Raw By Julia Ducournau

To make it easier for all of you horror movie fans, I found a movie for you. Raw directed by Julia Ducournau was released on March 17, 2017. Raw is one of the few “female cannibal” canon, and it’s one that really flips the power dynamic with a woman in horror being in control, rather than being scared of her own carnal desires. Although Raw falls with the canon of a French, coming-of-age, teen-cannibal story, I don’t really know what I was expecting.

As a strict vegetarian, Justine encounters a merciless, dangerously alluring world during her first week at a veterinary school. Justine was desperate to fit in, so she broke her morals and principles and ate raw meat for the first time.  Then Justine suffersers serious consequences asd her true self begins to emerge. 

I would like to mention that there will be some spoilers in this review. When you first start the movie, there is a car driving in the countryside, and then someone just suddenly jumps in front of the car, the car crashes into a tree, and the person that jumped in front of the car just stands up in an eerie way. Just with that first clip I was already intrigued, and wanted to know what happens next. Then the next clip is of Justine with her family driving to a parking lot near the veterinary school that she got into. Justine’s sister was supposed to pick her up, then take her to the school. Justine’s sister didn’t show up, so she just walked to the school. 

Justine fell asleep as soon as she got to the school. Then she was woken up abruptly by the upperclassmen of the school. They made the underclassmen do whatever they say, they explained that for the first few weeks they had to prove to the upperclassmen that they are able to party, and do the work in the school. Then after the upperclassmen had their speech, they partied until the sunrise. The next morning the underclassmen’s first task was to eat a raw rabbit’s liver. As we know, Justine is a hard-core vegetarian so she said that she didn’t want to eat it. Justine said that her sister was an upperclassman, and asked if it’s ok if she passed on this challenge. Her sister came over and basically forced Justine to eat it, so she did. 

After that first challenge, she started to feel a calling to raw meat, or any raw thing. In the lunch line, she stole a hamburger patty and ate it. She went on with her day, and woke up in the middle of the night. In the middle of the night, she goes to the fridge and looks for a piece of meat. She started to munch on it, she ate it completely raw may I add. Once she had her first taste of meat, she was a fiend for it. There was one time when she was with her older sister at the school, they were having a girls day. Justine threw a pair of scissors at her sister, and severed her finger off. Her sister obviously passed out. I’m not going to go into too much detail, because it was very gruesome. Let’s just say Justine did something with her sister’s severed finger, her sister woke up and ended up seeing. 

Later on in the movie, it gets into even gorier things, but I’m going to let you watch that on your own. At the end of the movie there was a huge pot twist that I genuinely wasn’t expecting. I really recommend the movie if you like to get your adrenaline pumping, and just overall like these types of movies.