Like Water for Chocolate, Tampopo, Big Night, Soul Food… there are certain motion pictures that are so indelibly linked with delicious food that remembering the first time you watched them can make your mouth water all over again. Raw is not that kind of movie… unless you really, really, REALLY like eating human flesh.
Julia Ducournau’s unsettling drama stars Garance Marillier as Justine, a first-year veterinary student and stalwart vegetarian who balks at her new school’s hazing ritual, which forces her to eat raw rabbit kidneys. It seems cruel as Justine’s older sister Alexia (Ella Drumpf) forces the giblet down her throat, but college is a place to try new things, and soon enough Justine is eating meat pretty regularly. And when the opportunity comes to ingest the flesh off of a human finger… well, what’s the difference?
Take out the cannibalism and replace it with something more familiar, like alcoholism or drug addiction, and Raw would still be a finely acted and thoughtful drama about falling prey to one’s own vices. But that wouldn’t be nearly as fun. Julia Ducournau’s twisted drama invites us to watch with twisted fascination as Justine gradually accepts who she is, for better or (let’s be honest) almost definitely worse. The moral high ground breaks away under her feet. After a while all that’s left is the hunger.
Focus World
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Read the ingredients on the package for Raw and you might be disgusted. But this is no processed meat product. The unseemly and perhaps even stomach-churning cannibalism sequences don’t compensate for a lack of nutritional value. The feedings in Raw are intimate, and illustrate the overpowering nature of compulsion more vividly than any conventional wickedness you’d be likely to find on a typical college campus. We can watch an alcoholic drink a beer on camera and think little of it, because dramatic motion pictures have more-or-less immunized us to the image. Skinning a body part and savoring the ingestion process has a bit more kink and kick, don’t you think?
It would have been easy for Raw to indulge in didactic moralizing, but when your hero is chewing off human skin it’s hardly necessary. The imagery in Julia Ducournau’s film is so slippery and stringy that the writer/director is free to merely explore what’s going on inside her protagonist’s head, and how one form of freedom begins to affect her entire worldview, her relationship with her sister and ultimately her relationships with every other human being in her life. Raw doesn’t judge because nobody in the film is innocent and pointing fingers is counterproductive, especially when you could be eating fingers instead.
Some audiences will be turned off by Raw, and who could blame them? These characters do vile and monstrous things. But for those with strong constitutions and an interest in understanding – if not necessarily forgiving – the darkest recesses of the soul, Raw is very well done.
Have You Seen These 10 Extreme Films?
Top Photo: Focus World
William Bibbiani (everyone calls him ‘Bibbs’) is Crave’s film content editor and critic. You can hear him every week on The B-Movies Podcast and Canceled Too Soon, and watch him on the weekly YouTube series What the Flick. Follow his rantings on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
10 Extreme Films
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Audition
Takashi Miike's 1999 horror classic remain perhaps one of his most notorious. The horror is all the more shocking because nothing weird happens in Audition until about halfway through. That finale, though, will leave you wincing.
Image: Lionsgate
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The Burning Moon
A distribution company named Intervision dug up Olaf Ittenbach's 1992 German oddity a few years ago, and it instantly made its way into the cult rotation. It's a set of stories told by a mentally ill German kid, involving some pretty extreme damn gore.
Image: IMAS Filmproduktion
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Cannibal Holocaust
Perhaps the granddaddy of all extreme cinema, Roggero Deodato's 1980 cheapie is just as shocking as you've heard, complete with actual animal death on camera, and gore so gritty and realistic, the filmmakers were arrested. They had to produce actors in court to prove they hadn't made a snuff film.
Image: United Artists Europa
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The Guinea Pig Series
There have been six Guinea Pig films, each one as notorious as the last. The premise of the series is essentially an extended medical experiment to see how much pain the human body can tolerate. The films are also an experiment to see how much terror an audience can tolerate.
Image: Unearthed Films
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The Human Centipede Series
Filmmaker Tom Six had a weird idea for a horror movie: Is it medically possible to surgically connect two people mouth-to-anus? This idea was explored in a trio of films, each more disgusting than the last.
Image: IFC Midnight
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Nekromantik
Extreme films are usually more troubling if the filmmaking itself is cheap. That's certainly the case with Jörg Buttgereit's 1987 necrophilia flick, one of the most notorious cult movies of the 1980s.
Image: Leisure Time Features
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Pink Flamingos
John Waters' 1972 cult giant has been widely seen by now, but many still don't have the stomach to tuck into the NC-17-rated vomitorium. Divine stars as a woman competing to claim the title of Filthiest Person Alive. Filth ensues.
Image: New Line Cinema
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Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom
Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1976 update of a tale by The Marquis de Sade is every bit as sick as the source material. It;s about a group of post-war adults who sexually enslave a group of teen orphans and... do things to them. It's ostensibly a criticism of fascism, but it's also difficult to swallow.
Image: United Artists
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A Serbian Film
This 2010 shocker involves the life of an aging porn superstar and his inability to make ends meet in post-Milošević Serbia. He ends up agreeing (and not agreeing) to do some awful, awful things. It's an economic statement, but more than anything, it's a really, really rough ride.
Image: Jinga Films
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The Wizard of Gore
And what list of extreme films would be complete without the inclusion of a film by the Godfather of Gore himself Herschell Gordon Lewis? His sickest is probably 1970's The Wizard of Gore, about a stage magician that mutilates - and restores - young women on stage.
Image: Mayflower Pictures
