Raw (2017)

Raw arrives from France and Belgium with a title that promises more than it delivers, in the sense that it delivers a great deal. Julia Ducournau's debut follows Justine, a lifelong vegetarian, through her first weeks at veterinary school, where a hazing ritual involving a raw rabbit kidney sets off a hunger she cannot name. The film treats cannibalism as an extended metaphor for assimilation, for appetite, for the mortifying business of becoming a person. It never stops to explain itself. That restraint is the whole achievement.

The film's social consciousness sits in its bones instead of its mouth. Two sisters, one hungry and one hungrier, circle each other across a campus of blood and paint, and the camera watches female desire with an interest that most horror reserves for punishment. Justine's arousal and her appetite arrive in the same breath, and Ducournau refuses to separate them. A feminist reading is available here, even invited, but the film never announces it. The body is the site of transformation, dread, and occasional ecstasy, which is to say it is a horror body, not an affirmative one.

Elsewhere the film is casually, unremarkably modern and nothing more. Adrien, the roommate, mentions that he is gay and the film moves on. The supporting cast is diverse in the way a European production simply is, with no commentary attached. Vegetarianism functions as a personal principle and a metaphor for repression, not as a position on the planet. There is no class critique, no sermon, no lecture. Ducournau provokes. She does not instruct. We are left with a film of genuine appetite and almost no agenda, which in this climate reads as a small miracle.