Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Raw
2017 · Julia Ducournau · Raw on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice how often the camera stays behind Justine's shoulder. (camera)
Impens keeps a shallow, handheld-adjacent frame close to Justine, blurring the campus behind her into an institutional smear.
Payoff: This proximity puts you inside her body's experience instead of watching it from outside.
Count the animal bodies visible in the background of scenes. (staging)
Carcasses, anesthetized patients, and dissection tables recur throughout the veterinary school, always near Justine.
Payoff: Her world is full of bodies and meat from the first scene.
Listen for the wet, foregrounded sound of chewing and swallowing. (sound)
Jim Williams's score goes quiet during eating scenes, letting the sound design carry the unease alone.
Payoff: The sound, not the image, does most of the unsettling work.
Notice the cold gray-green light turn to hot color at parties. (light)
The palette runs clinical and cold through corridors and dorms, then breaks into saturated paint and neon during hazing and rave scenes.
Payoff: The color shift marks the difference between institutional control and the loss of it.
Watch Justine's posture change from stiff to loose across scenes. (performance)
Marillier plays hunger as something happening to her body, not a choice, visible in small physical shifts.
Payoff: Her performance treats the transformation as involuntary, closer to puberty than to corruption.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch how ordinary embarrassments, a mirror, a rash, a shared dorm, sit right next to the horror.