By John Noonan
French filmmaker Julia Ducournau’s arthouse body-horror shocker, Raw, garnered plenty of attention at the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival when it was widely reported that multiple cinema-goers required “medical attention” during the film’s midnight screening. Poetic and quietly terrifying, Raw tracks the bizarre fate of Justine (Garance Marillier), a veterinary student and lifelong vegetarian who begins to develop carnivorous tendencies after a meat-laden hazing ritual at college.
Though deeply unsettling, Raw is no cheap cinematic gimmick, and the film’s reception at Toronto has been a tiny, niggling thorn in Ducournau’s side. “The internet snowballed about something that was not my movie,” the director offers. “It was all a bit annoying. People did faint in Toronto, but let’s put it in context: it was a midnight screening, and people had been drinking before the screening and probably hadn’t eaten enough… they’re tired. My movie is made to create a physical reaction, and I really believe in the organic aspect of the link between the movie and the audience. Two people fainted in a room filled with 1,200 people. So basically, 1,198 people were fine! That’s all. It’s two people. I was very sad to hear that they hadn’t felt well because that’s not my goal. I want people to enjoy my movie. People were saying that it was a ‘gore fest’, and that it was the most horrifying movie ever made! It has nothing to do with what the movie really is; it was not doing justice to it. I was surprised it went to such an extent.”
Highly unconventional in its approach to the horror genre, Ducournau positions Raw as more of a stand-alone, and even questions whether it can legitimately be labelled a horror film at all. “It uses horror grammar – particularly body horror grammar – because this is how I express myself and I really love that,” the director asserts. “It also uses comedic and dramatic grammar. I wouldn’t qualify it as a horror movie. I would qualify it as a crossover. That is the best that I can do to qualify it. But it’s certainly not a ‘gore fest.’ The body horror is not gratuitous; it actually means something in the internal journey that my character goes through.”
That journey is a grim and bloodstained one, but despite the atrocities that Justine commits through the course of the film, the audience never loses sympathy for her, largely because she’s not chosen this life. “That was the basis of the idea for me,” explains Ducournau. “I wanted people to relate to a cannibal. Cannibalism is something that we try too easily to put outside of humanity and not consider it ours. But it is ours! It is part of us. This should resonate in all of us because we are never actually that far from these people. If the line between animals and humans is already thin, can you imagine between a human and another human who is a cannibal? It’s even thinner. That was the idea.”
The key for Ducournau was in the creation and casting of the key role of Justine. “I knew that people would accept this grim story about cannibalism if they were in the shoes of the cannibal and if they understood her,” the director explains. “If they understood her desires, and if they understood her feelings, then they may understand what she was going through. That’s the only way that you can question your own humanity and your own identity: by putting yourself outside of your comfort zone and trying to experience the whole spectrum of what humanity can be.”
With the confronting Raw, Julia Ducournau has also traveled the whole spectrum, making an auspicious directorial debut, and exhibiting a striking lack of compromise in the process. “We did everything,” the director laughs. “We did more than everything! I hope that people talk about it together in front of the theatre. My worst fear is that people leave and don’t talk about it. The reaction varies a lot from person to person, and it says a lot about the people themselves. I really want people to talk, and by talking about their reactions to the film, they will be talking about themselves a lot. We need that these days. It makes you feel alive and it makes you feel meaningful. That’s how I want the audience to feel after watching the film.”
Raw is screening in select cinemas from April 20, 2017
