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Critics reviews

RAW

Julia Ducournau France, 2016
Film Critic: Adrian Martin
It's normal, in a sense, for a film such as Raw to jump from body issues to family issues to social issues, and then do the full circle all over again. This keeps things in motion and maintains intrigue and speculation... But – here's the temptation to hysteria in this structure – it also has the potential to generate incoherencies and confusions... Despite these reservations, Raw is a confident and striking debut feature. Ducournau will be a figure to follow.
June 1, 2017
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Even the densest viewer can puzzle out that this rigmarole is meant to pertain to the squeamish process of sexual awakening... An excruciating curatorial preciousness afflicts the whole affair, more showroom than film, its purported depths impossible to see past the glare of the vitrine—or is it a specimen jar? Bloodletting abounds, but nothing punctures the surface.
March 31, 2017
BuzzFeed
The film's bursts of intensity are memorable not because of the level of carnage they feature, but courtesy of the concepts they showcase. It's repulsive not just because it depicts something that people instinctively recoil from, but because the movie demands that you experience it alongside its doe-eyed heroine as she reluctantly finds herself shifting toward being a predator.
March 27, 2017
Ducournau's style often seems to exist for its own sake, trading in commanding long shots and color combinations that conjure up a potent atmosphere that's more easily felt than understood. Raw is being marketed as an art film whereas The Belko Experiment is being sold as a genre exercise—it's also getting better reviews—but I'd argue that the ostensible genre exercise has more to say about the world we live in than Durcournau's admittedly original feat.
March 22, 2017
As it moves along, Raw gradually gathers into a veritable fury of bloodshed and sexual abandon, as Justine loses her virginity to the gay Adrien, Alexia offers her own lessons on the cannibalistic practices that turn out to be a family inheritance, and all the while the film earns extra credit for its packed-party choreography.
March 10, 2017
Whether it's wide or close-up—Ducournau alternates between the two—shots are clipped. During an introduction at a recent "Rendez-Vous with French Cinema" screening at New York's Film Society at Lincoln Center, Ducournau talked about how efficiency isn't a bad word. Where she sees efficiency, I see scenes that are streamlined, smoothing out and pulling up emotional beats. Raw is torn between being an abstract and lyrical film, and one that's more psychologically grounded and character-driven.
March 10, 2017
The New York Times
Raw," Julia Ducournau's jangly opera of sexual and dietary awakening, is an exceptionally classy-looking movie about deeply horrifying behavior. Infusing each scene with a cold, unwelcoming beauty, the Belgian cinematographer Ruben Impens makes his camera complicit in the trashy goings-on. Sneaking beneath bedsheets and sliding over young flesh, his lens takes us places we may not want to go.
March 9, 2017
Throughout Raw, Ducournau exhibits a clinical pitilessness that's reminiscent of the body-horror films of David Cronenberg, often framing scenes in symmetrical tableaus that inform the various cruelties and couplings with an impersonality that's ironically relieved by the grotesque intimacy of the violence.
March 5, 2017
Teeth gnawing on raw meat, mouths sucking fresh blood, and tender kisses that quickly turn into vicious bites: these images of carnage punctuate the beautifully shot scenes found throughout the film... Love is painful in Raw, bloody and even deadly—but above all it is worthwhile. Raw pulls its shock value from clashes within deftly realized relationships, but when compared to other models of "extreme" cinema, the biggest surprise of all is its tenderness.
March 3, 2017
The Talkhouse
It examines sex and cannibalism with an eye to the experimental, but it does so with an infectious compassion for its characters and a confident, poppy style. Without shying from the visceral, Ducournau crystallizes the ache of adolescence and eschews the leery pitfalls that so many male-directed films about budding female sexuality slip into. Which is not to say that Raw isn't an exploitation film at heart – it has cheap thrills to spare and executes them effortlessly.
October 13, 2016
The Semaine de la critique, whose specific remit is precisely to unearth fresh filmmaking talent, featured a couple of notable discoveries: Julia Ducournau's vegan cannibalism film Grave (Raw) garnered a significant amount of interest...
July 10, 2016
Carnivorism flows into carnality, as Raw freshly conveys the reckless sensual abandon of Justine's tearing into her independence. Delving into brutal sibling rivalry through gamine older sister Alexia (Ella Rumpf), Ducournau's bloodily antic plot keeps one foot planted in heightened realism rather than settling into a vampiric rut, and therefore keeps us guessing about just how far things will go.
July 3, 2016