Grave [Raw] (Julia Ducournau, 2017)

[TMDaines]

Grave [Raw] is some film. A genuinely masterful horror film that manages to make your stomach crawl. A vegetarian is pressured to try meat for the first time during a hazing ritual at university and her appetite develops from there. I can see why this has received all the acclaim it did, but I don't think I'll ever want to watch it again. We had 3/19 walk out of our screening, but I expected more.

[DarkImbecile]

Grave [Raw] is some film. A genuinely masterful horror film that manages to make your stomach crawl. A vegetarian is pressured to try meat for the first time during a hazing ritual at university and her appetite develops from there. I can see why this has received all the acclaim it did, but I don't think I'll ever want to watch it again. We had 3/19 walk out of our screening, but I expected more.

I was really impressed by Raw as well. Julia Ducournou is a director to watch, and the lead actresses do great work with, um, unconventional material.

In particular, I loved the

SpoilerShow

entire finger sequence, which is just masterfully executed from beginning to end, and the scene with star Garance Marillier dancing in front of the mirror. The progression of the soundtrack in the former is just a perfect enhancement to what we're seeing without distracting from or overwhelming the scene.

The final shot is pretty special, too - calibrated to give us just enough new information in the final moments to change and clarify the context and significance of much of what we've seen before without feeling cheap or unearned.

I think I only had two walk out of my screening, but that was 1/3 of the audience. I was actually steeled for it to be more gruesome than it was, and the engaging thematic and character work kept it from feeling like the slog from one provocation to the next that equally bloody horror can feel like when those provocations are their sole reason for existing. The execution has much more liveliness and dark humor than I had anticipated, which I would imagine can carry the audience more readily through some of the tougher sequences than more uniformly grim film. I'm not sure I'd go quite so far as to call it "fun", but it's certainly much closer to that than I had been given reason to believe (or maybe there's just something really wrong with me).

[TMDaines]

Interestingly the film has got into some of the bigger chains over here. The Odeon in Manchester, which often plays Polish films and various Indian imports strictly for the respective immigrant communities, is showing this this week, which will surely make it one of the very few foreign-language films they show that is intended to appeal to an audience with subtitles.

Edit: reworded sentence

[colinr0380]

It has been getting a big push from Mark Kermode too (Though I questioned his insistence that the anchorlady on the 15 minute film programme on the BBC News channel who said that she hated horror films with a passion should watch it just because it was feminist!)

[colinr0380]

Major spoilers for Raw:

Well Raw was interesting and at times felt as if it was taking elements of a werewolf film, Crash (getting 'excited' by car crash scenes and eventually even causing them. Ban this sick car crash sex film!), Cronenbergian body horror in general, and Cat People (the fear of losing onself to sex, though in this case one turns cannibal (or 'canis' and dog-like) rather than feral!). In French film terms it also felt rather in the tradition of films such as Class Trip and A Ma Soeur. Plus there was a bit of a self harm narrative (however that aspect never really gets better than that early scene of the main character cleaning themselves up in the university bathroom after vomiting only to be given some helpful tips on the best way to induce vomiting by a beaming anorexic presuming that they have found a kindred spirit! I want to know that girl's story, as she seems quite happy with her lifestyle choice!), though the harm element pivots from internal to externally focused pretty quickly.

Tonally it felt a little strange, as it begins quite dramatic, then becomes a kind of black comedy (the 'lady finger' scene. Never faint or fall asleep in front of a cannibal and certainly do not leave any extraneous body parts hanging around in a tempting manner! I also like that this film has the ultimate form of the "I'm a little busy at the moment, can we talk later?" scene with the older sister being rather up to her elbow in work when the younger one comes to talk out her issues with her!) and then goes a bit Cat People for a while (I guess the parents putting the family dog down for having eaten the finger is another example of being able to destroy an animal without concern compared to being able to do that with an actual child, however necessary or desirable it might be to do so? Although I guess the dog is still there at the end, so maybe the older sister was just teasing the younger one!), before becoming a relationship drama for a spell(?), before a bullying treatise and then a family drama about moral culpability for one's actions and giving in to urges.

It was a little difficult to try and figure out any 'messages' this film had. Is it that vegetarians are just afraid of going feral if they so much as get a whiff of meat? Is the intense sister bond meant to seem so sexual? (This is where I felt the A Ma Soeur vibes most strongly). What about the gay character who finds that they get turned on by women but only when they may bite chunks out of them in a bloodlust frenzy? (Is it really intending to imply that gay people are meant to be more prone to being excited by danger rather than just interested in people of the same gender per se?) Why is going to parties and smoking joints put on the same 'cutting loose' level as cannibalism? For that matter why are animals equated with cannibalism rather than just being carnivorous? Are we meant to see the way that at the height of their callousness that both the gay roommate and the main character's sister start playing video games to be the ultimate representation of their casual bloodlust? I'm not sure that any of that material really sat right with me, and neither did the way that a veterinary school has military style 'Hell Week' hazing rituals that go far beyond a bit of freshman punishing. I was hoping that this aspect might at least provide some fodder for easy, morally justifiable murder later on, but that did not quite happen. Although I did like the way that the whole brutal induction of the school is probably meant to tie together with the older sister doing her own brutal induction of her younger sibling. Private tuition having a greater impact on an individual's personal (if not moral) development, and all that jazz.

And the ending with the parents was kind of obvious from the very beginning (I spent much of the film wondering whether this would all have happened if they had just let their children have a burger or two, so they did not go wild after getting their first tastes of meat. Everything in moderation! So I was already deeply suspicious of the overprotective vegetarian parents from the get-go!), but I suppose is another ironic A Ma Soeur-style take on useless adults abandoning their children for the bulk of the narrative only to intervene long after their role became redundant. Though I like that the film constantly has people react in a rather low key manner to really violent events, only to have that explained by their having already been aware of the situation!

