weird. For instance, the two female leads in Titane have the same names as the two female leads in Raw, and one of them is even played by the same actor. I wondered whether Ducournau was setting up a Raw-verse, but I don’t think we’re supposed to read anything into the names other than she likes writing for characters named Justine and Alexia.
But, yeah, the representation of veterinary school was weird, wasn’t it? I wasn’t sure how much of that was “well…France” and how much of it was Julia Ducournau’s style. Having seen Titane, I suspect the latter is the bigger factor.
I hate how it’s widely known as a cannibalism movie. :( That’s one of the biggest reveals, and of course, the movie isn’t actually about cannibalism, at least not in the way other movies are about cannibals.
I usually just throw in the director’s name or something about the subject matter. Discourse just needs a little extra help sometimes.
-Tom
I know I’m old now because literally my first thought was: is the true horror the idea of being forced to party all night? Because please kill me.
I wondered at that a few weeks back when it came it and I searched the forum for it and found nothing. I remembered folks here liking Raw (as did I), and a new crazy movie by the same director that won the Palm d’Or at Cannes? I didn’t start my own thread because I hadn’t watched it yet. I see it’s streaming on Amazon for $6 now, so time to give it a go.
Raw has two of my favorite music stings. One during…that… scene, and one at the very end.
I’d love to see this edited over the final shot of soooo many films.
This made me laugh out loud!
Put me down as having loved this. My wife is not super genre savvy, and kept thinking the girls were vampires, which is adorable.
They’re not even close to vampires.
I really liked the awakening sexuality being paired with the hunger the lead felt. There’s that great scene where she makes love for the first time and bites herself as she climaxes. Her lover is super freaked out by the end of the session, and won’t speak to her the next day, which she in her naivete misinterprets as standard guy post-sex douchebag behavior, when in actuality he’s pretty freaked out by her constantly biting him and then climaxing while sinking her teeth into her own arm!
I also loved the difference between her and her sister; how her sister was so willing to embrace the darkness, but the lead kept resisting it. But also it’s such a more sensitive film than most, in that the sister does some pretty shitty things, but our lead can’t leave her behind or throw her away. The scene where they fight but end up understanding each other, teeth locked into each other’s arms, trying to wound and then realizing what they share, ach! So good.
He slept with her after she bit the one dude, so I’m thinking he expected at least some degree of that. I think it’s more confusion over his own sexuality, or at least not wanting to pursue girls long term. He does after all shout that he’s gay at her, and while it’s a heated moment and he’s probably not being entirely honest, he certainly never showed signs of being into her or women in general previously and I suspect it’s at least part of it.
Also, what a great movie.
I finally got around to seeing this now that it’s on Netflix, and I really liked it. Glad I hadn’t read any reviews or seen any trailers, because I had no idea what it was about except (probably) cannibalism. And that wasn’t wrong, but as with all the best horror, the horror is just a foot in the door that allows a really close-up examination of its themes (whatever those are.) Really nice use of the camera. Really nice use of color and lighting. Really great, subtle performances from the actors. (The scene when Garance Marillier is sitting in front of the fridge contemplating that thing…) And the fluids: this movie uses blood, shit, piss, paint, water, pus, bile all in creative ways that aren’t meant to gross out the viewer, but to involve the viewer in investigating the messy business of having a body, particularly a female one.
I told my brother it was about a vegetarian who changes her mind.