Justine (18) comes from a family of devoted vegetarians. She enlists at a student of a veterinary university, attended also by her older sister Alexia. Justine is annoyed that she was asigned a man as a roommate, Adrien, who claims to be gay. The older students enter the dorm rooms and evacuate the freshmen students, order them in a basement, and force them to eat raw rabbit kidneys, as a hazing ritual. After tasting meat for the first time in her life, Justine starts behaving eratically. When Alexia attempts to remove a depilation tape over Justine's genitalia, Justine kicks her, causing Alexia to accidentally cut off her own finger. Justine enjoys licking blood and eating the cut off finger. Alexia finally admits they come from a family of cannibals, and thus their parents raised them to be vegetarians as to not destroy their own lives. Justine wakes up and realizes Alexia killed Adrien. Alexia lands in prison, while the father tries to calm down Justine.
"Raw" is a dark psychological allegory on vegetarianism and the notion that sometimes some urges are better left untouched from fear that they might lead to self-destructive spiral going out of control. The story about a student girl who finds out her family are cannibals has some interesting points, but is drowned in bizarre Cronenberg-style scenes of "body-horror" which appeal more towards disgust and vileness, and less towards intelligence, similarly as the director Julia Ducournau's later shock film "Titane", whereas it doesn't reach some sort of a satisfaying point in the abrupt ending. The best sequences are in the first act, when the viewers observe Justine's annoyance with the hazing-rituals of freshman students at the university, going so far to pour blood over the students and force them to eat raw rabbit kidneys. One creative moment has the older students pouring blue paint over Justine, and yellow paint over a guy, and then ordering them to make out in an isolated room, and as the couple hug and embrace each other, their colors blend, "connect" and turn into green patches. The dialogue is banal, the writing is rather thin, whereas Justine's descend into unhinged thirst for blood has some rudimentary symbols for adolescence and coming-of-age, or maybe for an unleashing of perversion that subsumes a person's entire personality, yet needed better character development to entrench themselves more towards quality.
Grade:+
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