Robert Horton is a Scarecrow board member and a longtime film critic. This series of "critic's notes" is chance to highlight worthy films playing locally and connect them to the riches of Scarecrow's collection.
A new film by director Julia Ducournau opens at SIFF Uptown this weekend, Alpha. It is her first feature since winning the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2021 for Titane. Of that film, I wrote, "Part endurance test, part fever dream. I’m always up for this kind of thing, at the same time that I’m not sure I get it."
I feel that way about Alpha, too. Told mostly from the perspective of a 13-year-old girl (Mélissa Boros), whose physician mother (an excellent Golshifteh Farahani) is terrified her daughter may have become infected with a bizarre virus (the girl has gotten a crude tattoo at a party), Alpha cruises through a world that would be oppressive and bewildering even if it were easier to keep its timeline straight. The disease gives its victims a kind of shiny skin that mutates into stone or metal as the affliction progresses; it is a startling visual idea that, like many things in the film, is unexplained in its particulars; why, for instance, does the girl's uncle (Tahar Rahim, looking frighteningly gaunt—actors should not do this) sometimes have regular skin on his back and sometimes a Golem-like hard clay that cracks under pressure?
Without knowing where you are, it's hard to comprehend this world. And so the movie thrives in set-pieces, and some of these are remarkable and affecting, including a mysterious final sequence. Some of Ducournau's imagery is so powerful, you wish it connected to the rest.
Having expressed some confusion, I will look back now at my 2017 Seattle Weekly review of Ducournau's first feature, Raw, a movie as focused (and still concerned with the body) as Alpha is fractured.
Raw
The last time I had a barf bag handed to me at a movie theater was for a University of Washington screening of George Romero's Martin, probably in 1979. I didn't use it, but I appreciated the publicity gimmick. This kind of ploy has an old tradition; when a few audience members fainted at screenings of Frankenstein in 1931, Universal Pictures sent ambulances to stand by outside theaters to collect the ailing and garner press interest. John Waters used to like to say, "If someone vomits watching one of my films, it's like getting a standing ovation," a line that says as much about Waters as a canny marketer as it does about his status as a subversive moviemaker and shock-value specialist. Waters knew that one report of viewers becoming physically sick at a movie would ratchet up interest for the subset audience that seeks out the edgiest thing.
The gimmick still works, as the pre-release chatter around Raw demonstrates. Viewers at film festivals rushed to the restrooms in mid-screening, and suddenly this blood-soaked tale of collegiate cannibalism became a must-see. Sure enough, when the movie opened in L.A. last week, the Nuart Theater handed out air-sickness bags to attendees. A charming touch, but it somewhat overshadows the film itself, which is quite serious in its ambitions.
Raw is the feature debut for writer-director Julia Ducournau, a 35-year-old French filmmaker. Her heroine is Justine (the suitably poker-faced Garance Marillier), a drab vegetarian beginning her first year in veterinary studies; coincidentally, Justine's older sister Alexia (Ellen Rumpf) is an upperclassman. Now I don't know much about veterinary college, but this one seems unusual: Its enrollees stay at party-hearty dorms and undergo hazing rituals that look like outtakes from Carrie. (Having access to pig blood is a perk of veterinary school.) Part of the hazing is forcing newbies to eat rabbit kidneys. One would assume this is a prized delicacy in France, but for Justine, it's torture. Worse, something changes in her appetite after this upsetting incident, and she develops a taste for human flesh.
The sequences that outline Justine's descent into cannibalism are skilful at mashing boilerplate coming-of-age material with horror, walking that fine line between growing up and throwing up. For instance, Justine, a virgin (they always are in movies like this), predictably yearns for her new gay-male roommate (Rabah Nait Oufella); that trope always ends badly, but especially so here. Raw also makes relevant reference to bulimia and cutting, with concern about appearance a key topic—nowhere more so than in a sequence in which actual cannibalism is made to seem less traumatic than undergoing a Brazilian wax.
There's a long line of movies in which the anxieties of youth are filtered through a horror lens, going back at least as far as The Wizard of Oz, and including, as it happens, Martin. Strong recent examples like Let the Right One In and It Follows demonstrate that there's plenty of life left in the subject. I am sure Ducournau has closely studied coming-of-age horror; there's a great moment just after Justine makes the suspenseful decision to go ahead and start gnawing on a severed human finger where the music cue evokes one of Dario Argento's cult slash-fests. If anything, Raw is almost too self-conscious about its metaphors; Ducournau is practically writing her own academic paper on Raw while she's unspooling the movie.
Still, at its best, Raw gets past its artiness and touches on the truly uncanny. This can be grotesque, as in the scene where Justine finds out what happens when she ingests her own hair—a scene that surely triggered its share of festival walk-outs. More truly haunting is Justine's discovery that her own skin is betraying her, breaking out in bloody rashes and peeling off in reptilian sheets. Here she experiences the private horror of the body's rebellion, the knowledge that she isn't in control of the closest part of herself. And that's what a real coming-of-age horror movie is about.
March 27, 2026
