With Titane in theaters, it’s time to revisit Raw - luckily, it’s streaming on Netflix.Īll of this experimentation plays out against the drab, antiseptic confines of the vet school.
Half a decade before Titane propelled Ducournau to her current heights, Raw cemented the filmmaker as a ferociously imaginative, fast-rising talent. The filmmaker first made her mark in 2016 with her dazzling feature debut Raw, about a young woman who begins to crave human flesh while at veterinary school.
Metamorphosis - the more physically icky and narratively oblique, the better - is at the heart of her ferociously feminist horror movies. Whenever Ducournau’s at the wheel, she’s seemingly fueled by instinct, animal impulse, and a fascinatingly amorphous view of metaphor. Yet the relentless, cage-rattling thrill of Titane (now in theaters) is that it goes nowhere you’d expect, racing forward in pursuit of a singular, savage vision without mapping out its ultimate direction (tonal or otherwise). After the French filmmaker’s Palme d’Or-winning sophomore feature Titane, about a female serial murderer carnally inclined toward cars, that much is indisputable.