Alex on the other hand finds it much harder to suppress her urges. We watch as she actively tries her best to stay in control when we watch her have sex with Adrien. Unlike Alex, Justine doesn’t want to give in to leading a double life. Alex has managed to balance both her social life and her cannibalism by sneaking off to an isolated highway where she jumps in front of cars hoping to get some fresh carnage. She too had to come to terms with her own cannibalistic cravings when she left home. Justine’s sister Alex holds her hand throughout most of her coming of age hurdles in the film. In order to restrain herself from taking a bite out of Adrien, who tries to calm her down, she bites into her own arm in an act of both self-harm and self-restraint. Although Adrien is openly gay, Justine feels an intimate connection with him enough to feel slightly vulnerable regarding what he thinks is her new “kink.” This lust and hunger she has for Adrien reach their climax as they have sex. After she bites off a boy’s lip at a party, she returns to her dorm to find Adrien awake. Her infatuation with Adrien evolves over the second half of the film into a conflicting sense of both lust and hunger as she stares at his body from afar. We see the way she looks at her roommate Adrien (Rabah Nait Oufella) shifts from a shy and quiet gaze to that of a hunter lurking her prey. She gets in touch with her femininity dancing around her dorm room in her sister’s cocktail dress listening to “Plus putes que toutes les putes” (more whores than all the whores) by ORTIES which lyrically sexualizes cannibalism and necrophilia from a position of feminine power. The first bite of this forbidden fruit ignites Justine’s feminine identity as she develops a stronger agency. Once she takes this step in finding her autonomy, everything changes. She is obedient to her parents, takes her vegetarianism very seriously, and she’s sexually inexperienced. Her character is established as relatively naive and innocent. This authenticity, however, comes at a cost. What the consumption of human flesh signifies for Justine is the beginning of finding her own authenticity of self-expression. We find relief with Justine as we watch her give in to what she had been fighting all this time. Rather than provoking a sense of disgust, this scene ultimately sets us up to enjoy the moment with her. We watch as she slowly enjoys analyzing the finger until she desperately begins to lick up the blood and eventually eat it in its entirety. In this moment, Justine is head to head with her animalistic temptation making her canine companion a reflection of her true self. After calling an ambulance and the panic subsides, music begins to pick up as a medium shot frames Justine in the foreground with her sister’s dog licking up the bloody mess in the background. In a climactic scene, Justine’s sister accidentally cuts off her finger. This assessment swells with tension as we watch Justine navigate suppressing her cannibalistic obsession until she eventually succumbs to the violent demands of her body. Short glimpses of a horse being put to sleep in class or a dream of a horse being monitored on a treadmill mirror the feeling of being actively assessed. Contextualized by having this story unfold in a veterinary school, our protagonist is framed under scientific observation as she struggles to manage her animalistic desires. In a close up of Justine’s crotch, the camera is clinically unapologetic without even a tinge of glamor, mercilessly bringing the viewer into the intimacy of Justine’s vulnerability and physical pain that we phenomenologically share with her. In one of the film’s most catalyzing scenes, Justine’s sister Alex forces her onto the bed to give her a bikini wax. Ducournau’s perspective provides an insight that is simultaneously intimate as it is corporeally aware. Too often in coming of age films, young characters are sexualized and images are projected upon them as developing sexual beings rather than physical masses of flesh on camera. The daughter of a gynecologist and a dermatologist, director Julia Ducournau offers a clinical gaze upon the bodies that fill up the shots of Raw. This sends her on a gruesome journey of self-discovery, eventually triggering a desire for human flesh that is almost unrestrained. Taken under her older sister Alex’s (Ella Rumph) wing, Justine slowly explores her autonomy, beginning with a reluctant decision to allow herself to break her life-long diet of vegetarianism by taking part in a hazing ritual of eating a rabbit kidney. Sixteen-year-old Justine (Garance Mareiller) is an incoming student at a local veterinary school where she is subject to first-year hazing, rude professors, and the transition towards living away from home for the first time.
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