Raw (2016) is a film about appetite. Not just for meat, though there's plenty of that, but for experience, for identity, for the kind of self-knowledge that arrives at the worst possible moment. Julia Ducournau's debut feature follows Justine, a lifelong vegetarian from a family of veterinarians, who arrives at a competitive French veterinary school and is forced, as part of a hazing ritual, to eat raw rabbit kidney. What follows is one of the most controlled, unsettling coming-of-age stories in contemporary horror cinema.
What the film is actually about
Cannibal horror is a crowded genre, but Raw sits apart from most of it. Ducournau isn't interested in shock for its own sake. The cannibalism here functions the way body horror almost always functions at its best: as metaphor made flesh. Justine's emerging hunger maps directly onto adolescent awakening. She leaves home, enters an institution that treats brutality as tradition, and her body begins to betray her in ways she doesn't understand and can't control.
Garance Marillier plays Justine with extraordinary precision. She starts the film as someone so controlled she borders on rigid, and Marillier tracks the loosening of that control with real physical intelligence. Her face does a lot of work. So do her hands. There's a scene in the middle of the film involving a pair of scissors and her older sister Alexia (Ella Rumpf) that's become justifiably famous, not because it's gory, but because of the expression that crosses Justine's face immediately afterward. It's the expression of someone realising something irreversible about themselves.
Alexia is the film's second great performance. Rumpf plays her as someone who has already arrived at the place Justine is heading, and who can't quite decide whether to warn her sister or recruit her. The relationship between them is the emotional spine of the film, and Ducournau keeps it genuinely ambiguous until the very end.
The craft behind the discomfort
Raw works as horror because Ducournau understands that the camera's relationship to the body is everything. Cinematographer Ruben Östlund collaborator Ruben Östlund didn't shoot this film; that was Julien Poupard, who gives the veterinary school a cold, institutional quality that makes every warm close-up of skin feel like a violation of the film's own visual logic. The school is shot like a hospital. Bodies are specimens. That's the point.
The hazing sequences are shot with a documentary looseness that contrasts sharply with the more intimate scenes. When the film goes quiet and close, it becomes genuinely frightening. Ducournau is working in the tradition of French extreme cinema, the same current that produced Martyrs (2008), but Raw is less interested in punishment than in transformation. It's a gentler film than it sounds, at least in intent, though not always in execution.
The score, by Jim Williams, is worth singling out. It shifts between orchestral swells and something more electronic and queasy without ever settling into genre convention. Williams did similar work on Ben Wheatley's films, and he brings that same instinct here: music that feels slightly wrong, like a chord that hasn't resolved.
Ducournau's control of tone
What separates Raw from a dozen other cannibal films is tone. Ducournau is funny. Not constantly, and never at the expense of what she's building, but there are moments of dark absurdism that are genuinely amusing. A scene involving a meat-craving Justine alone in the school's dormitory corridor has a physical comedy to it that's immediately undercut by something horrifying. She earns those moments because she never lets the film lose its grip on what it's saying.
This tonal control is especially impressive because the film's central idea is inherently ridiculous if handled wrong. A sheltered vegetarian develops a taste for human flesh at veterinary school. That pitch could go anywhere. Ducournau keeps it from becoming camp without ever draining it of energy. It's a difficult calibration, and she hits it consistently throughout a 99-minute runtime that doesn't waste a scene.
The film also has things to say about institutional culture. The veterinary school in Raw operates on a logic of accepted cruelty: older students haze younger ones, the faculty tolerates it, and the whole thing is framed as character-building. Justine's transformation doesn't happen in a vacuum. The school teaches her, in its way, that bodies are things to be handled.
How it compares to Ducournau's later work
Ducournau went on to win the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2021 for Titane, a film that shares Raw's obsession with bodily transformation but operates on a larger, stranger canvas. Watching the two together, Raw looks like a more controlled film, more concentrated in its focus, but also the film of a director still discovering how far she could push her material. Both films reward repeat viewing. Both films have moments that are difficult to shake.
For horror fans who found Titane too abstract, Raw is the better entry point. It has a protagonist whose interiority is fully legible, a story with clear emotional stakes, and a final scene that reframes everything that came before it in a way that is both unexpected and entirely earned.
The verdict
Raw (2016) is the kind of debut that makes you immediately curious about what the director will do next. It's body horror that earns its discomfort, a coming-of-age film that takes the metaphor of adolescent appetite literally and follows that logic with total commitment. Marillier's performance is extraordinary. Ducournau's control of tone is remarkable for a first feature. The film sits comfortably alongside the best of French extreme cinema, and the best of contemporary horror full stop.
Fans of films that treat the body as both subject and medium, films like Videodrome (1983), which asked what media was doing to human flesh, will find Raw operating in that same uncomfortable space, where physical transformation carries philosophical weight. It's a film that gets under your skin. That's exactly what it's trying to do.