My favourite film of last year was almost certainly Raw, the heart-warming tale of cannibalism at a French veterinary school.
I just really like any film that properly commits to its premise, and doesn’t wimp out when that goes to strange and graphic places. Raw takes a fairly ridiculous idea – a young vegetarian develops a sudden taste for human flesh in her first year away from home – and goes all the fucking way with it, no matter how unpleasant or baffling it gets.
The scene that starts off with the world’s clumsiest Brazilian wax, halfway through the film, and just gets more and more ridiculous and crazy, is so good and so unexpected and goes to places few other film would touch. When so many screenwriters are stuck in the predictability of the bullshit three-act structure, it’s so nice to have a movie that is so unpredictable, and so rewarding.
It’s a cold, grey film that still throbs with spilled blood, and repression breaks out into animal-level murder. It’s not a movie I can see myself watching over and over again, because it is genuinely disturbing at times. But in the sea of blandness that is modern cinema, anything that can get any kind of a reaction – even if it is just nausea – is something to be treasured.
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