#Julia ducournau serial
#Julia ducournau skin

Even in this debut feature, the filmmaker has a preternatural knack for knowing where to place her camera that can make the mundane instantly mesmerizing. Focus WorldĮqually pivotal to Justine’s transformation - tracked with intense focus and vicious gallows humor by Ducournau, who also wrote the script - is the dreamlike atmosphere of the institution around her. Marillier is a hypnotic screen presence, and it’s the childlike curiosity and gnawing absence in her gaze - though, of what, we’re not quite sure - that makes Justine such an endlessly surprising and unsettling protagonist. But as her cravings intensify, it’s not difficult to imagine a darker fate for this quick, hungering study. Justine’s emotional distance when it comes to matters of the flesh might make her a great doctor one day. And when Alexia’s efforts to give Justine a painful-looking Brazilian go skin-crawlingly south, a gruesome accident with scissors leads Justine to try human flesh for the first time.Īll of this experimentation plays out against the drab, antiseptic confines of the vet school, where students carve open animal carcasses with grim purpose, and body parts float in jars filled with formaldehyde.

Soon, Justine’s craving for meat leads her to devour hamburger patties and raw chicken breast. Absent-mindedly chewing her hair leads to an equally disgusting outcome, as she coughs up strands of hair like matted ribbons.

#Julia ducournau skin

Later, Justine awakens to discover her skin peeling due to a nasty, flaking rash. Justine is even more taken aback when her older sister Alexia (Ella Rumpf) pushes meat on her during one hazing ritual, forcing her to eat a raw rabbit kidney. With Titane in theaters, it’s time to revisit Raw - luckily, it’s streaming on Netflix.Īll of this experimentation plays out against the drab, antiseptic confines of the vet school. Half a decade before Titane propelled Ducournau to her current heights, Raw cemented the filmmaker as a ferociously imaginative, fast-rising talent. The filmmaker first made her mark in 2016 with her dazzling feature debut Raw, about a young woman who begins to crave human flesh while at veterinary school. Metamorphosis - the more physically icky and narratively oblique, the better - is at the heart of her ferociously feminist horror movies. Whenever Ducournau’s at the wheel, she’s seemingly fueled by instinct, animal impulse, and a fascinatingly amorphous view of metaphor. Yet the relentless, cage-rattling thrill of Titane (now in theaters) is that it goes nowhere you’d expect, racing forward in pursuit of a singular, savage vision without mapping out its ultimate direction (tonal or otherwise).

#Julia ducournau serial

After the French filmmaker’s Palme d’Or-winning sophomore feature Titane, about a female serial murderer carnally inclined toward cars, that much is indisputable.