When Julia Ducournau debuted Raw, mixed reactions ranging from audience members fainting to grand praise circulated the grotesque scenes and ominous coming-of-age film. We’re introduced to (Garance Marillier) at her crossroads of leaving behind a seemingly normal life with her parents, and an energetic high school-esque college experience with her older sister, Alexia (Ella Rumf). Coming from an overprotective mother who’s heavily instilled a vegetarian lifestyle for the family, Justine appears as an introverted personality, visibly nervous of high expectations as both her parents attended the veterinarian institute where she is about to make her debut to train as a vet.
Frustrated with her surprise male roommate and aggressively thrown into a midnight class initiation, Justine flows with the animalistic turmoil alongside her roommate, Adrien (Rabah Naït Oufella). When she finally connects with Alexia during a rave, Justine’s pure nature is exposed and their sibling dynamic of leading and following start clashing. Throughout the film, Justice wanders and observes everyone around her with curiosity and a fascination for exploration. Her education of animal physiology and animal rights become heavy subjects of debate amongst her and fellow classmates. And as the semester goes on, she plunges further into the typical college student stressors (exams, social gossip, professor connections). Through this, it becomes clear that the upperclassmen truly run the school, with education as a mere backdrop.
In an effort to balance social normality with exemplary student achievements, as well as being peer pressured into eating a piece of raw meat as part of another initiation ritual, Justine partakes in nauseating habits like hair chewing, skin picking, and blood drawing itch fests. Alexia’s abrasive nature threatens Justine’s isolated demeanor and on a night of sisterly bonding, Justine accidentally cuts off Alexia’s finger and consumes it while a passed-out Alexia bleeds out. That is until Alexia awakens in utter horror at her own sister chowing down on her finger like a piece of pork rib.
Justine’s grisly eating habits lead to a switch in heavy meat-eating (cooked and raw) with a ravenous and insatiable hunger that distracts her from school, her growing friendship/relationship with Adrien and fellow classmates, and her overall health and wellness. She even has sex with Adrien to distract herself from her strengthening appetite, nearly rips a hole in his neck, and bites herself when climaxing. Having realized from the moment Justine ate her finger that they share the same condition, Alexia takes her sister on a devastating whirl spin, attacking a bypassing car, killing the injured person inside, eating his brains from his cracked skull, even offering her sister a piece of fresh brain with disturbing ease. She attempts to mentor Justine saying that this is how they have to live now: with manipulation and sly quickness.
Justine’s condition worsens as her bloodthirst becomes a violent obsession and plot to attack someone, as raw meat can only take a zombie vampire hybrid so far. It all comes to a head when a night of party turns into a graphic torment where an intoxicated and sickly looking Justine tries to bite a corpse with Alexia leading to the bullying gathered by dozens of other students recording the incident. When Adrien shows Justine the demented video, she attacks her sister. A fight stemming from pent-up rage, guilt, and hunger clashing between sisters shifts into a straight-up awkward feeding session with the girls biting each other and feeding, all under the eyes of their creeped-out classmates. To go further, Alexia tries to seduce Adrien and ends up killing him with a sports stick, leaving Justine to awaken to blood dripping and the near fully consumed body of her boyfriend.
Talk about the ultimate betrayal, the sisters’ tale only worsens when Alexia’s imprisoned and Justine’s left to be back home with her parents. In an attempt to restabilize some inkling of normalcy during an early dinner, Justine’s father does what he can to comfort her after some tension with her mother, telling her that she nor Alexia are to blame for their actions or their hunger. He unbuttons his shirt to reveal his profusely bitten and scarred torso, which he explains is a result of the girls’ mother having the same zombie-vampire hybrid condition.
Raw produced a captivating and stomach-churning body horror unlike any other film in recent years. Blending a story of youth with an undiscussed family history of barely tamed inhumanness, all while using a veterinary college as the setting opened the door for some distinctive visual commentary on animal rights and abuses, mass production of first world countries food supply farms and sources, and even the fall from the grace of youth. The ending stuns Justine and viewers alike, sparking a desperate craving for a follow-up film. But what remains even more striking is the subtly slipped-in cross image of the sisters’ mother, seen when Justine talks to Alexia from behind the visitor’s glass window of a prison. The glare and reflections of both the girls’ faces neatly align to evoke an image of their mother, who’s only seen in the film a handful of times. It’s implied that this image is just a simple lead-up to the father’s big truth bomb, but it can be argued that the girls’ mother needs to be looked at twice to really get the complexities of the intertwined grotesque flesh-devouring and family divide.
Earlier in the film, Alexia, Justine, and their peers confer on animal rights such as the scene where they argue if a monkey sexual assault and human sexual assault should be considered at the same level of violation, accounting for the emotional toll it would take on either human or monkey. Justine takes the stance that tolerance of pain and emotional strife should equally be regarded when considering animals and their behaviors. Scenes of running horses, gut cleaning cows, and cadavers emphasize the observations of behaviors and physical structures of both animals and humans alike. Adding another layer to the conversation, scenes like Justine and Adrien eating greasy food at a truck stop with local sex workers call to the idea of unshakeable human vices and the natural inclination of sex amongst humans. The film pairs and contrasts these images and moments as a means to reflect how closely tied human's animal behaviors are in actuality to select animal behavioral languages.
In the final moments of the film, the melded image of Alexia and Justine depicts the girls embodying the pressures of maintaining academic success, obscuring their irresistible urge for blood and blurring the lines of their morality. Alexia must’ve experienced the shock and torture of resisting and caving into fleshy desires long before Justine's cringy dance with blood. And in the end, their father looks to Justine to put an end to their secret family horror when he exposes his abdomen. It’s alarming how the mother even manipulated him into such a debilitating position, relying on his body as a food supply and slowly killing him. His pleading now places Justine as the new daughter with a chance of either fulfilling her mother’s new hopes or being her family’s savior. Yet, how can one end this generational curse without a thorough knowledge of what they are and how they could co-exist without harming/killing others?
As an audience, we're left conflicted on feeling empathy for Alexia's crimes, and uncertainty of what Justine could do to hide or foster her inherited condition. The ending of Raw entertains philosophies that the students discuss earlier in the film. Acknowledging that there's an explicit and unchangeable hierarchy that humans have installed as our primary societal and behaviors formats clashes with circumstances like that of Justine and Alexia. The film continually tests the notion of what happens when the boundaries of humanness conflate with limitless animality. Would Justine, Alexia, and their mother be afforded all of their human rights if exposed for being brute flesh-eaters? Most definitely not.
The human condition relies on instinctual fear for survival and utilizes social ostracization as a means to gatekeep the desired from the undesirables. Alexia, Justine, and their mother all fall prey to this category of isolation. What cements this idea of blurred morality lines shows evident in the hereditary condition and behaviors of the girls. Their condition, so distinctive, so deeply ingrained, so irresistible as it completely distracted them from maintaining composure and stripped them of a moral compass, also gripped the girls in tormenting ways that put them more in touch with their human animality.
Often times as a society, we forget that we as human beings are simply animals. We may be slightly more intelligent than most species, but still- we're animals. Raw surfaces the idea that circumstances can instantly muddle these principles as Mother Nature is merciless in her chaotic maintenance of human and animal worlds.