Justine (Garance Marillier) is embarking one of the most daunting days of any young persons life; heading off to college. She's extremely nervous (who wouldn't be?) but she's academically gifted and she's excited to further explore the veterinarian discipline through her studies. Plus, she's got her older sister, Alexia (Ella Rumpf) also attending classes on the campus, so she'll have something familiar to help ground her while she's adjusting to heavily unfamiliar surroundings. Her trying to become assimilated to her new college, an already major challenge, is made even more difficult by how, being a Freshman, she's at the receiving end of a number of extravagant hazing activities by older students.
One of these hazing activities involves forcing new students to eat raw rabbit kidneys, which doesn't sit well with Justine given that she and everyone in her family is a vegetarian. Alexia pressures her younger sister to just take the rabbit kidney instead of incurring social ridicule and once Justine ingests that meat, our protagonist begins to react to it poorly. At first, it's just rampant rashes across her whole body, but it isn't long before a more severe response to this event occurs. Justine now has an intense craving for meat and her lust for all things meaty soon leads her to trying out human flesh. Turns out, she loves the taste of this taboo cuisine and now grapples with how to satisfy this hunger she has.
We've had a lot of issues with college hazing in the U.S. for about as long as one can remember as its a practice that encourages people to peer pressure younger students to do life-threatening tasks all in the name of gaining social notoriety. Raw knows just how much danger can stem from the world of college hazing and smartly uses that as a springboard for the event that triggers Justine's fascination with consuming meat. It isn't even just strangers that are drumming up all the hazing Justine endures. Even her own older sister is telling Justine to just give up her own personal beliefs in the name of just going with the crowd, a succinct demonstration of how fitting into the social status quo is placed before individual identity and safety in the world of college hazing.
But it's not all introspection on college social life in Raw, good gravy no. There's also the cannibalism aspect of the movie, which is introduced into the story in a disturbing fashion that has the camera lingering over Justine as she devours a human finger in a single shot. No cuts away, just the single unbreaking visual of this woman indulging in her cannibalistic desires. From then on, there's a similar starkness to the way Raw depicts Justine engaging in cannibalism that emphasizes the grotesque nature of her newfound fixation by way of impressive makeup effects that help create some truly unsettling gore-soaked imagery in these cannibalism sequences.
Julia Ducournau makes an impressive debut as a screenwriter and director of theatrical feature films with Raw and it's notable how she seems to be channeling the likes of Quentin Tarantino and Nicolas Winding Refn in that she's taking a genre film premise, with Raw's core story being the kind of thing that one could see being some drive-in horror movie in the 60's (I can see the old-timey poster with its big bold "SHE EATS FLESH AND SHE'S COMING FOR YOU!!!" tagline right now!), but then imbuing it with an immense of gravitas and thoughtfulness. Just as Tarantino uses Westerns to probe racial relations in America and Refn used a psychological thriller to contemplate how sexism in the modeling industry can affect women, Ducournau wants to use cannibalism horror as a vessel to explore how dangerous hazing and other tenants of the college social scene can be.
Merging the horrific with the thoughtful has worked out incredibly well for filmmakers like Tarantino and Refn in the past and Julia Ducournau also knocks it out of the ballpark with Raw. She's just as adept at creating interesting character moments for Justine that shine a light on how much this character is struggling with coming to terms with her newfound flesh-eating obsession as she is with creating memorable pieces of bloody and shocking imagery. Ducournau is also good at handling actors especially if the terrific lead performance of Garance Marillier is any indication though she's far from the only one in the cast that does noteworthy work. Basically, as if it wasn't clear at this point, you should totally chow down on Raw. Both its thoughtful themes and many of its most horrific horror moments are definitely still rattling around in my brain!
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