#Raw julia ducournau serial#

#Raw julia ducournau serial#

She may, in fact, be a lusty serial killer herself, although it’s worth pointing out that she’s far less desirous of flesh than she is of metal. But that’s not at all how the night plays out, and before long, Alexia has demonstrated that she can defend herself just fine.

In a more traditional horror movie, a character like this, leaving the venue after everyone else, might wind up victimized - raped or stabbed by a lusty serial killer. She’s hardly the sex object such an introduction might suggest, although Ducournau continues to play tricks with that persona for most of the first act, as in the post-show group shower, where Alexia drops the soap and gets her long hair tangled in another dancer’s nipple piercing. Ducournau introduces this newcomer in an elaborate plan sequence, like something out of a classic De Palma movie, opening with a close-up of now-adult Alexia’s lacerated scalp - a Frankenstein scar that gives her a tough, punk cred as she struts through the crowd.Īlexia works as a dancer for hire, and the long take ends with her twerking on the hood of a flaming muscle car, a show that’s at once gymnastically impressive and a major red herring. The first thing she does upon leaving the hospital is run out to the parking lot and kiss the car that nearly killed her - and then the film flashes forward a couple decades to observe her getting far more intimate with automobiles.įrom this point on, Alexia will be played by tall, angular Agathe Rousselle, a model-actor whose prior work (most notably the gender-subverting short film “Looking for the Self”) toys with ideas of androgyny and seduction. “Titane” never makes clear what impact the operation has on Alexia, but seems to revel in the idea that she’s simultaneously broken and made stronger by it. Revealed to be a girl, Alexia is a human Transformer of sorts, and this implant may as well be her first upgrade. The car spins and smashes against a cement guard rail, knocking the kid hard into the window and requiring a lifesaving titanium plate to be installed just above the right ear.

Bored in the back of the family car, short-haired Alexia kicks the driver’s seat while making low vroom-vroom sounds, prompting Dad (a cameo from director Bertrand Bonello) to lose control. From the beginning, it’s hard to identify what kind of antihero we’re dealing with - or even what gender the character is supposed to be.