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 before her hunger appears.
Payoff: The film prepares the line she crosses for an hour before she crosses it.
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.
Once you have seen it
Follow how each fetish object escalates: kidney, chicken, hair, finger. (structure)
Ducournau ladders the hunger in discrete stages rather than one reveal, echoing The Fly's incremental transformation.
Payoff: The ladder of objects shows escalation as accumulation, not a single moral fall. In the reading: fetish. Each object Justine eats is what the reading calls a fetish, a fragment carrying the whole force of the appetite.
Watch the hazing sequence for its refusal of an overview. (staging)
The camera stays inside the packed, strobe-lit crowd rather than showing the ritual's shape, treating the freshmen as one body.
Payoff: This disorientation puts you inside the ritual's pressure instead of letting you judge it from outside. In the reading: dividual. The undifferentiated crowd is what the reading calls a dividual, a group handled as a single affective body.
Track which sister carries the story's worst escalation at the end. (structure)
The final act's descent belongs to Alexia, not Justine, splitting the drive's self-destructive arc between the two sisters.
Payoff: This split lets the film end in inheritance rather than punishment, avoiding body horror's usual verdict. In the reading: entropy / degradation. Deleuze's line of slope names the drive's irreversible run toward exhaustion; Ducournau hands that run to Alexia.
Carry this in: Watch how ordinary embarrassments, a mirror, a rash, a shared dorm, sit right next to the horror.