An Unbridled and Insatiable Hunger; Female Sexuality in Raw

Raw opens with an ominous stretch of road in the French countryside. We witness a car accident, a vehicle comes by and hits a tree. As we see the car on the side of the road, we see a lone woman, come out of the side of the frame and approach the car. The music builds, the title sequence flashes, and we are brought into the vicious and brutally captivating coming of age story that is Raw.

Flash forward and meet our main character, quiet, vegetarian Justine, heading to veterinary college. We learn through a tense car ride with her brooding, passive-aggressive mother and reserved father, a man always donned in high collars and scarves, that the parents attended this school themselves. Alex, Justine’s sister who is absent from the scene is currently enrolled there and was supposed to meet them to help move Justine in. Evening comes and she and her roommate, Adrien, are awoken in the middle of the night to screaming, having their mattresses thrown out the window and personal items thrown about. They join a group of freshmen and are shuffled down together, and forced to crawl on hands and knees to the location of an absolutely wild party including students of all grades at the university. Dancing, nudity, drugs, and more are on show here at Justine’s first glimpse at college life. Wandering through the party, looking out of place, Justine searches for her sister. 

Through the flashing lights and thrashing bodies, we find Alex, wildly dancing and heavily inebriated in the party. With her short, borderline androgynous haircut and overconfident nature, we can already tell that Alex is sure of herself and frankly, does whatever she wants. From the first ten minutes of the film, we establish a lot about the Raw universe. First of all, the players with power in this world are the female characters, the controlling mother, the wild sister, and our less powerful but still present narrator, Justine, all in the same family. We also learn of this sort of legacy in place, that all their family have been to this school and share this common link between them. Another really interesting thematic development that ends up being a major theme in the movie is the aspects of this universe that Ducournau paints as abject. A good horror film frightens the viewer, but a great horror film recontextualizes what the viewer finds to be abject. 

Hazing, drinking, sex, drugs, partying, all putting on display these kinds of animal instincts from the students of this college that are foreign to Justine. She feels lost and out of place in the sea of debauchery because she truly hasn’t come to terms with who she is and what makes her feel comfortable, feel herself. In a different context, through lighting, dialogue, camera angles, music, etc. the hazing scene could maybe be fun in Raw, it is terrifying and embarrassing. Moving along in the film, the first-year students are brought to their first initiation ritual outside. All dressed in white lab coats, blood is dumped on a lot of freshmen and they are forced to wait in line and eat a raw rabbit kidney. This poses a problem to Justine who is a vegetarian (and as we later find out, a virgin, Raw conflating meat and sexuality heavily throughout the film) and refuses to eat the bit of flesh. Her sister comes over and urges her to eat the kidney. 

We as an audience assume that Alex’s intentions for making her sister eat the kidney are to ensure that her sister is not ostracized at school, but later come to realize that forcing her to take this first bite of meat was a decision that was coming from a more insidious place. After that bite, Justine is sent into a whirlwind of grotesque body transformations and strange cravings only to realize that the taste of meat awakened something inside of her, something her sister also shares. We as an audience now understand why Alex wanted Justine to eat the piece of raw kidney so badly, she didn’t care about her sister fitting in, she wanted her sister to realize this shared connection they have, the genetic taste for human flesh. Cannibalism stands in Raw as an apt and timely metaphor for female sexuality. Justine develops an insatiable hunger for human flesh and sex at the same time and in doing that finds confidence in herself and her choices. Raw is an incredibly unique genre film because of Justine’s reaction to her hunger. In a traditional cannibal horror film, Justine would be painted as the villain, punished to repress her confident female form, burned at the stake and so on and so forth. However, in Raw, Justine doesn’t even see her cannibalism as a defect. 

There is no point in the film where she is trying to stop what is happening to her. Much like sexuality, she acknowledges it for what it is, lets it take its course. Raw embraces female sexuality as animal and uncontrollable and turns the lens to the women reckoning with what it means to be a fully sexual being. They receive retribution from their own actions in themselves and in their family, not from men. Raw also covers themes of sexual fluidity and the animalistic nature of people in general. Adrien throughout the film struggles with his sexuality, and before her awakening, Justine never had sex, or really felt confident and sexual. This is a large reason why Raw’s narrative also works as an LGBTQ-centered film, telling stories of taboo sexual pleasure and how that defines oneself in a positive way. It is important also to note that the womens’ sexuality in the film is defined by themselves, not by their experiences with men. Men conform to the way that the women have sex, not the other way around because female sexuality is portrayed as such an active player. A largely overlooked facet of the film is the connection between the two sisters over their shared monstrosity. 