So its OK but I think it gets a bit muddled in its intentions. I would probably have had more problems with the handling though if it felt like it was trying to make a 'grand statement' about the above themes, rather than in the end just seeming to be a portrait of a particularly messed up family unit, and a university that probably is going to get shut down at some imminent point in the future for quite spectacularly failing its duty of care towards its student's bodies!

[DarkImbecile]

Colin, to your question regarding the film’s connection between partying/drugs/etc. and cannibalism, I thought by far the most prominent theme of the film (and maybe you didn’t explicitly touch on it above precisely because it is so obvious) was the use of the gradual awakening and intensification of cannibalism as a stand-in for repressed female sexuality. The parents’ tactic of refusing to acknowledge or educate their children about their innate desires backfires, and the end of that denial in the film’s final scenes reads as a grotesque kind of progress.

Also, I read the intensity of the relationship between the sisters not as incestual but definitely rooted in a more traditional sexual dynamic between siblings: first educational (the older, more experienced sibling helping the younger one understand and channel her new urges), and then resentful as their tastes/tactics/morality begin to diverge, and ultimately competitive in a way that is destructive (to them and the objects of their competition).

I wonder if any other members (especially the more Francophilic posters) have caught up with this since its release? It remains one of my favorites of 2017, and though I’m not exactly surprised it hasn’t attracted more than a cult audience, I’d be curious to know if others have sought it out since it’s release.

[tenia]

In France, most medical-related schools are said/rumoured to have extreme kind of hazings. It remained to be proven how much they represent or if they are isolated cases though, since none of my friends who went to such schools had stories like these. Though yeah, there's more booze and sex(ual harassment) than in other schools.

All this part felt very artificial to me. Just like another mythological look on school hazing.

[colinr0380]

I do agree with you DarkImbecile, although I felt that any themes or comments about female sexuality in general were rather overcome by the film's very individual focus on our main character and her familial repression that leaves her a little overwhelmed by 'pleasures of the flesh' in all terms of the phrase suddenly being available to her (which is where I see the resonance with either version of Cat People most strongly, as the individual and their specific desires get yoked down under the legacy they were born into, though this only slowly becomes apparent during Raw rather than more straightforwardly upfront in Cat People). Maybe that aspect may have had more prominence if a contrasting range of other female characters in the facility were represented (beyond the sister, who represents the family as much if not more than being another female, even if she is feeling more liberated by escaping from the family home. Though that is perhaps suggested to be the older sister's 'problem', as she is maybe suggested to have been too liberated, to the extent of being dangerously violent towards others without any sense of guilt. And that claustrophobic narrowing down when it might have been better for all the characters involved to have widened out their circle of friends instead is probably why I liked that fun moment with the anorexic girl who briefly appears in the bathroom scene, as that provided some outside contrast to our main character's struggles by an interaction with a person who is existing outside of her story), though it feels as if the film is intentionally trying to shy away from that by the gay roommate aspect.

Maybe it was felt that a lesbian tryst for the main character to discover herself might have not been particularly acceptable, so they had to shoehorn a guy in there in some fashion, but that felt a little like it did a bit of a disservice both to the gay roommate and unnecessarily sexualised the relationship between the two sisters, since there were no other female friends that the younger sister could have perhaps explored herself with beyond those in her immediate family teaching her about her familial legacy of a 'blood curse' that might be less of a curse if understood better as actually being an inherent part of her sexuality! (But all the people who share her burden seem to be struggling with it too, so maybe that is why the parents were trying to hide the truth from her for so long?)

In some ways the film feels a bit claustrophobic rather than expansive, and perhaps inevitably leads to an ending of confinement and retreat (willing or enforced) rather than going any further out into the world. Maybe it makes sense that it was double billed with Park Chan-wook's Stoker on the television, since in a way it is another film (like Dogtooth also) about an enclosed character being fascinated by and tested by the temptations of the outside world, but being unable to fully exist outside of the family. Either because they have not been 'socialised' enough in the ways of the world to be able to withstand the pressures of it on them, or have been 'socialised' in such a narrow way that makes them only able to have a bond with other members of their family who know what they are going through, whilst they would possibly be shunned or themselves end up doing damage to 'outsiders' to their secret life?

(I guess that I should also note that I'm an only child so have no particular firsthand experience of sibling interactions to be able to comment on how particularly true that the relationship between the sisters feels! Though I particularly like the idea in the film that despite being more or less the same age, a year or so's difference in age can lead to an enormous gap in life experience between siblings, especially if the older sibling has been living away from home for that year)

[Shanzam]

Just watched Ducournau's directorial debut (Junior). Slightly bizarre but fresh perspective on physical and emotional changes girls go through during adolescence, told in cca 20 minutes. Same lead actress as in Raw, Garance Marillier. Looking forward to seeing her Titane.

[colinr0380]

Since the thread has resurfaced, I thought it might be fun to mention that something I felt did a much better treatment of similar themes to Raw quite recently was Hedgehog struggling with becoming a werewolf in an episode of Summer Camp Island. I thought that was beautifully handled in the show, especially in Hedgehog initially wanting to be free of her 'monthly curse' before coming to embrace it (and the meetings of the secret cult that take place around it) as a new facet to her life (just a new part to fit into the tapestry of her overall character rather than being seen as an overwhelming, all-defining aspect of her) by the end of the episode!