Raw

Young, naïve and idealistic Justine (Garance Marillier) is leaving the family nest for the first time to train at the Saint-Exupéry Veterinary School. Though she may have suspected that it will be a whole new world to ‘find’ herself, she instead finds a tense, bordering on paranoid world, where increasingly bizarre, grotesque and brutal initiation rituals are just one more method of social control. In one of these rituals, Justine is forced to eat a rabbit kidney and, despite being a devout vegetarian, does so to ‘fit in’. This awakes a hunger inside her, one that she has never known, and one that cannot be satisfied by anything but human flesh…

With a very different feel from most horror films you’ll have seen, Raw has a French director, Julia Ducournau, which gives a new energy and realism to a somewhat tired-feeling genre. She sets up an unsettling atmosphere that never really lets up, while taking her time to slowly build up the tension. Moments where Justine is torn between her disgust, her desire and her want to fit in, give a very visceral punch. In fact, when this was first shown at the Toronto Film Festival, several audience members fainted. Definitely not one for the faint-hearted.