Raw

Julia Ducournau’s first feature played Critics’ Week at Cannes in 2016 and won that year’s Sutherland Award for best first feature at the BFI London Film Festival. Ducournau explains the veterinary setting: “Because cannibalism in the medical school would have been too easy: Justine would have gone down to the morgue every evening.” It keeps the human and the animal in one frame. The change does not arrive in one scene; symptoms spread over weeks, each first appearing as a physical complaint. It was shot in Belgium, on the veterinary campus of the University of Liège, which Ducournau scouted herself. She builds the effects on set: “I never use CGI alone. I always use it just to perfect on set special effects.” The lead was written for Garance Marillier. Focus World released it in the US in March 2017. Two viewers were taken ill at the Toronto midnight screening, one needing an ambulance. Ducournau objects to how that grew: it was “two people out of 1,200” and the rest, she says, became an urban legend. A good fit if you want the change tied to college hazing and a reckoning between sisters rather than a monster plot. Not for you if the itching, the hair and the teeth, held at length on camera, are too much.