Raw · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A girl stands at an open refrigerator at night and eats a raw chicken breast. The light is the bad blue-white of a dorm fridge. She isn't transported or possessed. She's hungry, embarrassed about it, and she keeps eating, and Ducournau holds the shot. That refusal to cut away is the film's whole method, and it's worth asking what it's for.

Julia Ducournau's invention in Raw is structural before it is gory. She puts a horror premise inside a naturalistic campus film and lets neither register apologize for the other. Arrival, hazing, roommate, first party, first exam, first sex, sister trouble: the film works the coming-of-age checklist almost pedantically, and the cannibalism grows in the gaps between the items. No curse, no bite, no infection, no explanation.

That is exactly the zone Gilles Deleuze mapped as the impulse-image. Between the close-up that registers a feeling and the action that discharges it, he found a third thing — a cinema of drives, where behavior is neither a decision nor an emotion but an appetite working its way up through a person. Its signature is that the world has two floors. There is the derived milieu, the concrete nameable place with its furniture and its rules, and showing through it the originary world, a raw place of pure hunger that the milieu turns out to be only the skin of.

Raw builds both floors literally. The veterinary school is staged as a total institution: dormitories, dissection rooms, a refrigerated morgue-like space, corridors that never open onto an outside. Animals fill it as patients, as material, as carcasses. The school's real curriculum is that a body is stuff you work on. The originary world is what that curriculum looks like when it stops making an exception for people. Justine's hunger doesn't arrive from elsewhere. It comes up through the floor of a place that was already teaching it.

Drives don't want whole objects. They want pieces, and Deleuze calls the charged piece a fetish: a fragment torn out of the world carrying the entire force of the appetite. Raw keeps a ledger of them. A rabbit kidney forced down during hazing. The chicken breast. Hair pulled out of a throat. A bitten-off finger. The debt here is precise: The Fly (1986) filmed transformation as bookkeeping in discrete stages, the finger, the ear, the tooth, and Ducournau follows that incremental ledger instead of staging one big reveal.

Then the rash blooms across Justine's torso and someone treats it. In naturalism, what a person does reads as a symptom of a drive they don't govern. Ducournau makes this medically literal, then makes it the architecture. The last scene reveals the condition as a family trait, lived with by one generation and discovered by the next. Everything you took for corruption was disclosure. The hazing didn't make Justine hungry. It triggered a diagnosis.

This is where the lens earns its keep. The standing objection to Raw is that its metaphor is too legible: cannibalism as puberty, a thesis executed rather than discovered. But naturalism isn't a metaphor mode. The drive is the literal content and the social surface is what's symptomatic. You don't have to translate the hunger into anything for it to mean; it means the way a fever means. Read that way, the ordinary scenes stop being a delivery system for the metaphor and become the film.

Deleuze's naturalism has only one ending. The drive burns down its world along what he calls a line of slope, an irreversible run toward exhaustion and death; the great impulse-image films he had in mind, Stroheim's and Buñuel's, are entropy machines. Ducournau keeps the slope and hands it to the sister. The last act's escalation belongs to Alexia, which lets the film close without condemning Justine, who is not punished, not cured, but initiated. Body horror had spent four decades welding transformation to punishment. Raw splits the naturalist arc between two siblings so one can carry the entropy and the other can survive it. That move is the film's ethical invention, and it's why the ending lands as inheritance rather than verdict.

The hazing sequences run on different machinery. Shot in saturated paint-light and strobe with bodies packed into the frame, they deliberately withhold any overview, so you never get oriented. Space stops being a stage for action: this is the any-space-whatever in its disconnected form, fragments of pure affect with the geography cut out. The freshmen become a dividual, a crowd handled as one affective body rather than a set of people, which is the exact craft debt to Carrie (1976) — a group marking a girl's body with fluid. And the ritual itself is a gest, a posture that exposes a social relation instead of advancing a plot. Crawl, drink, be drenched, obey. The school teaching its students to handle animal bodies as material is teaching them in the same week to handle each other that way.

Between the set pieces, the film gives its duration to bodies doing nothing dramatic: a mirror, lipstick, a song, a waxing session, showers, a roommate who wants to sleep. Deleuze called this cinema of the body — attitudes and postures carrying time, in place of psychology. Garance Marillier plays the hunger as an involuntary condition, something happening to a body rather than a choice a character makes. It's also why the practical effects matter beyond budget. The prosthetics are placed in front of the camera rather than added later, which lets Ducournau apply Bazin's old rule against cutting where the reality of an event depends on things being present together. Wound and girl share one unedited frame. That's an argument made in grammar: this is continuous with an ordinary body, not a rupture in it.

Ducournau assembled that grammar from sources she names. Her own short Junior (2011) had already filmed adolescence as a full-body molt, same actress, same refusal to cut. Shivers (1975) supplied the sealed building with a fixed population, where appetite reads as outbreak. Trouble Every Day (2001) established cannibalism as an erotic condition, and gave her a skin-proximate handheld for framing mouths on bodies without editorializing. In My Skin (2002) supplied the held-shot method for a woman consuming herself under a calm camera, and casting Laurent Lucas as the father says that debt out loud. Forward, Titane took the Palme in 2021, and Bones and All, Fresh and Saint Maud are now discussed with Raw as the anchor.

The label that stuck to it in 2017 was "elevated horror," which Ducournau rejected on the grounds that the genre didn't need elevating. Deleuze's map helps here because it has no ladder in it. The impulse-image isn't a lower rung on the way to something respectable. It's a distinct way of organizing a film, and this one uses it about as cleanly as anyone has.

So watch it again for the scenes with no blood. Watch the parents, whose marriage is a portrait of what living with this costs, and ask the question the last scene opens and won't answer: when a family finally recognizes you, is that a mercy or a sentence?