Their relationship is almost masturbatory, punishing and pleasuring one another is a form of punishment and pleasure to themselves because of this bond they share. In front of the school, they fight and bite one another, struggling like animals. They hate each other for what they are but are also connected with this strange, primal kind of love, one that was passed down from their mother and most likely will be passed down to their offspring. Ducournau again links this metaphor of cannibalism with female sexuality and in this universe that exists outside the patriarchy, the sins of the mother are passed onto the children instead of the traditional “sins of father” trope. Alex and Justine share this sort of strange sexual tension throughout the film, much like the sisters in Ginger Snaps because no matter the circumstance, they know they can never have the sort of bond they have with each other with a man or anyone else for that matter. 

It just wouldn’t be the same because of the insatiable hunger they have. This is what makes Alex’s final and terrible act at the closing of the film so impactful thematically; Alex kills Adrien by devouring the bottom half of his body while Justine is in bed with him, Justine unaware that he is dead. When Justine wakes and finds the horrible truth, she looks to the mirror and thinks that she is the one responsible, until we find Alex on the floor next to them. It can be theorized that Alex killed Adrien out of strange jealousy toward her sister. Justine and Adrien shared painful gratification with each other and in a normal romantic relationship that just means sex, but for Justine and Alex’s family, that hunger relates to cannibalism as well. 

Alex hated them together because she knew what Justine knew in that they shared something that they will never be able to share with a partner outside of their family. Adrien’s death also stands to show that this gruesome need that the sisters share can never be satisfied and the unfathomably grim consequences for fulfilling this urge. We can blame Alex for her recklessness and selfishness; for the video she made of Justine, blacked out at a party, biting a dangling corpse like a dog, her causing car accidents to eat bodies, and eventually for her killing Justine’s lover. However, it is important to note that Alex has spent more time as this sort of fully-realized sexual and ravenous animal than Justine has. It could be selfishness driving her actions, but Alex does act as an animal would reckless and instinct-based. She blurs the line between human and animal because she has realized who she is because has spent longer with the “curse” so to speak. In one of the final scenes where we see Justine visiting Alex in jail, their faces mold into one in the reflection. 

We are reminded of the beginning of the film with the car accident and realize the fact that we as an audience are unaware of the timeline of the crash. We know now that this was something that Alex did to feast on the recently deceased, but we don’t know if we are watching Alex cross the road before all of this, watching Justine cross the road after, or even their mother, at a different time period. The three women stand as a symbol for the female gender and the insatiable hunger that female sexuality holds and the punishment that is reaped for even attempting to fully satisfy the craving in a patriarchal society.

Women involved in the Film

Garance Marillier- Justine

Ella Rumpf- Alexia

Joana Preiss- The Mother

Marion Vernoux- L'Infirmière

Anna Solomin- Vétérane couloir

Sophie Breyer-Bizute réfectoire

Bérangère Mc Neese- Bizute peinture

Alice D'Hauwe- Étudiante fête CHU

Maïté Katinka Lonne- Bizute amphithéâtre

Amandine Hinnekens- Vétérane pistolet à eau

Sibylle du Plessy- Professeur autopsie

Lich Jass- Cantinière restoroute

Helena Coppejans- Caissière réfectoire

Charlotte Sandersen- Professeur anesthésie cheval

Julianne Binard- Étudiante fête CHU

Laurie Colson- Art Direction, Production Design

Ingrid de Ribaucourt-Assistant Art Director

Elise Ancion-Costume Design

Laura Ozier-Key Makeup Artist

Karine Atalla-Makeup Artist

Marine Tesson-Makeup Artist

Cecilia Ngo-Stunts

Julia Ducournau-Director

Bénédicte Kermadec-Script Supervisor

Maéva Buisse-Second Assistant Director

Judith Chalier-Casting

Cassandre Warnauts-Co-Producer

Julie Gayet-Producer

Nadia Turincev-Producer

Aurore Benoit-Unit Production Manager

Céline Bernard-Foley

Stéphane Thiébaut-Sound

Marie Maulet-Digital Compositor

Morgan Hardy-Digital Compositor

Julia Ducournau-Dialogue, Screenplay

Marie Amachoukeli-Barsacq-Script Editor